Getting Screwed (8 page)

Indeed, paid sex in postmodern America is increasingly exchanged like any other service, such as domestic labor, take-out cuisine, or child care. There is, however, one major difference between sex work and other services — it pays much more. And that is the primary reason why a growing number of young working- and middle-class women in the United States are turning to sex work. Even for many college-educated women in our postindustrial economy, there is quite simply a dearth of good-paying jobs. Bernstein again: “Compared to men with similar educational backgrounds and middle-class origins, women in postindustrial economies are much more likely to find themselves working in the lowest paid quarters of the temporary help industry, in the service and hospitality sectors, or in other poorly remunerated part-time jobs.”
¹⁵

There are any number of reasons for this disparity, chief among them the fact that women constitute only 28 percent of employees in the
IT
industry. They are also less likely to go into well-paid fields such as engineering, finance, and oil and gas exploration. So for some young women, with or without college degrees, sex work, whether it is strip dancing, performing in web-cam shows, or selling sex, is an economically at
tractive alternative to the poorly paid service jobs that proliferate in the United States today.

Consider Jillian (her work name), who became a sex worker just shy of her twenty-first birthday. A raven-haired, blue-eyed young woman from an Orthodox Jewish background, Jillian dropped out of college and moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, to be near friends. She soon discovered that the only work she could find was minimum-wage retail employment in a clothing store or café.

“I realized that with these jobs I wouldn't be able to do what I wanted to do with activism,” says Jillian, who sees herself as a latter-day Emma Goldman working on the behalf of disenfranchised people to create a more egalitarian society. “It would be forty hours of unskilled labor, and I'd be too tired to do anything afterwards.”

A few weeks after she arrived in Northampton, in 2001, Jillian spotted some ads for erotic services in the
Valley Advocate,
the local alternative weekly, On a whim, she called one of the services, which turned out to be run by two women who worked as independent sex workers and were interested in taking a younger woman into their business. After meeting Jillian and liking what they saw, the women took her to the Salvation Army and outfitted her in what she calls “instaho clothing” — a tight skirt and frilly blouse — which Jillian, who usually wears a T-shirt and cargo jeans, had never worn before. “It was kind of like dressing in drag for me, and it felt very powerful and beautiful,” she says.

The first time Jillian turned a trick, it seemed like magic. “It was an older man who wanted a 10-minute hand job, and I came out with $150,” she recalls. “Patty Smith's song “Free Money” was blaring in my brain as I galloped back to the car.”

Jillian has always felt like an outlier, a rebel. The first time I meet her, at the Yellow Sofa café on Main Street in Northampton, she arrives wearing a long black skirt and a black leather jacket adorned with a button that says “Activist.” She has a bracelet tattooed on her left wrist and wears a real silver bracelet on her right. Her long hair is jet-black, and she has a full figure and freckles across her nose. Jillian orders a latte,
which I pay for, and as we talk, she sips her latte and fiddles with an unlit Liggett Select cigarette.

Jillian grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts, the oldest child of Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States in the 1980s. She herself was born in Rome while her parents awaited a visa to enter the United States. Jillian's father soon found a good job as a computer scientist, but her mother, who had been a librarian in Moscow, felt out of a place in an American suburb where she struggled to learn English. She turned to the Lubavitch, a branch of the Hasidic movement, for comfort and enrolled her precocious ten-year-old daughter in Maimonides, an Orthodox Jewish day school in Brookline, Massachusetts. But Jillian hated the strict dress code and many other aspects of the school. “The class tension [at Maimonides] was incredible. They looked down on recent Russian emigrants,” she says. Also, “It was a really misogynist environment. There was that feeling that you couldn't understand the Talmud as well as a man. And they were into making sure you were chaste and modest. Shirts up to your elbows and skirts below your knees. At the same time, it was intellectually stimulating, for someone who was really into textual analysis, as I was.”

