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Even in the midst of Tuesday's joyous

inaugural

celebration, President Barack Obama turned from his "yes we can" refrain to a chillier "winter of our hardship" line. Pundits and politicians remind us daily that the economy is plunging. As Scanner's lead blogger, I always assumed that the only thing plunging in my vicinity would be necklines. Sex always sells, right? When the stock market collapsed in 1929, people embraced cheap thrills — boozing at speakeasies and visiting brothels — for comfort and distraction. People still hire Scarlett Johansson's breasts to appear in films. Axe Body Spray ads continue to evolve.

But then a struggling alternative weekly turned down my pitch for a sex-advice column. The bunnies Hugh Hefner hasn't fired are fleeing to magicians' hats. I wondered gloomily if Larry Flynt was right that the sex industry was no longer recession-proof.

"With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind," Flynt said earlier this month in a press release. In an age when two (or more!) equally broke parties can have free, legal casual encounters thanks to Craigslist and other online personals sites, are people still willing to spend what little money they have on sex?

I turned to the experts for answers. In this case, gorgeous blonde A., who's worked as a stripper and escort in the New York area for nine years. These days, the twenty-nine year old commutes into Manhattan for daytime work at a members-only, in-call agency. She's been working part-time for this agency since June, and while she now has a third fewer regulars than she did over the summer, she maintains the roughly $8,500 a month she was taking home before the recession hit New York City in the fall.

"Recession is good for the sex industry," said A.. She told me she saw a spike in business after the tech bubble burst, and that business got even better after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Her clients pay the agency about $1,000 an hour, and she can usually make up for her lost johns with inflated tips from those who stick around: "The ones who are still coming in are the ones financially able to do so, so it doesn't break their backs if I wring a little extra money out of them."

In fact, according to A., "Spitzer hurt the industry more than the recession." The only time she's seen business significantly slow down was when news broke in March that then-Governor Eliot Spitzer had been patronizing a high-class escort service. But after a month or so, it was back to business as usual.

Her clients may have momentarily feared a bust by the Feds — or their wives — but her remaining customers aren't the kind of men who have to worry about home foreclosure or escalating gas prices. Actually, they sound like just the kind of rich assholes who got us into this mess in the first place.

"These are massive commercial real-estate brokers, business owners, CEOs, all bitching and moaning that they can't gamble as much in Vegas or don't golf as much," she said. "One guy was whining that he had to cut down his cocaine consumption. Another has stopped getting two-girl sessions and complains about that bitterly — how he can only afford one girl an hour."

Unfortunately, sex workers in other parts of the country are not faring quite as well.
In November, the L.A. Times reported that legal brothels in Nevada had huge losses in 2008, mainly because the majority of their customers are long-haul truckers — a profession hit hard by the summer's record-high gas prices.

Donna's Ranch, about 400 miles north of Las Vegas and billed as "the West's oldest continuously operating bordello," saw a twenty-percent drop in sales when gas prices peaked in July and August. Many regulars continued to patronize the establishment, but almost always opted for the cheapest available services. Men who once paid thousands of dollars for mirrored rooms and Jacuzzis went for perks with fewer zeroes attached. From their online "pleasure menu," I imagined the customers ordering like I do at my favorite restaurant: skipping appetizers ("power shower for two") and dessert ("whipped-cream fun pie!") and going straight to the entree.

In a phone interview from his Boise, Idaho accounting office, Donna's Ranch owner Geoff Arnold told me that the Ranch ended the year with a fifteen-percent loss. Not bad, he said, compared to other industries like construction and retail, which suffered forty-to-fifty-percent losses. "Sex is something that people generally don't do without," Arnold said, and joked — or maybe half-joked — that investing in a brothel is a lot safer than investing in the stock market right now.

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