This is not entirely just a cliched tired tale of gender like little red riding hood and the big bad wolf that doesn't really hold up in reality. I don't have just a simple story of how women get unwanted sexual harassment facilitated by buying into sharing. This is a story of how a new class of petty capitalists have hit the skids harder than workers. This is, to some degree, the story of many Americans under forty. We invested in our own human capital through education. We tried to get ownership of places and things in this world. And now we are renting half of these out if we are lucky. We are renting our rooms, and renting out brains. We are selling our very selves in some cruel fight for survival that has become a race to the bottom. This race sponsored by the new sharing economy demands we all primp ourselves like beauty pageant contestants but vie for Ms. Congeniality and Hospitality instead of the real crown. This race has both buyers and sellers in service roles and it is not empowering either side. Those of us in the race are not there at random, and we are in reality the last people who need to learn how to share. As the economy goes down, by and large the few workers who can keep their heads above water are men. Women of my generation got degrees in order to compete on the labor market. Then too many of us got low paying jobs which demand a certain kind of subservience we are supposedly suited to. I've watched friends run this equation to the limit if they tried to break into creative industries. For them a hope to break in was about working for free, playing the attractive good girl who let the boss pat their ass if not fuck it, and lots of waitressing. I don't think many men are emotionally strong enough to put up with these kinds of arrangements. For these and many other reasons the sharing economy can not be entirely separated from gender issues.
The first couch surfer I ever met was a wealthy young woman traveling through Israel who could have easily afforded a hotel, but liked to keep her family money separate from her own. Her father was an Upper East Side dwelling doctor. She flew out to Israel on birthright and couchsurfed. She landed on my ex-boyfriend's roommate's couch. Not two days after I met her did I hear her host whining that she wanted to be taken here and there, and all without "being his girlfriend." According to my acquaintance, she sat in front of him and knowingly flirted. There was always the promise that she might be interested, at least in the mind of her host. His mood seemed to bounce around depending upon how much hope he held. I didn't worry about her safety though, because I understood, she had the money to walk away at any moment.
People asked me why I didn't just couchsurf when I needed accommodations to take my United States Medical Licensing Exam Step IICK exam in London (they shut the testing center in Israel at the time I wanted to take it). I was afraid. It seemed like men thought couchsurfing was some kind of sex service. "Then you only interact with women!" the surf- experienced told me. At some point, I took the plunge, and I must say, I am sorry. I have never hosted or been hosted by a male...but over time interacting with a few women I have hosted, and men who messaged me was enough to let me confirm what was going on. Obviously "couschsurfing" is not "sexsurfing"; but apparently about half of men on the site are confused on the point. One female surfer I had told me a long list of her many experiences where male hosts tried to get her to sleep with them. The most ridiculous was one who told her she could help him in a scientific experiment about kissing, but in order for the conditions of the experiment to work, they would both need take off their clothes. The most banal were men who simply demanded sex. Apparently the experience is so common there is a catchphrase women publish in their requests to rapidly relocate. I have forgotten the phrase, but I won't be using it. After my own interactions with men on the site, I'm frankly afraid to couchsurf. I thought I had set up my account to show I was interested in hosting with and staying with other women. A bizarrely high percentage of messages I got were from were older men looking hoping to meet for coffee or something else that sounded like a date. A date where I would pay and show them a bit of the city I suppose, otherwise, why not just find someone on the over 3,000 actual online dating websites?
Yes, that number is correct. With over 3,000 online dating sites, including footworshipclub.com, dateamormon.com, farmersonly.com and hundreds more there truly IS someone for everyone. There are dating websites for the mentally ill people, high IQ people, paraplegics, Zoroastrians...no group is too small; in fact statistically insignificant groups flock to online dating to save themselves from genetic erasure. I don't think Sawyourunningfromisis.com for Yazidis can be far off in the future in a world where Sawyouatsinai.com is one of over a dozen dating websites aimed at the two percent of Americans that share my religion, many of whom are married already. There are websites for all kinds of dating, including dating for married people cheating (Ashleymadison.com) and even...this one floored even me...dating for people who don't like sex (Asexualitic.com). So why would anyone, no matter how unique their tastes or profile, waste their time trying to get some action on a sharing site supposedly about hosting people? I have a simple hypothesis: people on a dating site can just say NO. People, most often women, on couchsurfing might need somewhere to stay, and feel pressured to acquiesce. Yes can be as simple as a woman too broke to spring for a hotel. You see, the sharing economy is all about love, and by love I mean desperation.
