The End of Escorts
The escorts are disappearing. They are flinging open the windows of the demi-monde, dropping ropes, climbing out. Is it true? I haven’t done any statistical analysis. I am faint-aware that numbers around our salty little trade have long been disreputable; ever heard the one about how in Victorian London there were about 80,000 prostitutes? That would mean for every 20-25 women, at least one was a sex worker. Hmmm. There wasn’t any welfare state as such, so, maybe. That being said, historian Hallie Rubenhold uncovered, contrary to popular belief, only 2 of the 5 women killed in the 1888 Whitechapel murders were on the game at all and only 1 routinely and professionally, despite all being poor, vagrant, and addicted at the time of their deaths. The Ripperologists were angry; indeed, the excitement of the weird little hobby was thrown asunder when it was put forward, rather than lighting up the cobbled streets with their weather-worn erotic charms a-flare, at least some of the women may have just been inebriated, and catching some sleep in an alleyway when they were horribly murdered. Murders of homeless people attract less attention than murders of ladies of the night, because there is no salacious, ‘crime of passion’ angle; it’s too obviously pure-grade in its bleakness. Killing sex workers is bleak too, btw. It shouldn’t need saying but seemingly it does.
In any case; that fact alone throws a challenge to the idea that the Big Smoke was swarming with whores, if even very down on their luck women didn’t consider it. There were a lot of early social commentators worried about the consequences of the influx of prostitution due to industrialisation and urbanisation and this may have inflated the sense of it being. ‘everywhere’ particularly among the lower orders; some of their worries were legitimate, however, genuine concerns were perhaps bulked out with a degree of moral flapping.
In any case, the point is, selling sex has always been filtered through degrees of fluidity and secrecy, rendering it difficult to ascertain the ebb and flow of the trade, so it is hard to really get a handle on whether it is true that women are leaving. Are they just exiting established platforms?
But if it were true, what would be the reason(s)? I’ve heard a few suggestions put forth, and I have some speculations of my own:
Online Sex Industry
This used to mean webcam, and now commonly means OnlyFans and other smaller, DIY subscriber platforms. For the uninitiated (which include me) on the site, people pay a monthly subscription in order to gain access to hidden photos, video, and other juicy content (beatnik poetry/ flourless cake recipes/ morse code/ cheats for Rollerpark Tycoon 1999 and declarations of independence for newly formed micronations, I believe are all popular) and some measure of distance interaction. If it were true that it were possible to reach your financial needs via a digital platform which gave you a lot of independence, of course there would be those who may have otherwise offered escort fraternisations, who would favour it, if at least for two reasons; the assumption of lesser stigma involved, and the eradication of the potential physical risks associated with classic sex work.
The sticky wicket here are the fraught questions about the site’s income potential for the user; very small numbers earn buckets, very large numbers of profiles sit there doing diddly (people signing up and giving up quickly, perhaps) and a median user base for whom it is a bit of a cosy side income. So how could it make much of a dent in the escort-trade? Well, there have always been a decent section of the lower-middle end of the sex industry who saw clients once or twice a week, or a couple of times a month, for a few hundred quid here and there; students, single mums, women working in low paid government/ service industries, needing cash around Christmas time or when the kids went back to school. Not lifestyle or professional escorts on the one hand, or survival/down on their luck outdoor sex workers on the other, just ‘ordinary women’, moonlighting. It is not inconceivable that OnlyFans has mopped up a good portion of this section of the trade, especially from students and service industry workers who have less to immediate worries about the exposure it portends. Perhaps some of these women still escort, but selling content lessens their reliance on seeing in-real-life clients and so they can afford to be more particular about who they see and when they work.
Some argue that it will also have taken up those women who would have ‘in another life’ been at the most expensive end of the escort world, and whereas I can see there being some truth in this, that portion of the digital sex industry – ambitious, model-esque young women using sex to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible – I would sooner guess that these millionaire content providers would’ve in another life been residents of the stripping, glamour model and old school porn industry, rather than private escorting, who are more willing to be a more visual presence in the sex trade. There are women who, whether ambitious or not, find the idea of having their sexualities as on view as what sites like OnlyFans require, undesirable. And seeing as 30-40 years ago, glamour modelling and pornography could theoretically make a woman a larger income than solely meeting clients privately, and yet many still chose escorting, it seems unfeasible that an analogous contemporary demographic would jump into commercial DIY production for the same reasons.
In sum? Though I think OnlyFans will have bought a whole new group of young women into the sex trade that would’ve never considered it before, I would be startled if it had not taken at least take a bit of a chunk out of the escort demographic, and the ‘just doing it for a bit of spare cash for a few years’ bunch – who have always been a significant portion of the trade I’d wager - taking the biggest hit.
Cost of Living
In 2022-23 we saw rates of inflation skyrocket (9-11% I believe), and we’ve not had hikes like that in years… a brief period in the late 80s, and through the 70s. This could pull in different directions; those working/lower middle-class clients may be too stretched to be able to afford to pay for sexual entertainment, especially escorts, and that could diminish supply. But on the other hand, collective belt tightening may encourage some women into the sex trade who were not there before, although they’d be competing with the already installed, over a shrinking client base. That would mean more escorts, but who are charging cheaper rates (relative to inflation). However, if the above is true, and media reports on the growing popularity of OnlyFans during the time (and the preceding COVID years) seem to suggest so, it was DIY content that burgeoned during these years of social unease, not escorting. And it would make sense, because content making does not carry the same potential financial outgoings that being an escort might.
Indeed, in the other direction, the rates for hotels, rents, phone contracts, travel and other of the paraphernalia of lay-for-pay, have risen astronomically. These are big outlays and it’s feasible that for some, with a squeezed client base, the profit margins no longer justify the social stigma providing sexual entertainment and intimacy can incur. Escorts may put up their prices to accommodate for this to a degree, but the extent to which this offsets these hikes in living costs seems variable. Furthermore, if there is more competition, some ladies may find themselves taking greater risks with undesirables they would’ve previously screened out, resulting in some negative experiences. Taking more risks for less money puts a dent in the benefits of the industry, makes burnout more predictable, and early retirement more likely.
On the other hand, I think during recessions, some escorts use the time as an opportunity to change their relationship with the industry, especially if they have the ability to lower their outgoings because they were previously pretty far away from the breadline anyway, and/or they were already popular with potential clients, so that even if their income takes a dip, they still can comfortably make a living. Instead, they see the wobble in the economy as an opportunity to think about their long-term financial goals, to start new forms of training or business, or to recalibrate how they approach being an escort, focusing on appealing to the desires of those clients whose lives are less impacted by economic volatility. Those escorts without children, debt, ‘economically dependent boyfriends’, drug addictions… who instead have savings/assets/good support networks and a professional client base less impacted by recession.
So, in sum, does the recession put some poorer escorts into further dangerous terrain, squeeze some moonlighting/median escorts out of the industry into other more reliable or less stigmatised work and encourage a professionalisation of the ones who keep afloat?
Take home? I’m on the fence, but I do think if average rates for escorts don’t get higher in the next few years, along with the popularity of online content, there might be a kind of feudalistic bifurcation of the industry, with the middle squeezing out, and a greater preponderance of survival sex workers at one end (including the cut-price services offered by groups from poorer European countries, often coerced), and more expensive professionalised escorts at the other. Indeed, the yanks have had a larger gap between rich and poor for some time now, which we are catching up with, and, alongside its criminal prohibitions, that seems to have manifested more of a stratified industry, in comparison to our British bell curve. I’m not sure this kind of talk was what Ed Miliband had in mind when he was prognosticating on the ‘squeezed middle’ some years back, but I think it translates.
The Pornography Demographic
I bring this up because I saw some chat on Twitter from sex workers which interested me, about how the escort industry was not attracting new clients from younger generations of men, in order to replace the older section of the boomer generation passing into sexual retirement or the ever-after.
I have some speculations, but they are raw and unfiltered (even for this pile of general conjecture); there does seem to be growing evidence that younger generations are having less ‘in real life sex’ and watching more pornography, consequently developing more of an abstracted sense of sexual identity; meaning, they think about sexual pleasure more as a theory than a practice, a way of thinking than a way of living. Next year I believe, will be the 18th year of the existence of major porn platform Pornhub, and the release of the first iPhone. Soon, we will have adults, who were not alive prior to the existence of a totally personalised, immediate, near-enough unrestricted, atomised, and unfiltered sexual consumption culture.
In real life sexual liaisons are exceedingly different from pornography consumption, and for those who grew up experiencing sexual development before they had unfiltered access to porn, seem better equipped to draw meaningful distinctions between the two and compartmentalise them accordingly. Comparatively, those who were immersed in digital pornography before sexual experience, seem more inclined to view it as instructive, or worse, as incapable of comprehending the scope of its influence on their desire at all, or to envision eroticism without its effects.
Indeed, whereas research on negative social outcomes for pornography during the magazine and VHS years were pretty inconclusive or weak, in recent years the evidence of negative outcomes (erectile dysfunction, depression, poor body image, relationship alienation & loneliness, sexual aggression, unrealistic sexual expectations of themselves and their partners and concomitant interpersonal hostility) have really started to amp. I doubt very much that porn-natives will be as inclined to see escorts, when natural born pleasure is less intuitive to them than mediated digital consumption, and when real life sex becomes too much of a ‘site’ of unease, due to distorted expectations and social confusion around relationships.
