LOL.

Solving the worlds problems one at a time, Bam… bowling em over… Yeah look i just hope she’d be happy yeah? maybe use the money to go to art school or something.. oh yeah and the pimp, of course. Well fuck him, she can afford protection at this point and and and….. why am i doing… this is drivel.

Well I almost know of a similar situation.

A student of mine was once homeless with a drug habit. She wasn’t a hooker per se, but she would sleep with other addicts or street folk for drug money.

At some point, her estranged parents died and left her about $50K. Not exactly a windfall, but certainly substantial.

She got off the street, went through rehab, rented an appartment and enrolled in school (which is where I met her).

She almost finished her degree when she burned through all her money and was homeless once again. She had also started using again sometime back.

Student services got her into a few shelters and with a case worker, but she “fell in love” with some guy she met on the street and opted to become homeless again to be with him.

She left school weeks shy of graduating. I saw her a year later pushing a carriage full of her earthly belongs through downtown.

Thats a sad story.

@cprevite Lets hope that would not be the typical outcome…...what a shame…..

You have been on a troll roll lately.

Unless she is unusually prudent or hires a financial advisor she will probably be back on her back within a couple of years.

Why do you assume there is a single course that “a hooker” would follow?

People who turn tricks are people: individuals.

Some would blow through the money just like some non-hooker lottery winners do. Some would turn their lives around just like regular lottery winners do.

Why, are you waiting for one to win the lottery?

All hookers are lumped under the same behavior label? All flutherers who spend too much time thinking up weird questions are silly, inane, living useless lives, annoying, boring, worthy of psychoanalysis? I think not.

Like @marinelife said, there are many different reasons why people become prostitutes. And like any job, whether or not you leave it upon winning the lottery depends on your temperament and how much you like the job. The second factor makes me think that the vast majority of prostitutes at least would quit the job. It’s typically a profession of last resort (though, in fairness, so is “McDonald’s employee”). But not all prostitutes are the stereotypical “crack whores” who need money for drugs. And those who are might be smart enough to use some of their monetary windfall to get help.

In the end, it depends on the individual.

@gailcalled All flutherers who spend too much time thinking up weird questions are silly, inane, living useless lives, annoying, boring, worthy of psychoanalysis? Many questions on Fluther has no deeper impact than a Ritz cracker. As @cprevite illustrated (unless you believe the story made up) is that the reason why many women get in to prostitution boils down to a lack of choices. Whatever they chose in life or a change they felt they had to make they did not have the money to do it, so they used the only commodity they had that had any worth of gaining quick money; their body. Some who were not addicted when they started ended up addicted after they started. Unless some kind Christian soul of sorts is going to somehow swoop in and provide the woman a place to stay and sustain her while providing a mentor/babysitter/body guard to keep her old life and friends from dragging her back about the only way she will get a chance and the money to fuel it is with a windfall of cash. She is not going to come into that type of money by way of a game show or winning Survivor, her best hope is a lottery.

Is winning the enough pull to make her get out and overcome her fear of a pimp? Maybe we should not think of hookers at all unless they are in our neighborhood doing business? I would not pretend to think that a hooker would want to keep doing that even if she had viable options to escape it, but as pointed out, they are individuals, some might get a rush from it and not leave. I was merely asking people with better choices what they thought.

Lets be thankful some Flutheronians think of things and people other than how to configure an iPad to a Playstation, what boots are best to walk around Italy in, or some other “me” centric questions.

@SavoirFaire And like any job, whether or not you leave it upon winning the lottery depends on your temperament and how much you like the job. Exactly, now the lower end hookers who work the truck stops etc. are usually more desperate than the high priced ones governors and movie starts avail themselves of, but even if they are not addicted or controlled by a pimp they may simply love the easy money or the rush. Oh, maybe I shouldn’t say that less people twist those words around to something different. People do all sorts of things many logically think they shouldn’t do be it legal or illegal because of the excitement, the action, so just as there are lotto winners who say they are going to quit work but then get bored out of their skull, there might be hookers the same way.

And those who are might be smart enough to use some of their monetary windfall to get help. That there might be easier said then done. Chances are she is estranged from family but maybe not all bridges are burnt. The only other person she trust maybe a fellow hooker. I can’t see many trusting the cops as they are usually on opposite sides of the law. If she has a pimp controlling her movements, access to things, etc. it might be hard for her to break away secretly to even collect the money. If a pimp got wind of her winnings I can imagine pretty easy what measures he would go to keep his new “cash cow” under his thumb. That is his/her job to live off his/her women like a sponge. It was just a question to see if others believed a pimp to maybe take the same measure of keeping control as I had imagined or maybe even think of something I or others would have never thought of.

