TER General Board
and personally I much prefer to be here...the men here are true gentlemen and treat me much better...than the men on that site...so Thank You guys for just being You 
Apperently idea to start the site occured to Brandon after he got busted for solicitation of minor on line
Does not surprise me really 
Lina
The whole issue of mixing money with intimacy is a deep area and I think it is fraught with peril because of the economic reductionism.
For example, many many feminist theorists have argued that all wives are prostitutes because husbands give them money and the wives provide sex. But that is really wiping a whole bunch of things out of the equation because husbands give a lot more than money, and wives give a lot more than sex.
Most of these sorts of errors come from seeing humans in strictly economic terms; and ignoring the psycho-social-spiritual aspects of humanity.
So I think that, in general, taking two things that both involve sex and both involve money and equating the two on that basis might not be sufficiently accurate because it is looking at a limited number of similarities while ignoring the distinctions.
We agree completely that escorting, sugar babies, kept mistresses and so forth should all be completely legal.
And you make a sound point that if mistresses are legal (which they are -- sort of) and that they often do volume like a low volume escort (which they do), then why should one be legal and the other not?
I agree.
But my concern wasn't over legalization. To me, that's already answered -- it should all be legal.
Rather, my concern lies in the fact that unlike escorting which many countries have dealt with adequately and which has well-characterized and carefully studied outcomes; we have no similar data on the impact of widespread adoption of mistress or sugar baby arrangements.
Now, I'll plead guilty. While I was single, I kept a sugar baby for a time. Why, I have no idea; because I had plenty of ordinary dates. I think I just liked the stability.
But since then, I have thought about it; and my biggest concern is that such arrangements, on a large scale, would amount to de-facto polygamy.
Now, polygamy has long been part of various human cultures and certain genetic evidence indicates that, at one time or another, it has been common to ALL human cultures at one time or another.
However, there came a point in most cultures where polygamy became generally discouraged in favor of adopting social monogamy. There were important reasons for adopting social monogamy even in the face of pretty much inborn non-monogamous instincts.
(Note: social monogamy is not the same thing as genetically predisposed monogamy. In social monogamy, a fair amount of cheating is understood to occur.)
Conflict between members of a given culture can be extremely costly. Civil wars are typically much more damaging than external conflicts. (For example, the U.S. lost more people in the Civil War than all wars fought by the U.S. before or since combined.)
Polygamy, by its nature, concentrates reproductive opportunities in the hands of a relatively small group of people. Essentially, maybe 5% of men end up with 50% of the women; with the other 95% of men left to scramble over the remainder. Perhaps, in small tribes where inter-tribal rivalries were sufficient to kill a lot of surplus males (i.e. males with no breeding opportunities who would otherwise make trouble) this was okay.
But in societies where we don't have an effective mechanism for killing excess males in sufficient quantities that would be consistent with our other social values; millions upon millions of lone-wolf males would seriously threaten social stability.
Look, for example, at the fate of young men in the sects of Mormonism that allow polygamy. They are essentially turned out to fend for themselves at puberty. But what happens when the entire society is that way due to the large number of the most desirable women being taken out of circulation by just a handful of men? (Admittedly, I'd be one of that handful. But this isn't all about ME. What about the future?)
So the first thing we would face is social instability spurred by millions and millions of men with no mating possibilities.
But, you see, there are 3 million women (out of only 100 million adult women in the country) on that one website alone. Once being a paid mistress becomes more widely socially accepted, how many will there be? 10 million? 20 million?
How would you anticipate handling those millions and millions of lone-wolf males left behind? Castration? Endless wars so they can be killed as cannon fodder? Maybe an ounce of prevention by the selective abortion of male babies?
So what I am saying is -- by all means, make it legal. BUT -- there WILL be consequences and tough choices coming down the road as a result. Consequences for widespread sugar-babying that don't pertain to simple escorting.
The second likely outcome that crosses my mind cuts to the core of why social monogamy co-developed with the end of hunter-gathering in many cases.
The end of hunter-gathering and the advent of agriculture followed by cities and then occupational specialization ... brought us the need to have children more and more educated in order to become productive and useful members of society. With this came the need for more intimate contact between father and offspring.
Many many studies indicate that, while the effects aren't always horrible; overall, children fair better with their biological father in the home.
While these studies are usually cited as an argument against divorce; consider the consequences in terms of the de-facto polygamy we'll be seeing.
Social monogamy forces a father to deal with a limited number of offspring so that each of them has personal access to the father's time. Not always, of course -- because nothing is perfect.
If a guy has 1 wife, 19 mistresses and 60 children -- in terms of the availability of his time and personal attention, they might as well have been born without a father at all. Sure, they will have material resources -- but we have evolved since the agricultural revolution such that children benefit when receiving more than just material resources from their fathers.
So we will have whole new generations of essentially fatherless children.
Again -- this is not a problem typically posed in escorting because the disease transmission possibilities necessitate the use of barriers. But this is not an issue when the mistress is only having sex with one man -- one man whose contract may require her (for a fee) to bear offspring.
Once these sorts of economic/sex transactions -- especially paid mistresses -- become explicitly legal; then they would be subject to contracts that currently are inapplicable. The power that women currently have in those arrangements would go to the men. Being a man, that doesn't scare me; but I think women should think hard about it because there is no such thing in this world as a free lunch; and if you are going to get something (the ability to be one of Bill Gate's 20 mistresses) -- you'll end up giving something.
So we do not at all disagree on whether or not all these things should be fully legal.
All I am saying is that there are possible social impacts to having millions and millions of kept mistresses out there; and that these should be considered. Or, at least, we should be deciding how to handle the spike of lone-wolf males, the essentially fatherless children and the inevitable loss of power of choice by most women in contractual service arrangements.
So I agree with you, but just think more analysis is required.
Personally, I favor this sort of thing because I think its time to shake things up and give evolution a shot in the arm. But the results of such things are often unanticipated and painful.
I totally agree that prostitution should be completely legal.
But I don't think it is reasonable to compare a wife to a prostitute just because both money and sex are involved.
While I realize this isn't always the case, most often, married couples actually love each other and do so in spite of changing economic circumstances. They set common goals and help each other in their achievement. They bring children into the world and usually provide a loving and stable environment for them for 20 years or even more.
Marriage and prostitution are not the same. Sometimes they are, with a gold-digger wife; but most often they aren't.
Both should be legal though.