On the flipside, many escorts are not over-fond of meeting with clients for whom pornography is their first great passion and who demonstrate a stressed, anxious discomfort or much worse, an angry, volatile, dissatisfaction, being in the room with an actual naked human being. I have long noticed that despite a growing interest for hardcore porn style sex among younger generations, I haven’t seen much willingness among many escorts to cater to it, particularly the more extreme end. One assumes that is at least partially because our clients are still in an age bracket where they were not inculcated on internet porn in the way digital natives have been and still prioritise the experience of enjoying human contact first and foremost?
It also may have something to do with growing numbers of young women becoming more sexually assertive, and less willing to do things simply because it’s what teenage boys on Reddit say they require. Indeed, further to the data on porn use, they seems to be a growing distinction between the sexual politics of young men and young women. The former are developing more regressive, conservative attitudes to women and sex, and believing sex work to augur some offence to medieval idealisms around hypermasculinity. The latter are becoming more independent and liberal and interested in sex work as a form of erotic autonomy and self-actualisation. These young women still have older generations of men to engage with, who are more liberal, easy-going, and warm-spirited about casual sex, but if these young men keep on their path, the risks of in real life encounters with men who think escorts are harbingers of vile amorality, will be too great for an increasingly assertive female populace, both in an out of the sex industry.
What I will say is that, cumulatively, as time progresses, if we marry a squeeze in earning potential, with the comparative accessibility of digital sex content and smaller numbers of clients with growing difficulties in enjoying sex in a joyful and untroubled fashion…then the pull factors for embracing escorting seem ready and set to diminish.
*
Perhaps however, for every 10-20 people who give up on the expensive perils of meatspace encounters and just strap in to the metaverse, cock/vulva in hand, there will be 1-2 who will shift back to escort companions, just as hipsters once shovelled their iPods to the back of a cupboard and started collecting the vinyl. Or city boys put down their stock sheets and invested in a small holding and a fine brood of Gloucester Old Spots. Perhaps seeing a companion will be like going to the theatre, the ballet, the opera, reading a novel, learning yoga or baking sourdough; something emotionally aspirant people do to help them fend off the melancholy of a digital cynicism.
It all keeps coming back to the same place; will the middle of the industry deplete, unable to compete with the digital sex industry, which will offer increasingly realistic headset versions of sexual encounters of any kind and quality to anyone, anywhere? The human body, even the prettiest female human body, will seem like a rusty old wrench by comparison, especially to those who grew up to not question the normalcy of their fantastical sexual notions. And on the flip side, will there be a growth of smaller bodies of escorts offering artisanal in-person eroticism as some specialist niche for a premium rate, to an alternative-market clientele? And perhaps, some DIY pornstars will patent their image in the metaverse (litigation against copywrite will be a more effective tool for combating revenge porn and deep fakes than sexual abuse legislation, just wait) for digital encounters to take place, but offer in-real life sex for exorbitant prices to very rich men? I see it now; the majority of the sex industry, the middle-road, will be digitally mediated for the masturbatory masses. There will be a small quirky section offering in-real sexual companionship to the male members of the bohemian upper middle-class, who are always pulling gently against totally subsuming into populist social fashions. And then an elite; a new courtesanry, branding themselves on the simulator-highway and offering nights to middle-eastern sheiks and silicon valley wiz kids for a million bucks a ride.
Perhaps escorting-as-standard will be a thing of the past, but will retain its existence on the specialist fringes, for connoisseurs or wealthy collectors, and the new ‘escort’ will be network of robobabes filtered directly into the mind’s eye. Dennis Miller, the liberal-conservative American commentator once lamented; “the day a laid off steelworker can sit in his barcalounger with a Fosters in one hand and a channel flicker in the other and have sex with Claudia Schiffer for $19.99, it’ll make crack look like Sanka.” He was wrong about a lot of stuff, but now and then broke clocks do chime right.
Cora Leigh, Yorkshire & Travelling Escort, Companion & Dominatrix xxx
Independent Escort, Dominatrix & Companion in West Yorkshire & The United Kingdom
Courtesans
The late 90s treated cinema audiences to the story of the 16th century Venetian courtesan, Veronica Franco; a film called A Dangerous Beauty, starring Catherine McCormack in the titular role. Franco has been historicised of note due to her poetry, her literary defence of courtesans, the infamy of her Inquisition trial (she was accused of engaging in magic) and her striking visage being committed to canvas by painter, Tintoretto. Her life trajectory also suffered from an arc riddled with pathos; she achieved the classically vaunted lifestyle of autonomy, wealth, beauty, prestige, and intellect associated with the courtesan of early modernity, but suffered under the weight of a growingly restrictive society that closed in upon her, ending her days in ignominy, obscurity, and poverty. For some, Franco’s life yields a harsh but necessary moral lesson to recalcitrant women; to others, it is a paragon of the libertine ideals of erotic and intellectual freedom being quashed by the hypocrisies of authoritarianism.
In the film, it’s an opportunity for lots of pliant, airbrushed flesh, bouncing about through an abundance of swelling strings. Her complex life is gunned through a gluttony of sentimental cliches filmed in soft focus; there is a duel, eyes meet across crowded rooms, she is doing it all for the love of a flouncy haired lothario. Had Venice a big sandy beach, they would have had a scene of them lapping across it to greet each other, arms akimbo. It’s surprising it’s not a parody. I keep checking the release literature just to check. Watch it as one and you might find it significantly more enjoyable, is my suggestion. I am reliably informed that Rufus Sewell, the Byronesque love interest, kept leaving filming, holding the project up, because he was anxious about how schlocky the film was turning out.
Franco given the Tinsel Town Treatment; Not only does she have ‘a destiny of her own’, she unfolds the mysteries of the masculine appetite for some naive wives by deep throating a banana. It’s a work of genius.
In any case, it is indicative of something; Courtesans of European modernity (16th- 20th century) are an interesting social phenomenon, and yet they are often given such lazy and hazy treatment in the cultural discourse, and A Dangerous Beauty is one the worst offenders.
There are some better examples; Sarah Dunant’s novel In the Company of the Courtesan never quite manages to bring her Venetian Renaissance character, Fiammetta, to multi-dimensional life through the narrative eyes of her greedy by troubled pimp, Bucino, but her distance from the reader is knowing, satirical and the story is rich, detailed, sensual. The dark comedy drama Harlots, influenced by the book Covent Garden Ladies by historian, Hallie Rubenhold, shows the complexity of a courtesan’s life, vis-à-vis her ability to trouble our understanding of class boundaries, particularly as they pertain to women, effectively giving narrative to the sex industry’s permeable membranes and challenging the assumption of a stark divide between ‘elite’ whores and the much-maligned rest.
To that end, one of the problems I see in many depictions of courtesans, is the way in which they are used to reinforce the notion that a woman’s value is within her sexual inaccessibility; unlike the cultural discourse around the ‘common garden variety prostitute’ courtesans are thought of as retaining a relative degree of sexual restriction. Though their job is to be available, and thus their position is characterised by a certain degree of sexual freedom, if they were deemed too available, then that would trouble the feminine value that endlessly attracts clients, historians and audiences to them. It’s a contradiction, in a fashion, and a popular one. Indeed, its peppered through one of the best books on the subject Courtesans, by historian Katie Hickman, featuring the biographies of five key figures of the British sex industry from Sophia Baddeley to Catherine Walters. It is a substantial, moreish book, but Hickman is keen to keep reiterating these women’s distinction from escorts more broadly, in a fashion that is not just about practical differences relating to wealth and its ability to give independent women a degree of freedom to set sexual boundaries, but has the inference of a more heavy moral load. The higher the escort ‘s esteem is deemed, not only the better kind of life she can afford to live, but, the implication is that she is a better person, fundamentally, on some abstract and esoteric level.
One of her figures of note, Cora Pearl, who ascended from being a working-class English girl to a member of the Parisian demi-monde, told of her brutal initiation into the world of sex, when she was coerced off the street as a girl, drugged and raped. Cora ran from home, and set herself up as a sex worker to survive, before rising through the slums to become a successful lover of wealthy men, who adored her ‘bathing in champagne’ antics, her fashionable excess and her sharp tongue. Cora was ambitious, and dressed for the job she wanted. And yet Hickman is keen to rehash the gossipy supposition that Cora might have been lying about her origin story, because she was accused of being ‘fanciful’ within her life and through her memoirs. But it strikes me that this denial of Cora’s complex story serves, most likely unconsciously, to sustain the intonation of the image of a kind of recherché unreachability, common to the myth-making around elite escorts of European modernity. In a funny way, recalibrating Cora herself as a myth-maker, gives her more of an allure to modern historians than making too much of the fact that she spent a deal of her time, ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’ and she was simply a tough cookie with enough intelligence and resourcefulness to make the best of her situation. Undoubtedly, Cora was not an upper middle class girl who lost her dowry due to rumours of barn-love making, and had to learn to show her wares at the opera; Cora was an upstart guttersnipe who had a fancy for ermine and pearls, and made no bones about her promiscuity and her worldliness; an anarchism that seduces and troubles even now, as Hickman’s polite, but ambivalent tone demonstrates.
