In a downturn, is sex work better than McDonald's?

Castro Valley, Calif. -- "Boob play," "pics of kitty," "topless housecleaning" and "hypno role play." The list, scribbled in a lined yellow notebook, is followed by a double-underlined figure: $725.

It's 9 a.m. on a Friday and 30-year-old Marie is sitting on her couch clad in Donald Duck pajamas, munching on buttered toast and staring at her cellphone like she can will it to ring. If someone calls in response to the ad she posted this morning on Craigslist, she can add $75 to her projected income for the month.

Five months ago, before being laid off, Marie was bringing in $45,000 a year at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Now, she operates out of two offices: her living room and a regularly changing hotel room. Her uniform is different, too: Instead of conservative business attire, she dons a lace bra and booty-hugging capris. The former corporate supervisor has become a sex worker.

She's applied for every strait-laced office gig she can find -- regardless of hours, pay or whether her University of California degree makes her absurdly overqualified. She went from being a manager to fighting for personal assistant positions. But last month, after innumerable unanswered cover letters, overdue bills and a delay in her unemployment checks, she entered a world of code words and cash wads. It was baptism by -- bodily fluids: She peed on a guy in her own bed for $100. Since then, she's been paid more times than she can count, or cares to count, for sex, blow jobs, hand jobs and sensual massage.

Of course, Marie is far from the only woman pushed into the sex industry by these harsh economic times. Strip clubs, X-rated Web cam companies and escort managers across the country have reported an increase in job applications in the last several months -- ironically, at the same time that business is largely going down. The same phenomenon was seen after the dot-com bust, when out-of-work techies turned to everything from S/M dungeons to porn sets. Both booms saw a series of salacious news items about good girls gone bad, a narrative that is at least as old as the Bible -- but I wanted to know what was unique about this particular cultural moment.

Industry insiders like to say that they're seeing more "normal" people, girls "with good minds." Mike of A&M Studios, a producer of X-rated video chats, says: "A couple years ago, we'd have a lot of strippers or people who might be on meth -- a lot of shiftier people." He continues, "Now we're seeing performers who are more educated and used to working on a regular schedule. There's been a shift to a very different class of people." Much as his phrasing gives me chills, it isn't just a cliché that women with limited job opportunities often turn to sex work.

The difference in these dark days is that middle-class advantages, like a solid college education and professional work experience, don't offer the same level of protection that they once did from being pushed to make such a choice. Not to mention, it's easier now to make the decision because the Internet has bulldozed the barrier of entry into the sex industry. Just a few clicks away from Craigslist's job board is an array of immediate, cash-upfront adult gigs.

Last month, it looked like that might change: Craigslist announced it would replace its raunchy erotic services section with a costlier and human-monitored "adult" section to appease a threatening state attorney general -- but, so far, the only difference is that there are fewer ads and more euphemisms. Instead of hand jobs and BJs, women offer "sweet treats," "pleasure," "play" or, most popular of all, sensual or erotic "massage." Those looking to hire simply put out a call for a "personal assistant" or a "female teacher" under "adult gigs." Craigslist still allows "normal" girls like Marie to easily gauge the going rates, pick up the lingo and become plucky entrepreneurs, so