life modeling and weed.

I did my first gig in sg today; it was very surreptitious. 

I don't know how else to articulate my thoughts, but I was thinking that life modeling is legal in the UK, which is great. This means that that demand for life models in London is not that high, and I charge £12.50-£15 per hour if I were to model for a drawing class. There's a "minimum wage" on the life model forum website in the UK; it's part union, part agency, and it's £12.50 per hour for London, so people usually charge that. As a benchmark, the minimum wage in London (it's not the same all over the UK because the living costs in London are higher) is £6.08, and I've been paid £6.50 per hour for a non-modeling job. 

So I come back to singapore, and thought that I'd charge about the same that I charge in London, maybe a little bit higher if I can get away with it-- £20 per hour. I'm going to put everything in sterling for convenience; and you can compare rates between the two cities. I did my first life modeling gig today, and it was a photoshoot. The amateur photographer who's paying me tells me that I should charge a higher rate; £75 per hour. I tell him £20 is what I usually charge in London. This person hasn't hired a studio; we're photographing in the open. It feels a little cheap; most previous shoots I've done have been in photography studios, in private. We end up doing the shoot in a stairwell, and there are noises all around, almost as if someone's going to barge in any moment. 

MY POINT IS. That if life modeling was legal and regulated in singapore like in the UK, I don't think I would feel bad about what I was doing. It's like legalizing weed. Weed is illegal in Singapore, you get the death penalty, hence demand for weed/ any kind of drug is high and terribly overpriced. Weed is technically illegal in London, but people still smoke it and there are ways of getting it, someone told me it was £10 for 5 sticks, correct me if I'm wrong.

Life modeling isn't regulated here, you don't sign any release forms, there's no minimum wage, so demand is extremely high and pushes the going rate to £75. For comparison, you get £2.50 per hour if you work at McDonalds. I got paid £2.75 per hour at my first job, a receptionist gig. 

It's a jump from life modeling to weed, but I was looking at how they were legalizing weed in the states of Colorado and Washington, and it was hard for me to understand why. But I realized people are going to smoke weed whether or not it is legal, just like people are going to life model whether or not it is regulated. When it is illegal or unregulated, people think that they need to try harder to obtain it, so that they won't get caught by the authorities. Because of the perceived "work" they need to do to acquire it and to escape detection, the price of the goods increases. 

I would like it if life modeling was regulated because then it wouldn't push the going rate so high. It wouldn't feel like an underground, seedy thing where people text you in undecipherable broken english in the middle of the night. I've been asked, "Can touch?" "Can come now?" (at 11.30pm) "Can come after midnight?" "Free now?" "Free later?" I don't know what kind of ridiculous unprofessionalism is this. I keep getting texts, one question per text; I've gotten four texts in a row when I didn't respond in 12 hours. It's annoying and disrespectful. It's not just from one person; it's from all the people who responded to my ad. I answer calls, and the caller sounds drunk and his voice is slurred; I can't make out what he's saying and I have to ask him to repeat multiple times. It's not professional at all, and it's frustrating to deal with the lack of discipline, to say the least.

In London, I put up an ad, people email me, I email back, we decide on a time and date that is sometimes set weeks in advance. The shoot is planned for, and I can put it in my schedule; I don't have to drop things I've planned for a shoot that someone has asked me to do the next day. If I'm lucky, the photographer shows me samples of his work, and I can decide if I want to work with him or not, based on the sleazy-level of his pictures. It all feels very professional and over the table. Sometimes at 6th form colleges I have to sign a book to say that I've been paid, or at other places I give an invoice, and it makes me feel better. The transaction has been recorded in writing; there's no need to cover anything up. 

About the legality of goods and services; I'm currently reading an ethnography by Sharam Khosravi for school. In it, he says that authorities have been more severe towards refugees since the early 1990s. People are still going to attempt to move to more developed nation-states whether or not the authorities are strict. The refugees and their smugglers are just forced to use more dangerous routes, now that border crossings are more heavily policed. It's still going to happen, even if the punishments are more severe, and if the likelihood of getting arrested is higher. The only things which change are the market rates asylum seekers have to pay to their smugglers, and the death toll in the inhospitable territory between Mexico and the USA. 

It's a radical argument, but if the borders weren't so heavily policed, maybe less people would die crossing it. Vulnerable asylum seekers would less likely be fleeced by smugglers. If weed or drugs were regulated, less people would get sick because of impure drugs, or overdose by accident. People who need money desperately wouldn't have to risk their safety to become mules and swallow packages of drugs. If the life modeling industry in singapore was more regulated, maybe people would stop treating me like a hooker and stop sending me rude texts, bordering on sexual harassment. 

I just feel more uncomfortable life modeling here than in London, even though I can charge more.