The courtesan as a figure is still sometimes evoked in modern stories of escorts, called upon to give this elitist, paradoxical impression of sexual exclusivity. In the loose adaptation of London escort Brooke Magnanti’s diary, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, there is an episode wherein ‘Belle’ leaves an expensive escort agency for a sort of courtesan sisterhood (a fictional vignette that does not appear in the original memoir), and her first client, an American film producer, warns her to keep her client list short, so to keep her ‘value’ high. Such co-ops don’t actually exist to my knowledge; or rather, where they do exist, they are really about groups of women who offer escort bookings with more of an assumption of intimacy and emotional literacy than often characterises some factions of the contemporary sex industry. This as opposed to the classic courtesan-client relationship, which implied at some degree of long term arrangement or paid mistress keeping. These arrangements, at their most lucrative, could be worth millions. It is hard to justify that kind of danger money arrangement in an era of greater sexual permissibility; perhaps ironically, despite the courtesan being an emblem of sexual freedom, she is in many ways, one of its casualties.
But despite the tendency to use courtesans to serve an idealised “not like other whores” narrative, they have frequently been ‘bought to heel’ and punished for their independence, all the same, in life (as was Franco) and in the discourse. One of the most successful figures in expensive sex work was Russian-in-Paris, La Paiva, who was sometimes thought of as a woman of cold character, but may simply have been a dominatrix playing to the peccadillos of her clients with a theatrical toughness. Some commentators of the time seemed to enjoy highlighting, with vindictive zeal, the changes bought to La Pav’s appearance due to age, and these bits of sexist gossip are still highlighted in biographies of her life, as though laments on women’s aging offers us some kind of meaningful insight. If someone were jealous or frightened of the sexual prowess and potency of a woman like La Pav, it would be peevishly pleasurable to watch her lose it.
So too, are they sometimes given the full blame of excesses of some of their more troubled lovers. Cora was the victim of an obsessive interest by a client who would go on to plot to assassinate her on her doorstep, but thankfully for Cora, he was no marksman, and shot himself instead. Cora was thrown into further ill-repute for the incident; she was reported to have protected herself by going back into her own house to escape her assailant. This was almost mind-bogglingly framed as her cruelly leaving him to die. She was victim blamed, her reputation was tarred and seemingly some pleasure was had in framing her demise as a one laden by poverty; although there again lays an exaggerated morality tale, as she lived out her days in a less riche, but still pretty comfortable style, and certainly for a poor London runaway within the harsh, context of Victorian England, not noted for its social mobility.
The ‘grande horizontales’ La Pav, allegedly her corpse ended its days in embalming fluid and being weeped over nightly by her final husband, she was just that charismatic.
A hotel suite at the Grosvenor dedicated to courtesan Cora; I believe it is no longer there, and anyway, the hotel had a bit of a brass neck using her image, seeing as when she was still alive her whore-rep preceded her, and they barred her entry.
It’s almost as though, despite whatever enjoyment audiences get from learning about the hijinks of ladies of pleasure, there is a need in petite-bourgeois society for them to have an ultimate downfall. The French author Collete, and fictionalizer of the demi-monde, played against this moralising ‘rags-riches-rags’ tale of sex work in her Cheri novellas. In her tale, a belle epoque 50-something courtesan, Lea, forms a love affair with a younger man, Cheri, the beautiful son of a retired fellow courtesan. The affair is passionate, but opaque, and ultimately troubled by his being torn between an obsession with her prettily adorned, hedonistic, interior realm, and his desire for the currency of heteronormativity; being a respectable husband with a younger, more obedient wife. In the books, Collete creates an ending for Lea as a retired, homely woman living a comfortable but less luxurious existence, who is taking her age and her reduction in fortune in comfortable stride. But Cheri is angry with her, for refusing to continue to fight against the turning of the tide (she won’t dye her hair anymore and this is most vexing) and for being so humourful about something he deems inexorably tragic. It is Collete pushing against the idea of the punishment of the fallen woman, Lea resists punishment; it is her former lover who suffers because he sees the passing of time, aging and the fading of love and desire, as some human, moral failing epitomised by the autonomous women around him, rather than simply some broad fact of life. Because he cannot be at peace with the facts of life and death, it depresses, and overwhelms him. But in the film, Lea ‘s cinematic ending has Michelle Pfeiffer looking forlornly at her own wrinkling reflection, as we hear of Cheri’s suicide, turning Collete’s lesson inside out.
Of course, courtesans are of their time, they don’t follow us from modernity into postmodernity. They were a consequence of a greater degree of social and physical danger associated with sexual freedom; though sexual stigma still prevails, in the 16th to early 20th century, if you were a woman associated with casual sex, the outsiderness would be absolute, the risks of pregnancy and venereal disease placed wholly on the woman’s shoulders. Therefore the danger money for the educated middle-class, young women who could foray with professional or aristocratic men, would have to be much greater. In the other direction, many courtesans were women who were accused of sex before marriage, and their ousting from ‘respectable’ society resulted in an opportunistic ixnaying of their exotic, ill repute. With the rise of sexual liberalism, sexual medicine, the welfare state and feminism, this social tension is less illustrative of our age in practice, though there remain corners of the internet dedicated to young, troubled men intimidated by women’s hard won greater sexual freedoms and a consequent new groundswell of idealisation of female virginity and restriction. Indeed, though the courtesan is a creature of the past, she continues to highlight something prevailing; the dissonance surrounding female eroticism; the allure is continues to compel, and fear it continues to provoke.
Cora Leigh, Yorkshire & Travelling Escort, Companion & Dominatrix xxx
Independent Escort, Dominatrix & Companion in West Yorkshire & The United Kingdom
Biology
I hear the term B!IOL$OGY a lot these days. It’s probably one of the most popular bits of scientific parlance in steady circulation. How ironic, given that our lives are ever more defined by technological mediation. Perhaps that is the reason folk want to talk B!IOL$OGY so much; we are on the precipice of an age where virtual reality might be chipped directly into us, making our comprehension of the gap between fantasy and reality very troubled. We are peeking through the door way of an environment that will have become so toxic that we may just have to stay home and have astronaut food pumped into us at intermittent intervals, whilst we play life like war-games with our actual brains. We’ll nay be able to escape it, it’ll become of us. As we lay in bed at night, we’ll not be able to shake the image of hardcore gangbangs, social media pile ons, and khaki commandos floating along our line of vision, like spectres, keeping us horny, angry, belligerent, frightened and alert.
Yes, the more sophisticated the technologies become, the more complex our lives become, and perhaps, the more alienated and confused we get, and thus the more we start harking back to some golden age of cave art and paleo diets and women being dragged hair-long by men in Tarzan loin cloths. It’s an odd paradox; the smart phone generation are slumping into a regressive idealisation of some halcyon days where we were all fight and flesh, because we are ever-more tethered to content consumption. Living in their minds, obsessing about their bodies. The war-game addict, the gym bro, the steroid quaffer, that dude who only eats salt and beef… because bread is a noxious sugar unit promulgated by soy-boy, carb-capitalists propagandising feminisation, not a miraculous agrarian invention that helped swell the ranks of the human unit from tribes to cities.
They spend most of their time alone, consuming content about how to get a better body, taking illegal substances, filling up their freezers with cheap meat, pumping ironing angrily and joylessly, oscillating between mammoth wankathons and evangelical abstinence, creating mensuration systems for the evaluation of beauty and bodies, based on bad maths. Preparing for the new dawn. Life is about ruthless competition, men bare knuckle boxing with ocelots and whilst women watch, oozing with desire and rubbing gooseberries to their eyelids to make them look younger & more fertile, and so on and such.
Indeed, I’’ll not let the ladies off the hook; filming themselves slicing jade-green avocados and bloodless wagyu steaks, sprinkling them with pomegranate seeds like ‘jewels’ and using them to decorate dishwasher white cereal bowls within wipe-clean pebble grey kitchens. One day soon, her caveman will come home bearing a blood diamond. It will be very sparkly and pretty in the cave.
Evolutionary psychology is frequently called upon to explain the insistence on this horse-nonsense, but its part in the cultural discourse has a grand misnomer running through the length of it. It implies at the prestige of Darwinism, the concept in the material sciences that over hundreds of thousands/millions/billions of years, genetic code is altered through natural selection and reproduction, with species splitting, melding, and forming over time, in order to adapt to new environment. We came from apes. Well first we came from tubes, sea tubes, in the ocean, about 600 million years ago. Our ape ancestor came about 25 million years ago. Contrary to popular belief, we are not descended from chimps, instead, we humans, and chimps, have a common ancestor. It took about six million years, from ape to early man. Six million. Then a further 5 million from these early apes/hominids to homosapien; us. It’s all a bit of a to-do. I don’t fully grasp it; I won’t pretend to. But its objective. As hard a fact as any.
On the other hand, evolutionary psychology, however, is a theory within social studies. Or social science if you must. It is a subjective way of making sense of human behaviour. It argues that there is a personality that arises in species pertaining to their evolution, that is absolute and continues to exist as the predominating tendency, irrespective of cultural and intellectual advancements. Some go so far as to say that more-so, any attempt to challenge this ahistorical personality, through ‘social engineering’, will result in chaos. It takes the bio-chemical arguments about terrain, food, fertility, and applies them in an irreducible way to human psychology. It makes a series of logical leaps; even if our biological evolution was irreducible to our personalities (the first leap), the idea that our personalities are not impacted by our cultures (the second) is much more questionable, as is the idea that rejection of the (debatable) evolutionarily instilled tendencies will inevitably cause us suffering (the third). But its popularity, despite its intellectual vulnerability, can at least be partially explained by the fact that it rides off the coattails of Darwinism, giving itself the same lustre of intellectual respectability. In popular culture, this important demarcation is often missed, and the theories of evolutionary psychology are disseminated as though it had the factual rigour of evolutionary biology.