Jillian remembers being called down to the school office and berated for her questioning of Orthodox Jewish beliefs. “That was one aspect of the pressure on me,” she says, waving her cigarette. “There were also a lot of parental pressures — scholastic achievement is incredibly important to Russian Jewish intelligentsia.”

In tenth grade, Jillian swallowed some pills in a half-hearted attempt to kill herself. Her parents had her committed to a private mental health hospital, where doctors put her on a cocktail of Zyprexa, an atypical antipsychotic, and Prozac, an antidepressant. Her doctors soon added Depakote, another antipsychotic, to the mix, and Jillian spent the next two years in a drug-induced haze. In 1999, after working with an insightful therapist who weaned her off some of the drugs, Jillian finally got her high school diploma from Framingham State College. She was accepted at Bryn Mawr, a select women's college in Pennsylvania, but
during her freshman year there, her parents divorced. At the same time, Jillian stopped taking all her medications cold turkey.

“I didn't know these drugs had withdrawal problems, and I was having horrible emotional and physical withdrawal symptoms,” she says. “I couldn't sit still. I felt horrible, restless, nervous.”

To calm her jitters, Jillian started smoking “an incredible amount of weed. That didn't help my academic career at all,” she says. “I could never finish assignments because I had pothead attention deficit disorder.” She dropped out of Bryn Mawr in the spring of her freshman year.

About twenty minutes into the interview, Jillian asks if we can go outside so she can smoke. Before she finishes one cigarette, she has already pulled another one from the pack. At one point, she says, “I'm really off my game,” and when I reassure her that she sounds quite articulate, she waves me off, saying, “You don't have to keep reassuring me. I have a lot of self-confidence.”

Before she became a sex worker, Jillian read many books about the profession. “When I was seventeen, I read about the second-wave feminist view that not all prostitution is exploitation,” she says. “It's a matter of choice. It's my choice what I do with my body.”

Jillian still works as an escort in western Massachusetts about ten hours a week. She spends the rest of her time agitating for change. As a member of Arise for Social Justice, a nonprofit that works for the rights of poor and low-income people, Jillian was involved in the fight to keep alive the needle exchange program for drug users in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

A few years ago, Jillian and other local activists managed to defeat a proposed ordinance that would have outlawed panhandling in Northampton. City officials had initiated the ban in response to store owners whose customers complained of being harassed by homeless panhandlers. Jillian and her friends mobilized against it, leading street protests up and down Main Street, handing out literature, and arguing at public hearings that the ban was an attempt to “gentrify” Northampton. Jillian, who is a talented writer, dashed off press releases and was interviewed by reporters from local
TV
affiliates as well as the
Springfield Republican
and the
Daily
Hampshire Gazette.
In February 2009, the Northampton City Council tabled the ordinance indefinitely.
¹⁶

Jillian currently advertises as an escort on
backpage.com
and
cityvibe.com
. In one recent ad, she called herself “a snow white look alike waiting to be kissed awake.” Jillian charges $250 for an hour (a no-frills visit) and $150 for a half-hour. She is very picky about whom she will party with. She recently got a query from someone who said he was an agent for the
NFL
who wanted to pick her up in a car and take her to an undisclosed rendezvous with, as she describes it on her blog, “some possibly steroid raging footballer.” She passed up the offer, telling the agent, “I'm just a small-town escort who sees mundane middle-class guys. This is totally outside my range of experience.”

Jillian likes to keep things simple. She doesn't have her own website and is decidedly more low-tech than other escorts. As I was soon to learn, a classy website with alluring photos and skillfully written ads can make a huge difference in an escort's earnings, enabling her to attract a more affluent, educated clientele. But it also puts her on the police radar screen.

Madeleine Colette and Michelle Christy are two of the web-savvy escorts whom I met at the 2013 annual meeting of the Desiree Alliance, which bills itself as a coalition of health professionals, social scientists, educators, and sex professionals working together to improve public understanding of the sex industry. Both Madeleine, twenty-five at the time, and Michelle, forty-four, do sex work in Washington, D.C. They have come to the July conference in Las Vegas to improve their business and be part of a community of sex workers who aren't ashamed of what they do.

