I am not bound to please thee with my answers. – William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (IV,i)
It’s time for me to answer reader questions again; keep ‘em coming, I’d like to make this a monthly feature! This first one was imbedded in a long and fairly boring neofeminist diatribe:
If being a prostitute isn’t shameful, why don’t you use your real name and picture?
1) Because there are far too many rabid lunatics like you around and I love my husband far too much to give any of you a chance to make his life more difficult.
2) Because I don’t trust the self-proclaimed “authorities” any more than I would trust a dog to guard a steak.
3) Because if I put a legal name and a distinctive face to my words I defeat one of my chief points, which is that prostitutes are no different from any other women. If you know what I look like you also know what I don’t look like, and if you know my real name you also know what it isn’t; that allows you to mentally push me away, to pretend that I’m different and that you don’t know anyone like me. But if I hide my identity I could be anybody:
Your sister, your daughter, your friend, your neighbor or that nice lady you always see in the grocery store. And that’s exactly what I want, because even if those women are not me they could share my profession. We don’t have horns, cloven hooves or pointed teeth and we don’t abduct your children to sell them to “traffickers”; I guarantee you that unless you live in a town with under 1000 people there are at least a couple of us around, and if you live in an average-sized city there are dozens of us around, and there’s a good chance you know at least one of us by sight. Let that sink in, and I hope it makes you very, very nervous because maybe then you’ll wake up out of this nightmare your brain appears to be trapped in.
What percentage of men see prostitutes?
It depends on who you talk to; estimates vary wildly, but the ones that sound about right to me claim that about 6% of men directly pay for sex “frequently”, 20% “occasionally”, and 69% at least once in their lives. Considering that something like 67% of men have had extramarital sex at least once, those figures seem pretty credible to me.
What I find amazing is that so many people are so obtuse about the role prostitutes play in male infidelity. Since only about 15% of married women cheat, many silly people conclude that either the men are lying when they say they have and/or the women are lying when they say they haven’t, because “all those men must be cheating with somebody.” Just Google a few studies on infidelity and you’ll see what I mean; many commenters on such articles and even some of the educated idiots who compile the studies are so blinded by their monogamist bias that they are compelled to reach the incredibly naïve conclusion that each philandering man is paired up with one and only one adulterous woman, leading to the erroneous conclusion that either the male figures are too high or else the female figures are too low. None of these pundits can see the obvious explanation right in front of their faces; most male extracurricular activity is with prostitutes, each one of whom accounts for dozens of men! In my busiest period (2000-2001) I alone had an average of 16 clients a week, at least 75% of them married. And that’s just ONE whore; I can assure you the escort population of New Orleans could easily handle the 77% of straying husbands who weren’t paired up with straying wives. This is actually good news for everyone; male readers can relax in the knowledge that, contrary to what the scare stories want you to believe, most wives really don’t cheat. And female readers can take comfort in the fact that even if your husbands do get sex from somebody else, 77% of them are doing it with women who have absolutely no desire to break up anyone’s marriage.
Why does it matter what hotel I get to meet a provider? If I get a cheap hotel they don’t want to see me, but if I get an expensive one, there’s no problem. Why is that?
There could be several factors at play here. Part of it may be what I discussed in my column of October 9th: If a man does not want to pay for a good hotel it could mean he cannot afford a good hotel, which means that the escort’s fee is also dearer to him than to a more affluent client and he will be more likely to try to get his “money’s worth” from her, thus making him far more demanding. Also, allowing clients to hire cheap hotels attracts a poorer clientele with higher disease rates and less to lose socially if they cause trouble.
Another factor could be the escort’s belief in magic formulae (as discussed in my column of August 21st); some whores seem to believe that cops are too cheap to rent good hotel rooms and therefore cheap rooms are more suspect. Nothing could be farther from the truth; police departments love to waste public money on prostitution “stings”, and the cost of even an expensive hotel room pales into insignificance beside the cost of taking a dozen cops off of real police work for hours so they can play sadistic sex games and ogle hookers. And that’s assuming they actually have to pay for the rooms in the first place; some hotel chains let cops have rooms for free in the belief that it builds goodwill with them, and those with bluenosed management may actually let cops modify their rooms for “stings” because they want to discourage escorts from coming there once the word gets out. Actually, in my experience mid-range hotels tend to be the worst; cheap ones have a “reputation” the cops want to avoid and some expensive ones refuse to allow police shenanigans because their upscale customers rightfully consider such activities objectionable and low-class. If you were a businessman paying $500 a night at a five-star hotel, would you want a mob of cretinous thugs playing “cops and robbers” down the hall from you?
Finally, snobby whores or those in the early stages of platinum pussy syndrome may think themselves too good to visit a Motel 6 or Super 8. For myself, I wouldn’t see men who were staying in such places for the reasons already discussed in the first paragraph of my answer, but if a local client felt uncomfortable with an incall and merely wanted to rent such a room for a rendezvous I wasn’t too particular about it unless the place was a scary fleabag like the London Lodge or Tulane Motel.
You said most escorts don’t worry any more about getting HIV or other STDs by giving uncovered blow jobs, but what about colds, flu and other “regular” diseases? Isn’t your risk of those higher without a condom?
As I discussed in my column of September 7th, the risk of oral transmission of HIV or hepatitis B is vanishingly low, and most other diseases have visible signs. And while cold and flu-type diseases are transmitted easily even when there are no obvious symptoms, mere skin-to-skin contact involving hands, faces and other such areas will spread those diseases even if the man wears a condom from start to finish. If you’re in bed with a guy you’re going to be exposed to his “common germs” no matter what precautions you take. But since this does happen, I suspect escorts build up an immunity to such common pathogens; as a call girl I was in close contact with men from around the world, and I was sick less often than at any other time in my life. I’ve never noticed escorts getting colds or whatever any more often than anybody else; in fact it seems to me that the people who get sick the most are the ones who are constantly “sanitizing” their entire environment with antibacterial products, thus robbing their bodies of the low-level exposure needed to build up antibodies.
That having been said, I did notice that I suffered from one particular condition more often when I was working than at any other times, and that was sore throat (and even laryngitis on a few occasions). Part of this may simply have been due to abrasion during “deep throat”, but I suspect it was sometimes due to unknowing poor hygiene on the part of the client. Think about it; we all know that the hands are the “germiest” parts of the body, and we’re told to wash our hands after using the toilet. But I doubt many men wash their hands before urinating, so the bacteria on their dirty hands are transferred to the skin of their penises. Thus, unless a man is freshly bathed when he visits a whore (or his wife for that matter) the exterior of his penis may in turn transfer that bacteria to the woman’s throat during oral sex and thereby cause minor infections.
