It's really no great surprise is it? There are several things contributing to the drop in young starters but to some extent you're looking in the wrong direction.
First over the last 20-30 years there have been massive advances in female education in the UK, to the point where girls can expect to go to university or a profession with equal earning power as a boy. The days of leaving school at 16, then working in a shop until getting pregnant are gone. Girls nowadays have access to real jobs.
Second the modern ubiquity of IT simply means girls who want to sell sex can do it online with no direct personal contact. Why fuck a bloke when you can get him to wank in front of a screen? But even then, if you look closely most of the online cam girls are based in developing countries: I believe Columbia has the highest number, many of them forced into it by gangs.
Third you have the apparent growth in the sugarbabes sites, but are they real? In the UK it's evident that with one exception they're all rope-a-dope scams with the "girls" actually being computer bots. The one exception, Seeking, clearly has some real contacts but of those, few are interested in sex work.
But lastly you're missing a key point. There is low recruitment to Adultwork because they've made it too fucking difficult for the girls to enrol. AW are increasingly enforcing verification / authentication on sex workers, insisting on passports / driving licences / bank details - and the girls are refusing. That's partly why the number of foreign profiles on Vivastreet are soaring, more or less tripled in the last three years - and most of those are under 30. There's not so many UK girls on VS but that brings me back to point (1): they're mainly able to get real jobs now so they don't need sex work
Parts of your analysis I find persuasive; others less so.
Where we are in agreement is that, as you put it, “the modern ubiquity of IT simply means girls who want to sell sex can do it online with no direct personal contact”. Or, as I put it, “All this is further evidence of the migration of
la jeunesse away from Adult Work to … sites such as Only Fans and to 'freelance' webcamming and photo-selling.”
That I think remains the central issue. The Covid epidemic may have accelerated that tendency.
An interesting point you make – and one I have not previously seen mentioned on UKP – is that there is low recruitment to Adult Work because the site has made it so difficult for girls to enrol. I think that may be a factor, but I suspect a fairly minor one. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Where I disagree with you is when you write this: “Over the last 20-30 years there have been massive advances in female education in the UK, to the point where girls can expect to go to university or a profession with equal earning power as a boy. The days of leaving school at 16, then working in a shop until getting pregnant are gone. Girls nowadays have access to real jobs.”
The era when girls' career options were to be housewives, secretaries, waitresses or (in a very small percentage of cases) whores – if such an era ever truly existed – was sixty to seventy years ago. Females have increasingly been having access to “real jobs” for half a century, while Adult Work has been a power in the land for less than twenty years. I do not find convincing the implication that in the 1980s and 1990s being a hooker was one of the few things a girl could do to earn a living.
In any case, the decline in young (18-25) British women advertising themselves on Adult Work has been over the past half-a-dozen years or so – and, above all, over the last three or four. And I am sure it primarily relates, as I indicated at the start of this post, to the point where we are in accord.
The brief golden age of prostitution was, in my opinion, roughly between 2005 and 2015. Between new technology (and specifically Adult Work) making it extraordinarily easy for men and girls to get together on a sex-for-money basis and other forms of new technology then providing different options. If young women are still willing to have "real-world" sex for money, it is mainly through sugar daddy sites – although only a minority of those who sign up for such sites are serious players – and through “freelancing” (conversations struck up on sites such as Instagram and so on).