This one is easy:

Regardless of how he or she feels about the job, if he or she is unable to leave – no.

If he or she hates the job, and is able to leave – yes.

If he or she likes the job, and is able to leave – maybe.

If he or she loves the job, and is able to leave – no.

@Hypocrisy_Central: Note, please, that mine was a rhetorical question whose answer is “No.”
I said “I think not.” Not a good idea to jump to conclusions. (Many questions have)

@iamthemob If he or she hates the job, and is able to leave – yes. The min. cash threshold you believe would be successful in making that happen?

If he or she likes the job, and is able to leave – maybe. The amount you believe on average that has the best chance with most of being that tipping point, i.e. $30k, $50k, $250k, more?

@Hypocrisy_Central

- I don’t think there’s a minimum cash threshold necessary. I was assuming that it would be enough to allow for independent wealth. But if we’re talking about a ticket that could be worth enough to simply buy another lottery ticket – I’d wager that it would be enough to reasonably allow the person to survive without income for a while – let’s say about six months or so (in this economy, maybe a year).

- Looking at amounts in the “maybe” threshold doesn’t really give us an answer – different areas require different amounts to survive. It depends greatly on the individual person. But, if we’re assuming the same general characteristics, my answer would be greater than the amount needed to make them leave their job if they hate it, most likely significantly more. I would say we’d probably have a situation where he or she would leave where it allowed the individual to get an education or the experience needed to do what the individual truly wanted to do, not just something they liked. At minimum, this would probably be an amount equivalent to that needed to attend a four-year institution, and some time on the front and back end as a cushion. Probably something the equivalent of income needed to survive about 6 years plus whatever would be needed to pay for school. It is likely, however, that the individual would continue to work until admission or bottom-level entry into the professional area of choosing.

Does the pope’s shit smell? One of many imponderables thrown up from time to time. Or is it that I just don’t care?

@Hypocrisy_Central It seems to me that the possibility of a prostitutes turning their lives around is not as dim as you think. The main element of their oppression is a lack of financial independence, which the lottery winnings would provide. As for trusting the police, prostitutes are quite aware that they only need to fear vice officers. And ex-prostitutes could even go to them if they needed help with their (former) pimps. I’m sure the police would be quite happy to help out in that regard.

No doubt you are correct that a pimp would do everything possible to prevent this from happening, and it might make the possibility of a prostitute winning the lottery like this a distant possibility. But were it to happen, I think the resources for escaping are available even for someone who is largely isolated from family and friends.

@SavoirFaire

I don’t think you’re fully crediting, if we’re talking about the real world, the various other elements that play into dependence outside of financial dependence. Talking about the pimp relationship, there is most of the time an extreme level of physical and emotional abuse, and eventually a battered woman’s syndrome style of codependence. When drugs are involved, as they often are, the dependence is intensified. The oppression is institutional when you consider police involvement (as many sex workers are victims of sexual assault by the police), a lack of education and the stigma of someone thinking that because it’s something they’ve done, no one will ever hire them because of their hooking past. Going to the police is always, practically much of the time and profoundly in the mind of a prostitute, a dangerous and frightening thing to do for many of the street workers/girls with pimps.

The availability of resources doesn’t matter if someone is psychologically conditioned to think the resources can’t help them…and when, in all honesty, they often don’t.

@iamthemob That’s a good point, and I certainly don’t know that much about the situation on the ground for prostitutes. I have one friend who used to be a prostitute, but she is a particularly strong person and has never been into hard drugs. Also, I am imagining the resources available to a person who has the lottery winnings, not those available to any given prostitute. It is for people in that situation that I think @Hypocrisy_Central may be overestimating the difficulty of leaving the profession.

But like @Hypocrisy_Central, I have been focusing on the external factors affecting the possibility of escape. The internal factors you mention are certainly important to any overall evaluation of how likely it is one might be able to stop being a prostitute upon winning the lottery.

@Hipocrisy_Central: Sadly, my above story is very true. Much like the dozens of others I have from working with troubled students for seven years.

Probably none of the above comments about making generalizations about hookers are directed at my contribution, but in case they are, my generalization was about people who receive windfalls.

Just like the sad story above about the 50k inheritance and the return to the street, many lottery winners manage their winnings so poorly they end up worse off than they were before. And if she [or he] burned through the money so quickly there was no time to acquire skills for a better living, reverting to the most familiar way of living to survive would be a likely outcome.

Possibly even a lucky outcome, because reckless living could leave the winner in worse shape than before. Harder to work as a call girl instead of doing street tricks if one has no place to live.

I personally would immediately seek a financial advisor’s advice if I won the lottery.