The internet really did change everything. Behold the rise of the middle to upper class prostitute. The web hosts a plethora of sites where the average Jane can post her picture, write a profile, and name her price. Married men, curious women, confused couples, and aspiring playboys then send messages containing a mixture of obscenely rich language and bids to match. This means you no longer need to know anyone in the industry to join it. Street-walking has been exported to the domain of anachronism. One can still walk the streets if they choose, and some do. But it’s a bit like writing a letter by hand and sending it snail mail; nostalgic and strangely sentimental, yet unnecessary and completely inefficient. I am an anomaly in my own way but (generally speaking) am part of a very large and expanding trend.

Old school feminism talked ad-nauseum about the portrayal of women as mere sex objects in a capitalist culture that created and commodified false images of them. In lay terms: sex sells, women are sexy, women sell. The image of woman as sex object was and is frequently used to move a product (think every vodka ad you’ve ever seen). Using this image to sell products, feminists argue(d), only further cements the idea that women are domestic sex toys. This, they tell me, is wrong. Incidentally, this is where that particular movement lost me. Mostly because it seems absurd to me that I live in a culture where the concept of ‘woman’ is absolutely loaded in the most powerful kind of way and most people don’t seem at all keen about using it to their advantage. At least on the surface. The website I use to post my profile when I’m looking for a new client has over a million users world wide. More than three quarters of which reside in the United States. Many of them are double agents like me. They have multiple lives that they juggle in order to protect their secret. We pay bills (taxes even), we babysit our relatives’ children, and we throw dinner parties for our yuppie friends.

Here’s how it works: I have three clients. I see each of them about 2-3 times a month. Each one pays me a monthly salary that is either deposited into my bank account or given to me in cash. My allowance does not change depending on the number of visits. If one of them cannot see me at all that month (which is a frequent occurrence) I still get the same amount. I make about 5k a month. Out of that 5k I pay an assistant between 900-1200 a month plus expenses (phone bill, etc.). He monitors my check in’s when I’m with a client, keeps an eye on my location via a gps tracker on my phone, helps me with cover stories, screens my emails, and keeps my calendar straight for me. As I mentioned before, this job comes with lots of travel. I take two appointments a week and spend all the rest of my time working on my own projects. The hours are good. The pay is good. And I have all the time in the world to do the things I love to do. I have discovered that nothing about being a call girl is a problem for me. All the problems in my life come from trying to ‘get away’ with something that doesn’t hurt me or my clients in the least.

An image is an image because it’s not the thing it represents. I personally (along with hundreds of thousands of others like me) don’t really care if the world sees me as a sex object because of the fact that images are manipulable commodities, not in spite of it. Would I rather people support my aspiration to stay home and spend all my time doing my art projects just because they believed I was brilliant? Sure. I most certainly would. But I am not above using some one else’s view of me against them in absence of that possibility. Especially if it grants me the ability to do what everyone else wishes they could. I stay up late, get up when I want, go to the gym every day, and spend 90% of my time chasing my own vision.

No one sees the world as it is. The world is as one sees it. In essence, to be a prostitute is to charge some one for their notion of you. They can think what they like, but at a direct cost to them. It requires physical capital to maintain the idea that you are there for their pleasure. If they don’t have money, you don’t execute the fantasy. At the end of the day, people are literally willing to invest in the idea of you that they want to have. They aren’t paying for you. They are paying for the idea of you. I say let them. Because what it comes down to is this: if you look at the world with wrinkled eyes, it will give you wrinkles. The people who want to see women as sex objects have to pay a price and the person being objectified get’s the proceeds. Seems like a balanced system to me. I know when I walk in the door that I’m selling an image. So I’m not offended by anyone’s approach because it isn’t personal. I don’t wrinkle my eyes at the way the world works, so it doesn’t give me wrinkles to see it working.

This entry was posted on March 15, 2011 at 12:00 and is filed under Business, Entertainment, LifeStyles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.