Spring, when a young person’s fancy turns to etc, saw me wandering around Frankfurt Airport more than I would have preferred. Schmoozing between flights, the sex shops and erotic video rooms scattered around the terminal provoked me – into thinking that is. I wondered, is commercial sex in the retail or the luxury goods sector? And is the bare market affected by bearish conditions? Clearly the thrust of such a pregnant thought could not be interrupted: throbbing intellectual urges meant that I had to follow it through to the consummation of my researches.
Several of the erotic emporia in Frankfurt are owned or franchised by Beate Uhse, which went public last year on the Frankfurt exchange. Its stock had halved since the launch, I discovered, which may be why its IR web site has lots of interesting links to the product, but none to the stock price. In fact, my screen kept erupting with images of the kind one does not associate with investor relations, whose practitioners may be at the cutting edge of lateral thinking, but usually know the importance of appearances.
In the US, sex is in the marketplace, but not on the stock market. Sex sells everything from cars to chocolate bars. But there are limits. Americans can put money into Victoria’s Secret, clothes made to be taken off. They can respectably invest in Club Med-style resorts whose main selling point is sex on the beach – or at least close by – but there is no epidemic of commercial sex IPOs to match the dot.coms. Ironically, the most, and possibly the only, profitable parts of the internet are sex-related.
Without IPOs and underwriting fees, there are no research analysts to consult to see how the sex business is weathering the ups and downs of the market. Could this be the weathervane we need to assess the shortcomings of Wall Street bullishness?
So I called the expert, Tracy Quan, author of Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, due for publication in August (Crown Publishers, New York). Tracy is as irrepressibly bullish as most of the customers she researched in writing the book. And she is quick to point out that Wall Street provided much of her customer base. However, despite the steady input of up and coming investment expertise, she feels her business is destined to remain in the mini-microcap size range, although she hopes the book will make a breakthrough on the grounds that the pen might be mightier than… well the whatever.
Quan thinks her end of the profession is essentially an industry for the self-employed and not really amenable to regulation. Indeed she recounts the problems of sex and socialism. Communists did not see sex-workers as part of the toiling proletariat and tended to lock them up as petit-bourgeois elements. Democratic socialists, like the Dutch, issued codes on working conditions. However, many of the workers in the brothels, Tracy recalled with a mischievous grin, did not want the regulation-size windows and compulsory daylight in their working rooms that the law stipulated.
Free-market capitalists are as illogical as the Communists on the issue, she feels, at least when laced with unctuous Puritan morality. However, she pointed out that illegality helps maintain high prices, that many professionals were actually trying to emigrate to the US from places like the Netherlands – where prostitution is legal and hence cheap. ‘Illegality stabilizes market prices,’ she opines, ‘even as it destabilizes lives.’
But what effect will market conditions have on demand? In common with some other bullish providers in the luxury goods sector, she feels that the effect of an undulating market will not be too severe. It seems that in this sector, at least, consumer confidence is not too deflated. However, ‘It will be necessity sex rather than luxury sex,’ she suggests. ‘Not so many threesomes and foursomes, but more bread and butter sex. ‘ This is not apparently a reference to anything exotic, ‘No it’s like restaurants that will serve comfort food rather than nouvelle cuisine during a recession,’ she explains.
As always, there are dangers that unemployment is also bad for workers, with the added suggestion that pink slips from Wall Street may lead to silk pink slips as professional dress. ‘I expect an influx of yuppie chicks unloaded from Wall Street, who’ll bring the prices down,’ she says, sniffing at the likely market dilution. However, brand loyalty counts for a lot, as in any industry: ‘Especially with clients in their 40s and 50s,’ she notes, ‘who have weathered recessions before and are not as panicked as the younger ones.’
So does she expect a sort of, well anti-viagra effect as the bullish testosterone is diluted along with the earnings? Not one to shrink from Freudian speculations, she pondered, ‘Sex is funny. Hard times may make people more adventurous.’ But what about the numbers? May I suggest that Alan Greenspan, omnivorous devourer of obscure data, avail himself of this inside source of information on market confidence? Surely he could flesh out the data?
The Speculator