Madeleine Colette, whose work name is a homage to the legendary French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, has a professionally designed website that shows nothing more graphic than a Victoria's Secret catalogue might. Her website manages to be classy and come hither at the same time. In person, Madeleine, who goes by “Maddy,” is very pretty and fresh looking, with blonde hair (twisted in a braid), an upturned nose, and laughing hazel eyes. She looks every inch the
offspring of “the southern Mayflower country club family” that she says she hails from. But she is as much a rebel as Jillian. Maddy, who began doing escort work while living abroad in Spain a few years ago, came home to North Carolina to continue her schooling and became engaged to a young man she met at school. She found out she was pregnant after she had broken up with him. But she refused to have an abortion, despite her parents' entreaties. Her daughter is now sixteen months old. “She is such a loved child,” Maddy says. “My parents have come around.”

Now in her midtwenties, Maddy does all her advertising online with a prepaid card phone number that clients can use to reach her. She has incorporated her business and runs it through a limited liability company (
LLC
). She even has a day job as a translator as a cover for her frequent visits to the D.C. area to meet with clients. Her family has no idea how she truly earns her living, and while Maddy sits in the ballroom of a Las Vegas hotel daintily consuming a box lunch with four other sex workers and a journalist, her family has been led to believe that she is at a continuing education interpreting conference.

“I hate the lie, but I feel like I'm living my life with integrity,” Maddy says. “The problem is that society cannot accept the way I live my life. I am in school and I am a single mother and I have a day job and I do this.”

To Maddy, sex work is simply a well-paying job, a way to support herself and her child. “Sometimes it's fun, and sometimes it's just real hard work,” she says. Two other sex workers at the same table giggle knowingly, and Maddy vamps, “Oh, honey, it feels so good,” sparking more laughter around the table, including her own.

Maddy charges $1,200 for two hours of her time. “One hour is too short,” she says, “It doesn't give me enough stability. I don't like rushing anything. It's about the companionship, not about the sex. If someone just wants sex, I'm not for them.”

She sometimes travels overnight to vacation homes and resort destinations with affluent clients. “I've been to Taos [New Mexico], a weekend in New York City, to [a client's] mountain home or their boat,” she says. She has a simple rule for these overnight assignations: she never travels with new clients. “These are clients I've seen before,” she says. Like many
high-end escorts, Maddy puts new clients through a rigorous screening process. She makes sure to ask where they work, and she always checks up on them.

“Google is a friend,” she says. “Since most of my clients are
CEO
s and top government officials, they have a profile page, so I know who they are. I also share provider references with other sex workers.” She giggles. “We're all so careful; it's kind of hard for men to break into our community.” And if the client won't reveal where he works, Maddy has a simple response. “I tell him, ‘I'm not for you,' ” she says.

Like Maddy, Michelle Christy (her work name) commands top dollar. Michelle says she currently makes between $2,500 and $3,500 a week, usually seeing only four clients. Her clients are often married corporate executives who want more than sex; they want someone to be an interesting, nonjudgmental companion for a few hours.

“Sex is the least of what they want. I've got the
CEO
of a major
NASDAQ
company who comes to see me twice a month,” she says. “His second wife hates his first wife, and he needs a place where he can go and unwind. He's thrilled to give me $1,000 to sit and talk.”

Michelle has agreed to meet me in the air-conditioned lobby of the Alexis Park Hotel, a resort-style lodging with three pools and a conference center a few blocks from Las Vegas's famously gaudy strip. Sitting on a plush sofa, her long legs primly crossed, Michelle looks like the corporate executive she once was. She is a tall, well-endowed brunette whose parents emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States before Michelle was born. (It's pure coincidence that two of the more articulate escorts I encountered for this book hail from a Russian-Jewish background.) Michelle says she received a good education, earned a master's degree at American University, and for many years worked as a sales executive for a large health care company. But she had too little time for her family and grew to hate her work.