As well as making logical leaps, it tends to be very good at cherry picking bits of natural selection it deems relevant. If a lobster mates for life, its relevant. If a chimp society is led by males, its relevant. If a mantis chews off the head of her lover, bite by juicy bite, like an apple, whilst she fucks him, it’s not relevant. If a group of lionesses kicks the absolute fur out of a male wandering onto their turf to start some trouble, it’s not relevant. If bonobos (as equally genetically related to us as chimps) live in matriarchies where eroticism and empathy are social lubricants moreso than aggression, it’s not relevant. If a mother waterbird abandons her weakest chick in order to give the best shot to the stronger, it’s not relevant. Or perhaps it is, depending on what version of evolutionary psychology that is being pilfered that day.
Its last weakness I can see, is it misses something discernibly central about us; we are the last surviving of the human hominids (so long to Neanderthals, Homo Erectus etc); our Latin name, homosapiens, a term applied to us by taxonomists during the Enlightenment (I would assume Linnaeus but I can’t be bothered to check). It means, ‘men of wisdom’. It is an important fact, because one of the arguments anthropologists make about us is that we survived other hominids due to our adaptability, our flexibility, our diversity, our intelligence, and our capacity for technology. The idea that the survival of the fittest genetics, translates to an aggressive survival of the fittest human personality (usually along lines of hyper-competitiveness) may be an easy narrative for people to grasp and may make some aggressive, self-centred people feel better about themselves, but it does not really get to the heart of what makes us distinct as human beings, what gives us our edge.
The body becomes the symbolic site of this idea of competitive self interest; the idea of the apex of human achievement is meant to look like a muscular man or a pretty, immature woman. Irrespective of anything else, it never fails to astound me, how much emphasis people place on the human body, erecting temples of idealisation to the best modern examples – sports people, supermodels – when the best modern example of human invention tend to pale by comparison in notice (inventor of the covid vaccine or David Beckham? – put Dr Katalin Kariko and Dr Drew Weissman into Google and field 103,000 results, put the football player in and get 64, 400, 000.) Of course, there is nothing at all wrong with people taking care of themselves, enjoying looking at people they are attracted to, or seeking joy in ‘embodiment’, the feeling of having a nervous system and flesh and so-on, and sharing that with others. That’s good, wholesome stuff. But finding the human body loaded with pleasurable fruit is a bit different to idealisation, sterile, competitive ideas about perfection and social hygiene, and putting some human bodies above others in some kind of morally loaded physical hierarchy. Not just because it’s not kind, but also because it’s kinda stupid.
When I observe the techno-throb of huge metropolis like Tokyo, the reflective beauty of the Sistine Chapel or the difficult to grasp sophistication of quantum physics, I find it difficult to understand how anyone could know these things exist, and were made by man, and still think some caveman monkey jibberish could effectively describe our species-essence. But thinking about it this way makes some men and women feel more desirable; imagining themselves as ‘fine examples of physicality’. But it’s a frankly ridiculous self-conception buoyed by a futile attempt to compensate for the fragility of the ego.
If confronted by such a silly person, I’ll proffer some talking points to bug them: Did you know that if a silverback gorilla took it upon himself to bench press, he could theoretically lift 1200-1800kg? Now, I don’t know if that is the strongest gorilla, or the average gorilla. I don’t know what a female gorilla could bench. I do know that no gorilla yet has committed to an actual live test of the calculation. (because even though, comparative to us, they are more brawn than brain, they aren’t that preposterous or that hat-doffing). I also know that the strongest ever human bench press was closer to 600kg. That’s the strongest, and it pales by comparison. The strongest human male would be pulped by even a fairly weak gorilla. On the flip side, the cleverest humans have mapped the genome, explored space, the deepest oceans, invented and conducted brain surgery, and turned cocoa beans into fudge sundaes. Impressive stuff. And yet, we are similarly impressed when a clever ape, Koko, mashes a symbol on a keyboard to ask to snuggle her pet kitten. Although, bless her beautiful heart, of course.
If anything, from ape to ape to man to man, we are less strong then we were in an our misty far past, less physically impressive, but with significantly bigger brains, proportionately. Indeed, many anthropologists have argued that it wasn’t strong men and pretty women who found each other and moved shit along, but clever, resourceful, sensible men and women, who worked out how to get the most food with the least amount of effort and danger. Initially that meant more meat from bigger sources using spears, which helped grow our brain evolutionarily (but eating more steaks won’t grow your individual brain, if it needs to be said). But eventually social evolution meant farming, and huh! gasp!, carbs. Delicious, safe to consume, won’t rot quickly and get riddled with disease or stomp on your head and kill you like meat, energy dense carbs. Of course now, we have too much energy dense food in the form of hyper-processed sugars; but the answer to that is to move back to lentils and pasta, and away from cocoa pops, not to start knawing on passing badgers or clogging up your arteries with large amounts of powdered protein.
The stronger, faster, brigade won’t enjoy hearing this of course, because then they’d have to confront the fact that they are obsessing over improving their bodies because they don’t know how to confront the problems of their alienated personalities and atrophied minds. They’d prefer to sit on their podcasts and rant into teenage bedrooms, and/or the void, about how it is the highest form of being to be a man who keeps ‘their women’ in headlocks incase they get eaten by predators at bus stops, or a woman who has lots of babies but doesn’t live beyond 30; she dies off so her skin can be used for lavish clothes for male tribal elders with big pecs. Ask one of these lot why human women are one of the exceedingly rare species to have a menopause alongside some other clever, social species like apes and orcas? Watch them scratch for an answer; they won’t hit on the fact that many of those other species were, gasp matriarchal, and perhaps women getting to have a lifespan beyond reproduction is of social utility to our species. Indeed, elderwomen may have had a lot of influence in our misty past, just as they are effective, diplomatic rulers in bonobo societies, unlike their finger chewing, angry chimp patriarchal cousins.
We could do a Gareth from The Office and ask more questions to vex them like, will there ever be a boy who can swim faster than a shark? No, but I’ve known a few boys who make for better conversationalists than sharks (or Gareth for that matter - he’d be on ‘team Man = Caveman for absolute sure). Which man can outrun a cheetah; which could better scale a sharp incline than a mountain goat? Which man could flap his arms fast enough to take on after a golden eagle (it would be enjoyable to watch in in any case); which could death-poison an elephant with a single droplet of his body juice better than a jungle frog? And in another direction, no matter how beautiful Marilyn Monroe or Lady Di were, can we really say that they were as beautiful as a peacock or a tiger, a coral reef, or an arctic vista? It's contested at least; I’d say no.
*
I once took a visit to Cardiff Museum, because it used to have an exhibit about the history of the Celts, for whom I am, I suppose, distantly related. These were a punchy bunch; a bejewelled set of goddess-cults, who spoke in Druidic babble, slavered themselves in blue and had a good old go at fighting off every Imperialist that ever tried to take bring them to heel. They would’ve done better had they only had a good sit down and worked out some decent military strategy rather than just screaming into the fray and stubbornly flashing their arseholes at the tightly wrought Roman death units. All very apposite to my general point. In any case, after I’d wandered among the lavish jewels, gold torcs and spearheads, I got chatting to an anthropologist who was setting up a stall to give talks to local schoolchildren, placing real Celtic artefacts on his trestle table. He talked to me about the history of the Celts and the British isles, and such, which was richly interesting, yet I recall little of it. There was one thing he said though that always sticks in my head;“You know, people always think we are top of the food chain, but anthropologically speaking, in terms of our long past, we are as much prey and as we are predators,”. He smiled wryly and held up a ruddy, grey spearhead into the artificial museum light, “…but we aren’t prey anymore are we? We found a hack.” Once upon a time a human tried to fight a sabertooth to show off to the girls and got himself eviscerated; some millions of years before him, some ape picked up two bits of rock, & decided to see what would happen if he sharpened them against each other.
S/he isn’t the version of the troubled history of the mind that is on display in the aggrandisements of evolutionary psychology so popular with the testosterone brigade, as they help disseminate their vain politics on the machines that are making nerd boys in SV billions of dollars and immeasurable amounts of political clout. Indeed, it occurs to me that if what really defines the troubled greatness of our species - our ability to transcend the violence of immanence through clever advancement - those who still worship at the temple of the body, need to start see the machine better than the body it smartly professes to contain.
Cora Leigh, Yorkshire & Travelling Escort, Companion & Dominatrix xxx
Independent Escort, Dominatrix & Companion in West Yorkshire & The United Kingdom
Escort Manifestos & Stay in their Lane
Escort Manifestos
Escorting is easy. Anyone can do it. Quick, easy money for quick, easy women. Women who do naught but lay on their backs & think of England or wherever else happens to be their national abode. This is an old viewpoint which surfaces to the fore of my attention intermittently, but with the predictability of gathering damp leaves after autumn rain.+
It has its explicit forms, the most notable being the chauvinist Andrew Tate fan on Reddit for whom it is but an iteration of a well rounded hostility to the female of the species. This is a guy whose soul has been so putrefied by malignancy, that the only way he imagines he can be content is by expecting people to fall at his feet at the rate of marbles down a drain… despite (or because of) a plush velour of woman-loathing, thus proving, in dramatic style, the intensity of the seductiveness of his masculinity. He is a known quantity, a beast whose taxonomy has been well-illustrated. I won’t labour any longer at his cold, damp cavern.
