Mapping Escorts, or what's up with Plano, TX?

The role of sex in the American economy (let alone, culture) is complex and exceedingly contradictory. While sex is used extensively to sell to the consumer-citizens of the U.S. (see any TV ad) it is also the focus of efforts to control it (who is allowed to marry) and regulate its sale (the illegal status of prostitution in most of the U.S.).

This latter issue is particularly convoluted as leafing through the back of many a local newspaper or postings at Craigslist (or other websites) will aptly demonstrate. There is any number of "escort services" for sale, with the majority presumably being a thinly veiled offer to exchange sex for money.

The wide spread availability of these listings led to today's maps which visualize the distribution of directory listings for "escorts" within Google Maps. The map of the absolute numbers of escorts identifies major urban centers as key sites for this activity, with Denver, Dallas, New York and Miami representing particularly large clusters.

Absolute Number of Escorts Listed in the Google Maps Directory

It is only through the analysis of the relative number of escort listings (see the map below) that more surprising patterns emerge.

Relative Number of Escorts Listed in the Google Maps Directory


Most large urban centers are still present although some such as Detroit or Salt Lake City are very small. Additionally, smaller cities such as Tampa, FL, Knoxville, TN, Tulsa, OK and Lexington, KY appear to have a much higher number of escort listings than their mere size would suggest. As Lexington is the U.S. home for floatingsheep.org we are somewhat nonplussed at this result. Who knew? Particularly since "Sin City" aka Las Vegas is completely absent in this map. Not really the category that Lexington's city council has been trying to get the city highly ranked on.

But the clear front-runner in this category is Texas in general and Dallas in particular which appears as the most specialized metropolitan area in escort services in the U.S. The nearby city/suburb of Plano contains the highest rank which leads inexorably to our final observation (apologies in advance) that…

...Debbie does Dallas, but prefers Plano.

Where do people Make it Rain'?

I make it rain. I make it rain on them.
-Fat Joe featuring Lil' Wayne, "Make it Rain"

No surprises here (except for FloatingSheep's mastery of slang). The folks in Las Vegas make it rain. No, not precipitation. The kind defined by the Urban Dictionary as "When you're in da club with a stack, and you throw the money up in the air at the strippers. The effect is that it seems to be raining money." Indeed.

It shouldn't startle anyone that the largest city in the only US state where prostitution is legal also has the most user-generated references to strip clubs. Contrasting its usual ranking in the urban hierarchy of user-generated geographic information (i.e., somewhere in the middle), Las Vegas is undoubtedly considered by the collective intelligence of the Internet as the place to go to see the clothes come off.

But it is also clear that this phenomenon is national with clusters of strip club reference throughout the U.S. with Florida, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Montreal, New York-New Jersey (Bada Bing!) and Portland standing out in particular. Does Las Vegas retain its penchant for seedy entertainment when the raw number of hits are normalized by both the average number of mentions of 'strip clubs' in user-generated placemarks and the relative specialization at each point (values divided by the number of mentions of "1")?

Even when the raw values of user-generated placemarks are normalized by these two measures (with values showing less-than-average specialization excluded), Las Vegas remains the national hotbed for strip clubs by a considerable margin. But what explains the relative prevalence of strip clubs in the area around Aiken, SC? Or most of Connecticut, for that matter?

Clearly further research is needed but that's NOT what we mean. We're more than content to let it remain one of life's little mysteries for now.