Finding a prostitute in the Dominican Republic is easy. Really easy! You just won’t believe how positively, undeniably, mind-bogglingly easy it is! I mean, you may think it’s easy to find a pineapple stand on the side of a pothole-encrusted road outside of Santo Domingo — but that’s just peanuts to finding a prostitute.

For those over the age of 18, prostitution is legal in the island country as long as no third party (such as a pimp) is involved in the transaction. At night, the local discos and bars fill up with Dominican women in their late teens or early twenties, who stare suggestively at male tourists or rub up against them like cats. Nearby strip clubs allow you to take a working girl out if you pay the club a salida, or exit fee. Adult resorts — such as BlackBeards in Puerto Plata (where “fantasies become reality”) — cater to single men and swingers with on-site companions. Passion’s Night Club in Sosua even offers a no-haggle, full-service menu, with a take-out option!

Photo © Passion‘s Sosua

If you somehow still can’t figure out where to get some sweaty entertainment, popular adult websites educate subscribers on where they can go to “get 18-year-old girls for less than the price of a good steak.” A plethora of available “guides” on every street corner will gladly steer you to the closest cold beer, hot food, or “skinny chica” in exchange for a buck or two.

According to a Wired Magazine interview with a Dominican Republic prostitute, “there is always a demand for sex. Men will always pay for it, especially in here where they can get anything they want at a discount.” Right before Christmas, more girls than normal work in brothels and massage parlors in order to earn some quick money for the holidays. In the same interview, a 15-year old girl in a hot-pink Lycra dress stated, “I don’t have an education, and I’ve got two children. Where else can I make such good money? To be a prostitute, you don’t need schooling, all you need is your body.”

Well, she needs a cédula if she’s going to visit clients in their hotel rooms. A cédula is like an internal passport, a government-issued identity document that allows citizens access to public services and to move about freely. It is common practice for hotels to take a girl’s cédula during the conjugal visit and return it to her when she leaves. That way, if there are any crimes committed during her stay, the hotel can take the girl’s cédula directly to the police. Citizens found without their cédula are often arrested, or even deported to nearby Haiti if their skin color is dark enough — a whole other story.

Most of the bigger hotels or all-inclusive resorts have on-site security officers who will refuse to allow streetwalkers inside, limiting entry only to registered guests. Not to worry; the opportunity for sex is everywhere. The country is littered with ”turisticas”. Also known as cabanas, these upscale, rent-by-the-hour hotel rooms are frequented by the locals even more than the tourists.

About a half hour east of the capital city of Santo Domingo, Boca Chica, a seedy beach town, is a popular destination for sex-seeking tourists, despite a short-lived crackdown on the negative image of prostitution and its related crimes several years ago. Yards from the beach where families with young, half-naked children wade in the shallow water, nubile dark-skinned women snuggle in the laps of plump, elderly American and European tourists.

My Search for a Prostitute

Photo © Richard D. LeCour

My reward being solely material for my website, I set out to corner a prostitute in Boca Chica in order to snap a picture. After strolling the beach for about 20 minutes and realizing a bit too late that I needed to ditch my traveling companion since we looked like a bit too much like a staid gay couple, it took less than three minutes to catch the attention of Marissa and her friend. It required only the flash of a smile.

“Just relax,” said the voice in my head pleasantly, like a flight attendant in an twin-engine airplane with only one working engine, the other of which is on fire. “You are perfectly safe — they’re harmless.”

Marissa (the girl in the green-tinged, off-white tank top) was clearly in charge; she monopolized the brief, now-forgotten conversation so much that I never heard the name of her darker-skinned partner. After posing briefly for the photo, the pair morphed into a form of land-based kraken, tentacles groping and grappling. I strove to disengage, feigning ignorance to their profession, while Marissa persistently sought to keep my attention. I suppose I could have paid them for the photo as Marissa requested in a valiant last-ditch effort, but I was not about to expose my wallet as I had used the sorry-no-money ploy in my getaway.

