It’s very easy to hide this crime,” an official with New York’s attorney general’s office said defensively regarding the state’s discovery of only two trafficking victims in advance of the Super Bowl, an occasion during which prostitution is allegedly at its peak. Sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wrote an entire memoir predicated on the notion that sex work has become “more efficient and more hidden.” While rejecting Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore, feminist Katha Pollitt declared that when it comes to sex work, “the subaltern do not get to speak.”

So it’s unsurprising that in March, when the Urban Institute released its study on the United States’ sex economy, the mainstream media promoted their self-described “landmark” findings as a triumph. The New York Times claimed the report could address “wide gaps in the understanding of how the underground sex trade works, especially in the Internet age.”

Journalists, policy-makers, and self-appointed experts repeatedly say that the Internet facilitated an explosion of activity for sex sellers of all stripes, yet that activity was somehow entirely covert. Similarly, the “end demand” crowd, who would like to see the sex trade eradicated but catch flack for explicitly supporting policies that criminalize those selling it, assert that sex work proliferates because of an endless male appetite for bought sex.