There are some angry women too, who feel we whores are putting a fall on the lady pound, diminishing the value of their own sexual currency & so suffer an avarice of hostility at our expense. Honestly though, I seldom encounter these types in action, though I am assured they exist. Most women I ever seem to meet are more resigned to romantic feelings about sensuality than free market cynicism. But then again, I’ve watched the most contemporary adaptation of Jane Eyre about fifteen times, so perhaps like simply meets like.
There is however a more insidious version of this perspective, however, which is the true subject I wish to deal with here. It is the persons who enter into this sullied trade, our dirty little demimonde, driven by hubris. This confidence is partially predicated on the notion of the sex industry’s ease, a misconception no doubt chemically toxified by a chronic case of self-esteem. In simple parlance, the psychological malady is: “Fucking for money is easy & I am hot, this will be a synch, millions in the bank!”
I have encountered this type in the wild, both male & female. The greatest hurdle I can see in overcoming the falsehood of prostitution’s ease, is that it can start off seeming an easy ride & get more saliently strenuous with time, especially if bad business choices are made. For multiple reasons; firstly, when you make your first forays into escorting, being a new face in a new town, can attract a veritable tsunami of attention in your direction, both from new clients who try out everyone & from active time wasters who spot a new potential source of vulnerability. If validation is the reason sex work has been sought out as an occupation (the worst reason to commit to this lifestyle imaginable) this could feel pretty enlivening, for as long as it lasts.
I’ll not be trite; many who enter into escorting, even those without narcissistic tendencies, can be taken in by the initial ease of attention, but if they are smart, thoughtful & capable of self improvement, they will adapt to the realisation that getting & keeping clients is not always some lazy meander in the erotic meadows. The initial attention wanes, but thankfully, so too goes with it the sex pest callers, the wannabe punters, the local pimps trying to mess with your diary & other such non-desirables & you are more commonly left with the genuine & the respectful. It is somewhat like watching the water drain from spinach; every good iron-loving cook knows that a big bag of the stuff will result in a much smaller mulch. The common wisdom among sex workers is to appreciate the fact you will not be constantly, year in year out, faced with more genuine potentially clients then your energies can manage, but rather you will have to develop a good reputation with a good base of regulars, return clients, to sustain interest, whilst taking care of yourself & your own interests. Finding a balance is the trick.
There are some basic ways of doing this; firstly by recognising that being an escort is a service position, not simply a podium upon which to stretch your self-idealisation. Good hooker lore dictates that one must recognise one’s job is not just to make yourself look good, but to make the client feel good. Another tip is to know, & be completely OK with that fact that, no matter how cute/sexy/pretty/smart/charismatic/amiable you are, there are dozens of other cute/sexy/pretty/smart/charismatic/amiable escorts in your vicinity, all available, who you have to stand out from, & that on a personal level, them being cute/sexy/pretty/smart/charismatic/amiable does nothing to diminish you’re own charms. Also, giving too much (or any) attention to time wasters or boundary pushers will sap the energy you need for appointments with much nicer, more genuine chaps & though it might feel prudent in the moment to try & keep every outside bet in the offing, keep every unlikely communication going, ‘just in case it is genuine’ this isn’t a good long term plan if you don’t want to burn out. To that end, having a life outside escorting is paramount. Par-a-mount.
And finally, pretty much everyone has bad periods, whether its because of issues in our political economy, or because you’ve not been on form recently because of issues in your personal life, or for no reason in particular. The trick is not to suddenly feel ugly or unlovable when it happens, but to keep yourself in good fiscal order so you can take little time off to recoup, do something fun & therapeutic. Or indeed to invest in new photos, haircut, lingerie, new filler for your kisser… whatever makes you feel good & gives you a new edge. Oh and to that end, advertising. Good advertising never hurts.
When did this turn into a liturgy on how to be an escort? Ah yes, the pitfalls that face those who swan into the industry in a Napoleonic bid to take it over. Indeed, I think this industry has a tendency to occasionally attract narcissists, & narcissists are not good at adapting, learning the ropes. They need to believe they are simply the most desirable creatures ever, at any & all times; if not they think they are losers. The world is winners & losers & one must be one or the other. As such, they cannot emotionally cope with not doing so well; they can’t say, if after the initial buzz of interest fades off & they are left without custom, “OK, I’m doing something wrong here, what can I do to make it better?” because they’d have to acknowledge they are flawed & the world isn’t one long parade in their honour and that this fact is far from being the end of the world. It doesn't help that since the turn of the millennium we have been saturated with such media ‘events’ as X Factor, which encourage the belief that some people have some indiscernible ‘Something About Mary’ wonderfulness that can just be spat out into the social ether for endless adulation & reward.
And it’s not about being beautiful/sexy/pretty as such either, although being some or all of those things will never hurt. Indeed it is true enough that if you are exceedingly good looking, you have more room to flex a vexatious attitude, a stern manner & the reliability of a wino, than a plainer Jane. That being said, it is not the most winning long term business strategy, because however splendiferous your appearance is, many men will not relish paying money to be treated like a Serf, unless of course, they harbour more exotic inclinations. And if you are not classically beautiful, having something of an erotic temperament can be very overcoming; my namesake is borrowed from the courtesan Cora Pearl, who was believed to be unremarkable in general appearance (though this is in comparison to the great beauties of her day) but had such a charm, charisma & sex appeal that she still made it as one of the most successful whores of history (her remarkable tits didn’t half help though I’m sure, Cora played the mammaries she was dealt!). Being able to look upon yourself neutrally, see your strengths & limitations without stress or affront, & focus on putting your best foot forward (& improving on the weaker of your limbs where you can) is a part of succeeding in any occupation, & being an escort is no different.
It’s hard to say this without some paid lovers fearing you are a whore of mercenary tendencies; but this is a job at the end of the day. Never fear, professionalism can be a good aid to service. Indeed, refusing to deal with those aforementioned timewasters & only giving energy to decent types that approach us cordially, as though, gasp, we were simply another human being offering a service, spares us the energy to be warm, sunny companions to those men who don’t treats us like shoe muck or like fishnet-laden aliens from the planet Cunstafuck. And I reiterate this fact because it has long drawn my notice, that those who ballet into the industry ready for the fall of roses, adulations & applause & are incapable of assessing their own limitations or false steps but are operating out of a need for validation & attention, are often precisely the one’s given so much breath to the numpties who approach escorts purely for the purposes of personal entertainment. Who call upon companions simply to ‘fuck around’.
Being an escort is not the hardest job in the world, it’s not sea fishing, or nursing or coal mining. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, like being an aristocrat or a clairvoyant. And to that end, being an escort is not especially noble, like being a brain surgeon, an oncologist or a social worker, but nor is it ignoble, like being a con artist, a crack dealer, or a a daytime TV presenter. It's a job that affords freedom, flexibility, the intimacy of one on one company, an evasion of the hellishness of the administrative chamber that is the modern office & an excuse (not that ladies should need one) to buy lots of frilly pants & body oils. However, it also requires patience, self-preservation, adaptability, fiscal sensibility, humility, a keen instinct for the stupid & the dangerous, self-reflection & no small touch of humanism. I don’t have all of these things all of the time, but they are my manifesto, especially if the troubles of the industry start to lead me all a-folly.
Stalin in Their Lane
Have you ever had a friend who wryly laughed at you when you told them you’ve started to learn how to pole dance because “they don’t see you as a sexy-type of person”? Or a colleague who, because they respect you enough to be honest, told you to rethink going for that promotion because they’ve decided you’ll be disappointed? Or a partner who lets you know they think having excess weight is unappealing & regularly watches buff fitsplainers on social media… but tells you your weight loss goals are ‘unrealistic’ and ‘a waste of energy’ because you always ‘lack motivation’?
There is a phenomenon I have come to notice. A social quirk. I don’t now if it has a name but it goes like this; you encounter a new person in your life, friend, lover, colleague, whomever. You size each other out, and find yourselves working out where to ‘place’ each other in some opaque hierarchy across various metrics; attractiveness, smarts, class, wealth, fitness, wit. You’ll be heavily impacted, both as a giver and a receiver of these fairly haphazard social judgements, by certain stereotypes no doubt, what liberal students might call ‘bias’. Some are more obviously politicised, like sex and ethnicity, and others just as socially pervasive, but less decisively politicised, like age, body size, degree of conformity & application of fashionable social manners.
