As a first-time hooker working in the London hotel bars, I quickly discovered that the super-rich trophy client can be a claustrophobic companion. My fantasies were about freedom, not wealth. While I enjoyed the high-end scene, I often preferred working the middle of the market.

Belinda, one of the girls I looked up to, had a rich Saudi client who used his generosity to monopolize her. While it sounds romantic to hit the jackpot in this way, there was way too much drama. In contrast, I had Stanley, an easygoing salesman from Leicester who never questioned a working girl’s freedom. Stanley couldn’t afford to buy me a flat, but Belinda’s situation made me wonder: why should a wealthy client behave in ways we’d consider psychotic in a middle-class man?

Stanley was a lot like the warm businesslike customers I met when I moved to New York. The escort service I worked for wasn’t exactly high class, but a steady diet of high-class dudes can get boring. The parade of men from every class, religion, and ethnic group turned my job into an informal sociology course. I met self-made billionaires, celebs, art dealers, movers and shakers—but I also met the indentured restaurant worker, the dentist, the furniture salesman, an air-conditioner repairman. It was tremendously liberating to know I could relate to such a wide range of men, that I didn’t have to spend all night—like Belinda—with a controlling millionaire.

One of the silliest misconceptions about my former profession is the assumption that every call girl prefers to be a high-end courtesan. The less well-to-do clients sensed that I had other options, so they felt lucky to have a brief encounter. An appointment could last 15 minutes or five hours, depending on the type of client I saw.

Among my first New York customers was a bachelor in working-class Washington Heights, one of many African American soldiers who had gone to Europe when the United States was still segregated. My transatlantic accent reminded him of his army years. He hadn’t been back to England after the war, but he had good memories. Impeccably polite and courtly, he came very quickly. I was new to the business, while he had been seeing prostitutes for years. He was comfortable with the transaction—neither cold nor sentimental—and made me feel a bit like a goddess for 20 minutes.

Later that night I was sent to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where my client was a white, well-off, married Midwesterner. My last client that night was 30-something and Jewish, a single guy with frizzy hair in a renovated Upper East Side tenement down the street from an expensive-looking high-rise. He smoked pot and used a lot of black American jargon to flirt with me. What a funny charmed place New York was turning out to be.

When I graduated from the escort agency to work with a group of successful call girls, those earlier customers could no longer afford my new rate. I was comfortable with my roster of swanky clients, but I often felt that my encounters with less wealthy guys were more interesting.

Ten years later I compared notes with Belinda, who never left the circle of the very rich. Though she had been successful from the start, she hated her job and felt stuck. Traveling between the high end and the middle market seemed like a compromise to her, but not to me. If a wealthy customer wanted to spend eight hours doing illegal drugs in his five-star hotel room, I could opt out. I could see, instead, a nice dentist or accountant with only an hour to spare and no portable drug habit. On a good day I might have sex with five ordinary customers instead of one megadate. My body got more of a workout, but when I did a midnight call with a demanding zillionaire, I felt free to leave early.

You might wonder how a girl with a distinctive look migrates between different price cliques. In a conventional job, a person who keeps changing her name would be viewed as a nut, but it’s more than okay in sex work to alter your identity—as long as you maintain a spotless rep. (If you adopt a new name simply to cheat people, word gets around.) Madams routinely accepted the fact that I used three or four names, and I felt privileged reinventing myself on a regular basis.

If you’re willing to entertain a higher volume of men, if you aren’t horrified by a client who works a blue-collar job, you have more options than the girl with a fetish about catching a big fish. A girl who sees 10 working-class men each day is often stereotyped as a victim. Actually, she may feel more independent this way and dislike making small talk with the rich and famous. I’ve known girls who felt trapped and unhappy operating at the top of the market, while some of the most cheerful sex workers I’ve met have been streetwalkers or brothel workers. The wealthiest men may be spoiled, used to getting their way.

In my job, I had an opportunity to mingle with girls from everywhere. My co-workers were unschooled drug users who ran away on the bus to New York, nerdy medical students, boarding-school babes who sold real estate by day and sex by night, semi-employed musicians, mysterious vagabonds. I met girls who had pimps and girls who lived entirely alone. Some were sex addicts, others nearly frigid. Most kept the job a secret from family members—but I also knew two sisters who saw clients together. Too many people, even in a city as colorful as New York, consort with a narrow predictable group. Not me.

Women enter the sex trade for many reasons. It’s a myth that we’re all addicted to Louis Roederer Cristal, pricey lingerie, and Prada. Sometimes we work just enough to pay our bills, so we can have time for our hobbies. Material wealth, I found, was quite alluring to girls who had grown up poor.

Gigi, who came from a rough neighborhood, was brilliant at saving money and sometimes worked around the clock, sleeping in a loft bed high above the mattress and box spring that was reserved for sex with clients. Karen, who spent nights in a homeless shelter when her parents were divorcing, was another savvy investor. She used prostitution as a ladder to middle-class security. I sometimes envy their solid financial goals.

For me, having grown up middle class, with neither deprivation nor luxury, prostitution was an elusive, occasionally confusing pursuit of something harder to define. Personal autonomy, the liberty to make my own mistakes and be answerable to myself—in a word, freedom.

And yet I’m different from the college girl escorts and middle-class sex workers you so often hear about. As a teenager under the legal working age, I yearned for the freedoms enjoyed by legal adults. I had to fight (albeit covertly) for the right to work at all. I landed my first office gig during my 13th summer by lying about my age, only to be fired after two weeks when they found out. For a kid so obsessed with the right to work, running away at 14, dropping out of high school, and turning tricks was logical. When a boyfriend tried to persuade me that I should quit, I felt the walls closing in on me.

