Younger Escorts Advertise Higher Charges Online than Older Escorts for Sexual Services Cross-Culturally

Abstract

As men have universally expressed attraction to younger women, awareness of this proclivity in men by women should be maximally reflected in terms of mate value in younger compared to older women. Prostitution has been recorded across all cultures and historical epochs, and one way in which mate value in women can be explored is by obtaining data from online escort advertising sites. The current study accessed an online escort site called adultwork.com to compare advertised fees between escorts at various ages and age ranges in five different cultures (UK, Ireland, Australia, the USA and Europe) offering either incall or outcall sexual services. With the exception of Irish escorts advertising for an outcall service, differences were found in all countries sampled with younger escorts charging significantly higher fees than older escorts. The current findings are another example of how by accessing real-world online data we can successfully test hypotheses relating to sexual behaviour from an evolutionary psychological perspective.