We all do this. We kind of have to, to a degree, make initial cover judgements. I know to a modern liberal mindset that sounds counterintuitive, but there are degrees of difference between hostile bigotry and making safe bet assumptions about the needs and wants of other people on the basis of slender information, and I shan’t bore you by remonstrating relentlessly on the practical differences. OK maybe just a smidge. I’ll just give one useful example of what I mean; if you are comfortable, and you meet someone who seems to you like they might be poor, you could ignore that initial assumption, and start talking about foreclosing on the six bedroom detached house you & the Mrs have in escrow, thus offending them by being unintentionally gratuitous about your advantages in the face of their difficulties. So you steer away from talking about money, in order to be polite. You could be wrong, and they are a rich man in moth-worn corduroy because they are eccentric, but it’s a mistake not worth making. Perhaps if he cottons on that you thought he was poor and avoided talking about money because of it, he’ll feel patronised, but in the main we tend to think risking passively patronising someone is a lesser evil than seeming an overt braggart.
Maybe that’s a flawed social conception, but the point stands; not all judgements are utilised for hostile, self interested or cruel ends.
This tendency however, is significantly more useful to us, if we are adaptable to learning that our initial judgements might be incorrect; perhaps at first they seemed a little dim, but possess unforeseen cerebral muscle. Maybe the reasons we sometimes find it hard to do this, is because we would have to confront something in us that made that conclusion so initially plausible; if someone is taciturn and has a working class ‘air’, we find ourselves thinking, “saying not much; unable to keep up with the conversation”, whereas if a middle class person possesses similar taciturnity we reach for , “hmmm, they are quiet and thoughtful, with hidden depths”. We don’t like admitting, even to ourselves, our prejudices (even though prejudice is pretty universal), in part because the kangaroo sanction against snap judgements can be pretty unforgiving in certain circles.
We also might find it more effective if we can recognise and acknowledge the adaptability of others to change . Say you meet someone, they aren’t doing so well in their career, they’ve a weight problem, they keep having stale dates. We might be inclined to see those facts as absolutes, totally indicative truths about that person, and then struggle to envision them in other ways, fulfilling other roles.
This is also where the fragile ego can destructively veer in unbidden; worse than when we make initial reactionary assumptions about who someone, is when we come to insist upon them staying in the lane we mentally create for them based on those assumptions. We install a map of where they are in relation to us because it serves our personal anxieties about the fragility of our capabilities and social value, and passively aggressively defend its boundaries. If we need to feel like we are at least superior to some people, some of the time (and if we are actively disordered, most people, most of the time), its useful to make initial assumptions about someone that serve that need. Worse still, when we encounter signs that those assumptions might be flawed, instead of accepting that possibility, we instead act as though the person is acting out of character, behaving pretentiously or trying to ‘be something they are not’.
Perhaps an illustration would work here. Story-time.
Joan has a friend, Jill. When Joan first meets Jill, she is flitting from one dead end job to the next. Joan sees herself as a bit of high flyer; perhaps in truth she is just installed in comfortable middle management, somewhat above the average in her annual salary, but nothing remarkable. One day, Jill decides she is going to finally lock this career stuff down, perhaps a parent passing away or the end of an destructive fling with a steroid-riddled Joe Rogan fan, has given her the motivation to make a big change in her approach to life. She has a skill with software but it's always just been a bit of a hobby, not something she envisioned herself actually profiting from, especially as she has always just done clerical roles. Joan has always been keen to assure Jill that careerism and money successes are ‘not her thing’, and that is ‘ok’. It seems like a compassionate stance on Joan’s part, and perhaps she believes she means it as such, although she has always been a little embarrassed introducing Jill to her ambitious workmates, though she thinks she has hidden it well.
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
Jill gets herself some actual qualifications in software development, and lands a learning curve job in a respectable, global company. She moves up quickly - and soon finds herself on a similar salary as Joan - and with the offer of potentially moving to the States where her skills can command even larger salaries, she could easily surpass her. Jill has become something of a new bird, spreading her wings. Her new confidence spills into other areas of her life; she gets fitter, more decisive, more willing to express herself straightforwardly and ask for the things she would like.
Joan is unseated, conflicted. On the one hand, Jill is now more akin to the kind of person she imagined herself associating with, and is relieved she feels less embarrassed by introducing Jill to her other friends, but she also drew some comfort from her belief that Jill had previously been her social lesser. She would enjoy spending time with Jill, but largely because she discovered she had the dual benefit of feeling like she could be relaxed and off guard with her (because she didn’t hold her in very high esteem) whilst always feeling quietly gratified that Jill made her look good by comparison.
Joan is a bit of jerk, essentially. She views other people not as independent beings but an extension of her own ego. She’s not a psychopath or a predator or probably not even a full blown narcissist; nothing that dramatic, her jerkishness is of common, garden variety, that burns away quietly and kills off friendships slowly. Jill is now out in Silicon valley, making money with her intellectually stimulating career, getting a tan and having country weekends with her new yankee lover who knows how to cook sizzling enchiladas and has an Olympic tongue. Go Jill. Joan will satisfy herself with the belief that Jill got lucky, Jill was a diversity hire, Jill isn’t being ‘true’ to herself, Jill isn’t staying at home counting her temp checks and crying into her sugar puffs, where Jill belongs.
This might be a slightly over the top exemplar; a Hollywoodization of a the plucky phoenix who overcomes the ‘stay in your lane'/know your place’ phenomenon. I am hoping I can get the script commissioned, I’ll be honest. I envisage Felicity Jones as Jill (cute, clever and unassuming) Keira Knightly as Joan (gorgeous but has those ‘would sleep with your boyfriend then blame you for introducing them when he does the same to her’ energy), with Emma Thompson playing Jill’s go-getting but emotionally unavailable mother and Hank Azaria, Uma Thurman, and Janeane Garofalo as the ludicrously amusing and probably racially insensitive Latina love interest, the ball busting but hot corporate boss, and the quirky and satirical new bestie, respectively. I plan to call it The Jill Life Crisis. It’ll have vintage 90s romcom vibes & media professors will be getting out their scribblers to theorise on how the film deals with the juxtaposition between British class rigidities & American dream idealism, and the new wave of interest in the ambivalent optimism of Generation X.
Yes its usually more subtle than this, but the point still stands; people move in and out of successes and failures through different phases in their life, and they often discover that social connections are born & broken on the same hills, precisely because some people struggle to accept that other people’s gains and losses are not a mirror to their own gains and losses. Friendships and love affairs can only really survive through life’s transient tendencies if we truly don’t mind if the people we have around us are CEOs of FTSE 100s or rocking the lemonade stall, practical considerations all aside. Yes of course, sometimes change makes relationships untenable because we lose the things we once had in common, the points of connection, or people can’t find a way of making their new life-pace elide. But that is different to being threatened by someone' else’s growth, self-improvement (or even a spell of good fortune), by refusing to envision them as better versions of themselves or even sabotaging, undermining or mocking their attempts at working towards fairly commonplace ambitions, like losing weight, getting a degree, working abroad, starting a business, becoming more sexually confident, or even finding love.
The point is, you don’t have to be pre-America Jill. You don’t have to stay in your lane. And you certainly don’t have to stay in the lane someone else has decided to construct for you, especially if it is narrower, rockier and shorter, than the one they have constructed for themselves.
Cora Leigh, Yorkshire & Travelling Escort, Companion & Dominatrix xxx
Independent Escort, Dominatrix & Companion in West Yorkshire & The United Kingdom
Beauty & Time
Beauty
"There is no instinct like that of the heart.” Lord Byron
I’ve long been afflicted by this penchant for artistic and literary romanticism; you know, the pre-Raphaelites, Lord Byron…oh and I love, gothic horror, which is romanticism’s more calamitous cousin, his hangover, if you will. Romanticism is about freedom from restraints to pursue art, love and desire, a pre-occupation with the notion of beauty ‘in the abstract’, a rejection of bourgeois morality. A belief in some non-godly ‘heaven on earth’ pleasure-seeking, even a touch of mysticism. The style was often grandiose, flamboyant, camp even. The gothic after-effects, Wuhering Heights, Dracula, even German Expressionism, are about the headache, the hollow feelings and the nervous guilt after the wild ride, but are usually as ambivalently swimming in the desire for subjectivity and uncertainty. Romanticism is the rugged bad boy on the motorbike or the hot, exotic Bertha Mason. Gothic horror is the visceral bike crash and the arsonist mad woman in the attic that say, “but you are going to take another spin, all the same”.
It’s not very popular these days; we live in utilitarian times. Writing has to be punchy and to the point, very clear about what it is saying, bring everyone along with it, fit a political agenda. Art is…well, crisp packets by posh-kids, stuck to white-wash museum walls, which are apparently saying something about the “liminality of consumerism”. Painting, with is naughty, oily brush strokes and baroque frames… is considered a dead art. Even photography has become too oblique, too whimsical, for the post-computation generations.
That is probably what it was the did it, the death of the romantic dream. The computers. Mind you, they did have a romantic era of their own, in the transhumanist 90s, when people seriously talked about uploading brains into machines and the ‘internet’ being a Wild West of exploration and freedom from that terrifying of all vague things, ‘The State’ (insert gasp). It turned out though, that statelessness had its own brutal regime. It came pumping out of Silicon Valley like digital ooze, but its malignancy was about surveillance, not restriction. What a coup! You can do whatever you want now, but they are watching you, counting out your every move, quantifying you. What you like, what you think, what you masturbate to. Your being is converted to information and being bought and sold by Steve Jobs style psychopaths doing yoga and humming mantras in $500 dollar underpants, in San Francisco.
This is the context for troubled young men, inebriated on Andrew Tate-isms, a new golden age of chauvinism, to spit out into the ether their absolutisms, their quantifications, about beauty and sexual morality. I saw it only the other week, another microcosm of their cynicism; a woman over 200 pounds cannot be beautiful. Can. Not.
I’m not going to confront the particulars of that statement; its beneath any woman to argue with the pointlessly destructive petulance on display of any person who, simply because they do not fancy fat woman, have to ensure that all fat women everywhere never feel beautiful to anyone at any time, not even to themselves. Or maybe they do sometimes feeling an attraction towards fat women, and that is precisely what worries them. In a culture where people feel that not only what they look like, but the appearance of their associates confers some total status upon them, it would be disconcerting indeed to discover you get mouth watery over an association that would, impoverish that status. How much easier would it be if voluptuous women didn’t idle their juicy fruits in the line of sights of such troubled anti-troubadours? Leave this place vile witches! With your subcutaneous temptations, ungodly in their generosity!
Even so. It’s not the fat that concerns me, it’s the number. It's the arbitrary way in which some people want to quantify human life. The ‘what number out of 10 are you?’ brigade. I’m not rationalism’s greatest apostle by any stretch, but I can at least see its purpose in getting us to the moon and back and lighting up my home and mechanical engineering and all that pickle. But the facts of it make me feel sleepy and stupid. But pseudo-rationalism? It’s positively rancid. It has neither the humanistic, creative potential of artistic, romantic subjectivity, nor the actual certainties of the material sciences.
But the ‘what number are they out of 10?’ brigade don’t care about beauty or truth, they care about ego and power and they are out in force on the digital highway, playing at being primary school-grade statisticians trying to dull the innate uncertainty of life using a cat-in-the-hat degree of numerics. I’m being patronising, numbers have never been my strong point, but even I can ascertain that taking such complex, unwieldy concepts like beauty, desire and the sex lives and social antagonisms of multi-billions of humans and trying to gun them in to some basic graph… is more asinine than going on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and picking as your book of choice The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Power for power’s sake has always been a trifle stupid, and a bore to boot.
What number out of ten would The Lady of Shallot be? Or The Mona Lisa.
I was in a park once, being followed by some Elliot Rodgers to-be and after politely rejecting his bizarre advances he shouted, “You should be grateful for my attention %^8$£, you are a 6.7 out of 10, MAX ON A GOOD DAY+”. I was so astounded at seeing the moral vacuity of incel Reddit in the actual wild, that I just gawped at him for a bit before shuffling off. Later, when I was pondering over a gingerbread latte at a Caffè Nero, I thought of my come back, which was something about being a 0.5 idiot out of infinity. It was belated and not very good even for having been slowly stewed. But what can you say? I didn’t feel offended, it was too silly an insult to find offensive, like having a school kid tell me his dad could beat up my dad (my dad is not longer animated by oxygen so that is probably true in most cases). But I felt deflated by the miserliness of it; the cold, hard, surreal singularity.
Because in a fashion, it's not strictly untrue. To that guy, who looked like the love child of Kiki Dee (no relation) and the late, great John Woodnutt++, I was interesting looking enough to sexually harass near the swing set, but not interesting looking enough to respect my desire to decline. Which would be about a 6.7 one wagers? That was ‘his truth’. But it misses the point, or, rather, the big picture. Its like going on a long journey and only looking at the bits of the map that pertain to the parts of the road that are not directly ahead of you, or, if asked by an alien what cake is, you reply, “a substance for consumption”, or worse, “a floury item that comes in to being through measurements, implements, and heat”. You wouldn’t be wrong. You are looking at the way, but you are still getting lost. You’ve told the alien the truth, but he is none-the-wiser.
There is some truth I believe to hierarchies of beauty and desire, and it’s a touch tone deaf to utterly ignore it. It’s a clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right style vibe, when you have some people trying too give human desire a basic ‘score’, and others denying that beauty has any value attached to it at all. Indeed, some ugly people become vexed at the ‘all things bright and beautiful’ bunch because they are engaging in wilful denial of the The Halo Effect; the way in which attractiveness results in material, social gains. Pretty people get more social respect, better economic outcomes and so forth. Some ugly people, like some fat people, want to be able to articulate the potential unhappiness of that experience, and find it stultifying when some jump to happy retorts, like, “ugly is an ugly word! We are all beautiful!!” in a fashion that makes them feel better about themselves morally, but obscures the cause of some people’s discomfort in an unfair world. Often it is pretty people themselves who do this, sometimes just because they are kind, and sometimes because they just don’t want to acknowledge their unearned advantage.
It is true that what is considered beautiful changes across time and place. There is nothing much essential about the particulars, other than perhaps youthfulness, which commonly is a part of the package. But a sense of there being an ideal and a hierarchy seems persistent. And we all know when a supermodel, the feted 9/10 creature, walks in the room, we all do. But even so, if beauty exists on a bell curve, then most of us (6.7 out of 10, MAX ON A GOOD DAY people included) veer somewhere near the middle. The majority of people, when it comes to beauty, intelligence, social skills and other, are, average, or near. And it is here, in the morass of human averageness, that subjectivity becomes so important.
Personal preferences. What is it to you about women with green eyes, men with long, sinewy, limbs, women in hippy festival garb, that just assaults your attention? The energies of biochemistry. The memories of erotic encounters warming your perception of someone’s face, a visage that may have once drifted anonymously by in a populace buzz. Someone’s untouchability or the precarity of their mutual regard, further exciting your desire. That’s romanticism. In effect. And it cannot be quantified, the ego will not be mollified by vain attempts to give numbers to its vagaries. It may be sated by partnership with some officialised beauty, if you have the means to attract her, but it won’t protect you from falling in dangerous lust with the less remarkable looking nanny. Ask Mr Rochester of Jane Eyre fame. Or Jude Law, of fame fame. They know. And seeing as you got to the end of this waffly blog written by a woman with a flair for the romanticism of mediocrity…I’m guessing you might too.
Time
I could write screeds and screed about the dreaded Timewaster… an escort/companion/dominatrix’s largest natural predator. Only I’d bore myself, risk unduly worrying good clients that they might fall under the banner (if it worries you, you probably don’t), & the little shits wouldn’t read it anyway. Or if they did, it would be a hate read.
But I have a few words, a minor verbal exorcism of my frustrations.
They are many and varied forms of Timewasters, and, truthfully, a gargantuan percentage of my escort life is taken up with trying to manage them, trying to place sticky fly traps throughout the administrative architecture of my daily life, in order to avoid the buzz and the burn. But instinct is the best weapon; indeed, in the lion share of cases, once someone has come through to my phone/email and waved a read flag, no matter how patiently I try & answer their questions or meet them in the middle, more chicanery comes forth, not less. So, I find it helpful to just follow my initial instinct, and drop the communication.
It’s the ones who message like a teenager, “yo/what’s up/u about” etc. Or the ones who ask questions already easily viewed on the advert (honestly, it is so much easier having a quick read than making a phone call, so I’d assume in these cases they have no intention of booking and just enjoy ‘ringing around’). Or the ones that send ping pong messages (sending one well thought out message is easier than twenty short ones) or frequently messaging to enquire, but never actually confirming a booking. Or who are rude and curt in their tone or ask for a lower price or more photos or “if you have a boyfriend who can join us”. I’ve tried, I really have, it’s never worth it.
I’ve spoken to fellow escorts who’ve worried about ignoring these kinds of contact; “what if he does show?” they worry. He may. But you’re probably going to end up sat in silk Bluebella knickers scrolling aimlessly on TikTok waiting for the “I am parked” text that never arrives. But even if he did. Arrive, I mean…do you want to be intimate with someone who doesn’t have enough respect for other people to even engage with you in an ordinary, grown-up fashion? Indeed, in my experience, when I have ignored my niggles about someone, because they seemed terse, inpatient, etc, & I’ve actually gone through with a booking, the experience has usually left me with an uncomfortable taste in my mouth. Maya Angelou’s saying “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” is popular with people for a reason, it seems.
It’s hard to tell if people like this are disrespectful towards escorts particularly, or are just rude/entitled people generally. Do these pseudo-clients try to set up appointments with accountants with texts at 2am saying '“yo Nigel I like u maths we can have some fun I got some big accounts”, “Nigel u there???”, “the inland rev gets me hot Nigel answer”. Doubtful. Though they might book tables at restaurants and not show or send the steak back because it’s “not brown all the way through for some reason”.
But either way, I’m not asking for Downton Abbey style deferring from a potential client, I’m not a diva… just behaviours that show that he views me as an equal human being, not a utility or a beast of burden. Indeed, if you see an escort require you to read her advert before contacting her, approach her politely and so forth, and you think ‘up her arse bitch’, then I think you need to do some soul searching. Because though it can work both ways (I hear guys who tell me they had a bad feeling about an advert but followed their sexual energies not their mental faculties, and, well, regretted it) working in the sex industry as a woman, carriers some unique risks and dangers that having protocols like screening and deposits are is designed to help evade.
Because more often than not, it’s not the time wasting that worries me. You know what, if someone doesn't show, it sucks, especially if I’ve paid for a nice hotel, but I can make then best of it in other ways. But its what time-wasting style behaviours potentially portend; if someone does not respect a woman enough to send her a thoughtful message to enquire, if he doesn’t care about the vulnerability of the position of a woman who meets men for intimate encounters she doesn't know very well, I have a feeling he is more likely to be the type to pose a greater risk to me than simply being an irritant. And that is certainly not a risk not worth taking.
