As an aside, I'll tell about my experience in Asia for lower end prostitutes salaries...<p>A friend of mine in China was the boyfriend of a massage salon madame (she started out as a prostitute, saved money and opened her own salon later on). In this salon, it was mostly handjobs, the price was 70RMB + tip (so usually around 120RMB -&#62; 17$) ... out of this the salon took 40RMB and 30RMB if the girl was requested directly (in the case of a return customer). The best girls get about 4-5 customers/day. To compare, at the time I paid my cleaning lady 10RMB/hour and the official minimum wage in shanghai is 680RMB (but in practice a girl working as a waitress fulltime is paid 1000-1200RMB/month). Those are prices from 3 years ago. So a successful girl could earn at least 7000RMB/month and the most successful girls would move over to higher end salons where they could get more money (higher end salons would charge 2x/3x as much for the same service). That's higher than the starting salary of someone who graduated from a good university like jiatong daxue.<p>Another element of comparison, where I used to live in japan, there was a soapland next to my house that was hiring new girls and showed the salaries... The salaries were around 6000-8000$/month...<p>So outside of high end and street workers, I think there's quite a few number of not college educated girls who make a very decent living of the trade much better than if they did normal jobs (one chinese girl I met in japan was doing this kind of job to pay for her studies).