When I was websurfing a few weeks ago I happened on a story about how Uber, a new car sharing service, had a sexual harassment problem. I was not surprised. Men boast that the Uber app lets them "pick up girls", literally. Those young women are, I suspect, not unaware of the issues of getting into a car with a stranger who is not that well tracked. Like the thousands of women on couchsurfing, they need to save some money, and are willing to take a calculated risk. The women I have met who surfed my couch or rented my bed via Airbandb, were almost never on vacation. They were trying to hang on to their jobs or get a foothold into some part of the labor market. If they had to be in New York City for even a shot at some gig, they were there. Apparently the days when employers picked up travel costs are gone. I can not however tell a rosy story about how we became some sort of sisterhood of labor due to sharing my apartment. In fact it became painfully clear that some of my mini-renters viewed me as pathetic given that I was so poor I had to sleep on an airmatress while renting out my own bed. Nonetheless, I avoided the fate or ever having to couchsurf a man's place. This fate seems to bring a certain kind of sexualized doom onto single women.
Sharing was supposed to bring us all closer together. But can men handle that lots of women don't want to be so close as to let them grope us or use us as courteous cheap labor? The sharing economy is not just about men finding new forums in which to sexually harass women, it's also about some men throwing certain women and men into a low wage pit of doom. Technology enabled sharing model companies market themselves as the salvation for stay-at-home moms among other gendered groups. But what they are really about is chopping work up into tiny bits that can be done by no benefit underpaid workers. Hosts working instead of salaried hotel workers. Car sharers instead of professional drivers. Amazon's mechanical Turks instead of tech and office workers. The ideas of sharing style companies seems to be spreading like wildfire through every single part of the American economy. You would be wrong to think many of us are immune. This year when looking to pick up more income one company I interviewed for specifically pursued would-like-to-stay-at-home bilingual MDs and RNs to staff online call centers for the pharmaceutical industry. The pay was based on only minutes actually talking on the phone. with patients. Before taxes the pay came up to 11$ an hour when talking. So if you got calls about 50% of your shift, you couldn't even make minimum wage. Yet that was more than I would have made on many share-model service businesses- because they just don't seem to be influenced by the minimum wage at all. But hey, we are all sharing, right? Except that those at the top don't seem to be sharing any of the profits from turning everyone below them into independent contractors in a fight to the very bottom of a personalized capitalist pit. Paradoxically we aren't the new capitalists in this scenario in spite of selling the sharing of precisely our capital. We are instead, to be honest, all prostitutes now; I think that is the best summary for the sharing economy. The sharing economy is really about servicing others at dismally low rates while maintaining the illusion of a happy intimate exchange. Then again, prostitution isn't what it used to be either, apparently.
Every few months I have a passing fantasy about becoming a high end hooker: the kind of woman that gets flown to exotic vacation locations and receives gifts of expensive jewelry but doesn't have to smile in front of cameras when her man gets caught in some embarrassing infidelity sextastrophe. I know what you are thinking...and you may want to keep in mind I'm too far in debt and age for anyone to marry, thanks in part to my supposedly awesome education. Becoming a high end hooker seems kind of romantic when I think about the fact that I may never have sex again. The fantasy of happy hooking of course ends abruptly when I look in places they advertise, and realized I don't have the correct skills for any kind of sex work at all. I think most of us lack these skills, which include the ability to sleep with unattractive people on demand. I used to think maybe only one in a million of women could ever bring herself to sleep with a stranger. Therefore the numbers of streetwalkers I saw as I walked around surely reflected the fact that somehow they had all just decided to work near my old apartment in Brooklyn . I was convinced 'normal' Americans didn't get into this stuff; and I was living in a very abnormal ghetto; but I was only half right. Apparently I was naïve and overly privledged if not straight up delusional. A quick perusal of the web proves prostitution is booming at every level. From high earners on websites that match "sugar daddies" to middle of the road whores on websites like craigslist, prostitutes are not too hard to find in America. Apparently there has been a dramatic surge in the number of women in the sex trade due to the new economy, not so coincidentally, this new "sharing" economy. This is what happens when you combine soaring student debt with "chick jobs" and their famously low entry level wages or even non-wages...How else did you think all those 'I'm trying to break into the film/art/publishing/other creative biz' unpaid interns paid their bills and had somewhere to live? Oh, yeah, how could I forget? Couchsurfing...that will certainly fix their problems while saving the world one intercultural exchange at a time...Well, I'm not going to hold my breath for a new sharing inspired collaborative world peace. The reality of the sharing economy is not the increasing intimacy, trust, and wealth it claims to promote...it is increasing sexual harassment, suspicion, and poverty: exactly the opposite.
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