Cora Leigh, Yorkshire & Travelling Escort, Companion & Dominatrix xxx
Independent Escort, Dominatrix & Companion in West Yorkshire & The United Kingdom
+The ‘on a good day’ bit was a conjecture of remarkable genius for this idiot savant.
++Is he dead? I don’t know, I suppose he must be.
Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare
Escorting, whoring, courtesanry is a well told tale. The contemporary iteration? It goes like this: the scene, a TV Channel with it origins it in the late 80s, pilfering low rent claims on reality…snapshots of the life of badly behaved dogs, celebrities from the 80s trying their hand at nude pottery, and the ‘secret’ life of hookers. Or swingers. Foot kissers. Drag ‘artistes’. The plot? Perhaps a middle aged Madame from Wakefield in M&S part-cashmere, performing warped cheeriness to glaze a cold cavity of sociopathy. Perhaps a pretty single mum with three kids and at a lost look in her eyes to match her unwarranted chronic deficit of self confidence, an insecurity she is sure stripping will cure her of. Or a plump, emerald haired student bubbling with ill-advised idealism, draped on an Ikea chaise, seductively sucking on sherry trifle for a wonky webcam.
They are going to delve us into the deep, murky mystery of the elusive sex industry, for the first time ever! Tell the never told story. Bust it right open. Deliver a lightening shock to a Protestant middle England that has been otherwise soothed by Earl Grey tea, Delia’s hard boiled eggs. Elgar. Snoozy Sunday services.
All apart from the fact that middle England has long been up to its testicles in suburban filth, on the secret. So much so that the sexy French call sadomasochism ‘the English disease.’ And in any case, they have seen all these bits dozy dozens of times before. They aren’t saying, “People have sex you say? Sometimes for money? Well butter my crumpets!” Or if they are, it’s only because they suffer from the other British disease, chronic verbal repetition. Saying the same stuff over again because our society is old, the people who run it can’t be bothered to innovate and make new culture and Brits are too polite to make a fuss.
This so-called ‘reality TV’, is an intellectually lazy, emotionally manipulative, follow the money, version of a documentary, which has the double edge of both casting a sterile and dishonest eye on the so-called ‘truth’. And my assumption is that, such as their popularity exists, it is so because some people enjoy laughing, sneering or gossiping at, and about, other people. Sometimes vulnerable people. Sometimes people they assume are invariably beneath them and enjoy having that prejudice proved. Sometimes people they are frightened might be better than them and enjoy seeing them bought to heel.
For a time, British escorting forums would get hit up by TV producers giving us the fantastic opportunity to tell ‘our’ story. Sardonic hookers replied, “again? And will you be paying us this time? No budget? Could it come out of your salary perhaps...?” They got bored eventually, there is only so many times you can claim to be subversive and exposing for telling the same turgid story to the same disaffected audience. Now these forums get regular calls from chirpy humanities students wanting to involve us in their undergraduate dissertation scheme to decriminalise brothels and save us whorebags from purported pearl clutchers. Bless them.
I don’t blame the escorts and other sex industry ladies themselves for getting involved with these megaphoning moments. In their own individual lives the stigma of the sex industry is often keenly felt. Some suffer from isolation, utilisation and undermining. Women who’ll reject us lest we try to seduce their husbands (we won’t). Men who pretend to like us to try and use us for the money we apparently have in piles (we don’t) because such as it is, they think it isn’t justly gained (it is).
Thus, some escorts welcome the pseudo-opportunity to explain their industry or present themselves sympathetically. But TV producers can be sneaksters - shock horror - just like many bottom line, junk food journalists. It’s just never going to go well, and usually I would wager, it has the opposite intended impact.
Indeed, if we are viewed as a lowly being trying to persuade those who think that way, that it is otherwise, will only serve to validate their arrogant belief that their opinions are important, thus, they are important, which consequently validates their idea that you are their lesser. Pleading for acceptance is putting yourself on trial to a self appointed Judge who has no moral right to decide you have committed a crime and no jurisdiction to arbitrate on your sentence. Why give them the satisfaction? Abuse therapists, for much the same reason, often council their clients to not rise to the distortions that their former partner/friend/parent will spread; don’t counter the gossip, don’t try and fend off the smears. Anyone who wants to accept you and trust you are a good person will… anyone who doesn't, that’s their loss, they missed a trick. To grasp for a well squeezed idiom: the best revenge is living well.
But women in particular can often feel the need to gain approval, to be liked, to be accepted. We struggle with non-conformity, we find it hard to know that people see us badly, don’t like us, judge us, believe false things about us. Its hard to not notice that its often single women, promiscuous women, fat women, and other types of women with a challenge posed to their social value, who often plead their case, in the way men of the same genus don’t waste their breath. Quite rightly. Partly because women are often given ‘a harder time for the same crime’. Partly because we are, by nature or nurture, more concerned to ‘get along’ with people than to be happy with ourselves. But all this special pleading against stigmas just risks making us ever more vulnerable to the kangaroo court.
Par example. In an early episode of Sex and the City, sex writer, Ms Carrie Bradshaw is offered the opportunity to participate in a magazine column that she thinks will be called Single and Fabulous! It is set to curb the myth that single women in their 30s (ahem) are sad rejects who could not find one single man who’d by happy to spend his life receiving their darned socks and cooked dinners. Probably because they are weird, ugly and have too strong an attachment to the feline species. But what’s wrong with any of those things anyway? Weird can be interesting, ugly can have character, cats make for calming companions. Even so, this single woman has money, a good sex life, a well stocked wadrobe, friends, freedom. She isn't the stereotype of the 'sad spinster'.
Carrie Bradshaw ‘Single & Fabulous?’
All the same, the column ends up being called Single and Fabulous...? The punctuation mark makes all the difference. As does the unflattering photo that accompanies it that Bradshaw had unwittingly posed for.
I imagine a similar thing occurred when two expensive London escorts signed up for a reality programme about their lives, now on Netflix, simply called Escorts. Two vibrant (though somewhat unreconstructed), young women making what seemed like a tidy living, were shot from oblique angles, lit in chiaroscuro and soundtracked by ominous music. For a time, embalmed by film, their life became that same question mark. Perhaps it was true? Maybe their lives were bleak. Maybe the TV producers came with an open mind and found melancholy. For Emily and Cookie at least. But how can one feel confident, when the stylisation was so clearly loaded with a view of placing these women from beneath the eyeline of the viewer? It is an especially moreish tidbit for a braying, narcissistic spectator: the opportunity to witness the dissembling of those social inferiors who have the temerity to hold no obvious self-loathing. Whores must be bought to heel, through laws, slurs, shock-doc agitprop.
Emily & Cookie, stars of Reality TV Escorts
None of it is a shock though, of course. Fact, fiction or floss, the story of prostitution has been told - god on stilts - thousands of times, its vintage is no doubt, Sumerian. For myself, I always prefer fictionalised versions of the story of prostitution. Fiction can be a pile of greasy dung, similarly. Or it can be a fantasy landscape that exercises our desires for glittering magpie excitement, vengeance against injustice or hot eroticised adventure.
It can offer a more humanistic insight into a character, how they think, why they do what they do, or did what they did. Psychologists logically propose the idea that, when it comes to ourselves, we see the nuances in our daily lives, the causes of our frailties and misdemeanours…whilst in others, we singularise and simplify. If we do something bad or foolish we say, “I did this because of all these reasons” and if someone else does something similarly inept we say, “They did something bad because they are a bad person”. Fiction has an ability to disarm this tendency, reality TV has a tendency to affirm it. Verisimilitude is when something fictional has the appearance of being real. The upshot of this kind of philosophical take on storytelling, is that things that exist in some surreal landscape can hide profound truths, and things that have the appearance of ‘realness’ can be riven with horse-waste.
Photography, the concentrated chemical underlay of reality television, is itself an oddly slippery witness. When we look at a photograph of someone we don’t know and have never met, we are seeing an unmoving, one/two dimensional image of a dynamic, three dimensional person. Our head walnuts are thus missing key information about what that person looks like, no matter how unfiltered the photograph is. We fill in the gaps intuitively, responsively. We suffer from a misleading sense of intimacy. When we meet the person, even if the photograph was not actively deceitful, we sometimes think, “gosh, you don’t quite look as I was expecting, and I don’t know why”. That is of course before we get to all the android-looking superimposed bunny noses and skeletal cheekbones that find their way on to dating applications. I’ll be honest, if you’re shocked when you show up to Nando's for your first date to find that your new beau was using filters in those pictures…well… you have consumed the lie as brazenly as they have told it.
On the other hand, sometimes a painting by a talented modernist artist can get to a kind of truth of how someone looks, who they are, how they felt at the time, more than populist photography. Even with big smudgy brush strokes, unreal colourscapes, and some random objects (a whistle, a parakeet, a pair of bloomers) floating about in the hither and yon.
Belle Epoque panting of a Bordello, by Toulouse Lautrec
Fantasy has its own veracity. Those silly bodice rippers about aging high-end dollymops suffering from impossible to satiate lusts for poor, rippled lotharioa. Those streetwalkers engaging in meet-cutes with dashing wealthy men who escape them from the hustle. