Ashley Mears: evaluation

Transcript context

…In this whole arrangement, how happy are the club girls? But relative to their peers who would otherwise be demographically similar. Well, it’s an interesting question. I think that for the women that end up going out with promoters in the VIP — they’re motivated by a range of things. For many of them, because they’re recruited from the bottom of the fashion modeling industry — and that was one thing that I found in my first book, that most models don’t make very much money — they actually need to eat. They don’t have very much money. So the promoters are opening up for them a glamorous network of friends that also comes with these clear perks, like expenses paid, wining and dining, and these experiences that models otherwise can’t afford. Which is ironic because, for you, Tyler, you’re looking for a good restaurant, and you see this trendy place full of beautiful people. The reality is, most of them probably can’t afford to eat in those places on their own. Or maybe they’re actually motivated to go to those places to get the free meal. So in that sense, there’s a tradeoff that’s clear. And I think that the promoters in this VIP clubland do subsidize a lot of the low wages of the modeling industry. But the other question is, what else would a woman that’s, say, 20, of limited financial means, be doing in the city? Well, there’s lots of other things. In some ways it appeals to a woman’s taste if she wants to be a part of this glamorous, high-end world and participate in it even for a short while. Definitely there’s a tradeoff. And people talked about it as being a win-win. There are downsides, clearly, that they recognize — that when the beautiful women go to these restaurants, the food comes out, but you don’t get to choose what you want off of the menu. It comes out family style, and usually it’s the leftover stuff from the kitchen that they just have that’s cheaper. If it’s a sushi restaurant, it’s never sashimi that the beautiful women are treated to. It’s the cucumber rolls. [laughs] So there’s some downside to it, in that the women don’t get their choice of how the night is going to unfold and where they’re going to sit and what exactly they get to do, but they do get a piece of this affluent city that they would otherwise be excluded from. If some of the men are high-discount-rate men, do you think these young women are, on average, high-discount-rate young women?…

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