Obviously, the recent crackdown in Boca Chica has done nothing to actually discourage business; it is quite rampant throughout the country, although the majority of the sex trade has been pushed to the north coast. A German-language on-line tourism guide to the Dominican Republic states that “prostitutes and their inexpensive offerings are the favorite goal of many single male German travelers”, noting that the “center of sexual tourism is now Sosua”, a city on the northern beachfront of the island. The German guide website states that “the women already possess the vocabulary of the most important language.” My German’s a bit rusty, so the translation after that point is a bit questionable; the women are either (a) quite proficient linguistically, or (b) really good with their tongues. Both have their merits, I suppose.

Mostly harmless.

Author’s Note: This article is intended to educate readers on the prevalence of prositution in Dominican Republic. While written with artistic license in a seemingly approving tone, I do not actually approve of, condone, or support prostitution of any kind in any way. All comments and questions regarding legal prostitution are encouraged, however anything surrounding the topic of underage prostitution is prohibited.]

Another weekend project from World of Warcraft’s Azeroth Film Institute, my second video (to the tune of “Hit the Road, Jack” by Buster Poindexter) took about a day from start to finish to create — barely in time for my 24-hour deadline.

I am quite proud of the strong pairing of character animation to the lyrics that I managed to achieve in this video.

These are really fun to create, and they also serve as an interesting enhancement to the creative side of my online résumé.

Unlike my most recent “Another Girl” video, this one was created the more traditional way: the song was selected first, and then the video was captured and created to match the song. I like the results much better this way!

Production Notes

• The off-beat timing of the footsteps that actually brings character and soul to Jack as he trundles off was at first unintended, or at least unconscious. It just seemed to fit.
• The repeated scenes with black or white backgrounds were originally added as part of the storyboarding process. Normally, once storyboarding is compete, I replace the scenes with “live” shots from within WoW. The few fully black scenes hadn’t been storyboarded because I had no concrete ideas what to put in those places! I spent so much time playing with various camera angles of Jack hitting the road (like at 0:55 and 2:13) that I simply ran out of time for my self-imposed deadline. So I just left the blank areas and storyboards. In the end, I actually preferred the final result over my original vision.
• Continuity issues: there were four identical scenes (at 0:16, 0:52, 2:09, and 2:22) that were unintentionally imported at double-speed. I forgot to readjust the timing before I duplicated the scenes, and there they stuck.

I recently quit playing World of Warcraft.

I’m having minor withdrawals, and I’m in a quandary about whether to resume playing World of Warcraft, switch from World of Warcraft to Vanguard, or just to give up the incessant addiction of MMORPG games altogether. If I don’t keep playing WoW, I’ll miss the girls I’ve spent two years of my life creating — they have distinct personalities and traits, and I already miss them the few short weeks it’s been since I gave up playing cold turkey.

To ease the withdrawals, I’ve decided to create a tribute of sorts — a few hand-crafted videos to remember them by if I do decide to permanently stop playing. This is my first WoW machinima video, the soundtrack courtesy of The Beatles, without permission.

My favorite part of this video is the transition from 1:16-1:22 (Aragwyn morphing into Stranded).

Fantastic!

Production Notes

• I created this video very unusually. On the last day or two before my account was to expire, I captured about 20-30 minutes of random dance video without any real idea in mind as what to do with them. I didn’t even come up with the idea of making a music video until weeks after I let the account expire. There were no video scenes specifically captured for the making of WoW Another Girl — and it clearly shows. While it’s not the best video out there, I don’t think it’s that bad considering it was created essentially with stock footage.
• Little known, unimportant trivia: A few months before I quit playing WoW, Blizzard gave everyone on our server (Hyjal) the option to move to a less-populated realm. My friend Equinox and I figuratively jumped to the new realm Azuremyst — which was the beginning of the end because we were unable to find a guild not led by morons, so gameplay became futile and boring. The warrior girl Stranded was created in order to keep ties open with Hyjal; she was “stranded” on Hyjal while the rest of the crew had jumped to Azuremyst. Thus, her name.
• Stranded’s mission was to remain unnoticed among the crowded population while she took advantage of certain exploits in order to get some final, unusual footage (such as running around underneath Stormwind starting at 1:43).