I was thumbing my nose at conventional feminism, which creates a straitjacket for young women, urging us to be good girls who finish school, go to university, and pursue a career where you keep respectable hours. I am, by nature, a night owl, and feminism seemed to favor the early riser.

As a junior hooker, I was delighted to find you could start your workday around three or four in the afternoon. Exploring central London at night, I was seduced by the opportunity to live with my natural body clock. But freedom at 14 is a bright, shiny object. You don’t realize that it comes with a price.

When I began working in my own flat, the easiest customers turned out to be morning appointments. These 10:00 a.m. guys were eager to get back to work, so their sexual demands were simple. They were happy to let me initiate sex without trying to explore my body, and quite a few were satisfied with some quick oral sex or a hand job. A more demanding type will wait until he has a block of time to indulge himself.

The later you rise, the more complicated and tactile the customers become. Clients who party with escorts in the evening want to chat for hours, play with your emotional boundaries (not to mention your clitoris), and get to know you. I wasn’t always in the mood for this.

If you prefer to work in a well-managed brothel with high turnover and less mental involvement, you may have to get up rather early! The freedom to set your own hours means answering your own phone, managing a business. You end up working harder because you’re always strategizing. You become, in essence, your own madam, but the hard work was worth it to me.

I was glad to have multiple sex partners, sometimes as many as eight in one day.

Having sex with men you’re not attracted to is actually quite interesting—even though it sounds horrible to the average modern woman. The liberated Western lifestyle encourages us to objectify men, but when you lust after a man—imitating the male gaze by turning it around on him—you lose touch with the classical narcissism that brings pleasure to a prostitute. Sex with a man you’re not into forces you to become a star in the bedroom, where you project shameless self-love. Much as I enjoyed this, I’ve never been able to carry my vampy industrial personality into my love life: it’s very specific to commercial sex.

I also enjoyed getting to know men and women outside my age group. In so many jobs and corporations, people are clumped together in age ghettos where 20-somethings have only superficial contact with people in their fifties or sixties. At 19, I routinely had female mentors of 45, 50, or 60 who spoke candidly about sex, love, life, and the law.

Getting naked with a man old enough to be my grandfather made me feel like his social equal. My customers also experienced some temporary freedom—stepping outside their nine-to-five selves to be with a confident young girl who wasn’t afraid to kid around or act familiar.

A 40ish madam told me why she wasn’t turned on by women: “They don’t have that thing between their legs. But don’t shelter yourself—everyone should try it.” I had, since age 13, defined myself as bisexual, but didn’t get a chance to find out until I became a New York call girl. Three-way sex (two girls, one man) was rampant. All the girls encouraged it, to give a customer variety without losing his business. A madam could double her income and keep two girls busy. Some girls wanted to fake it; some were into the real thing. When two girls didn’t see eye to eye, there was paranoia, disgust—or just wry laughter.

My friend Suzy had a way to deal with this. “I’m not into girls, but I’m happy to do it for real if your customer wants it.” This was my policy, too. I had a few friends I enjoyed working with, because we tend to be good at things we like doing—especially where oral sex is concerned. Making another girl come while someone else is paying: does it mean you’re gay if you keep inviting her back to see the same client? I enjoyed sex with a woman—sometimes when servicing a married couple—but the idea of going steady with a girl made me uncomfortable. There was no pressure to declare myself gay or straight, and when I left the industry, I had no interest in girl-sex at all. Coincidence? Or proof that I’m gay for pay? I’ve never been sure.

And speaking of orgasms, they are a misunderstood perk of the job. Paid sex is one way to have an orgasm without strings attached, but nobody enters the business for the sex alone. I had my first multiple orgasms with one of my clients. Still in my teens, I learned about sex on the job and found that my body had its own agenda. Don’t assume that multiples are typical, though. You aren’t normally that relaxed at work, but having sex every day brings you to a point where your body can’t stand it anymore—unless you come. Sometimes it’s a relief to do this with a man who doesn’t know your real name, age, or address.

And when you enjoy a high level of sexual freedom, you can discover that the most delicious connection to have with a man is traditional vanilla.

Why Lying about Monogamy Matters

Susie Bright

Op-ed columnist Ross Douthat has written an argument for the
New York Times
titled “Why Monogamy Matters.” He says that women with minimal or virginal sexual experience are the happiest women in the land. Wheeeee! Upon the story’s publication, pink-cheeked schoolgirls in braids floated across the national horizon, clutching bouquets of daisies, giggling over something they couldn’t quite recall. Happy. Happy! That’s what little girls are made of. Ross knows.

According to Douthat, back in the old days (before women’s lib), Americans had far less premarital sex, and they married when they were really old, after they’d considered everything, like their moral values. So happy, too, really happy. It’s in all the historical record; I’m sure he checked! Ross reminds us that no matter what you hear today, abstinence programs really work. Do you know how happy that makes him? Tee-hee! Ross always makes me laugh, and that makes me—happy!

There are Four Big Kinds of Sex: casual, promiscuous, premature, and ill-considered. They all lead to—depression. Did you know that? It’s truthy. Ross looked it all up in a book by a Christian sociologist in Texas who has studied things like “pornography,” and its magical ability to wed grown men to masturbation for the rest of their lives, to the exclusion of any real, live yummy sex partners. Fascinating stuff.

BOOK: Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture

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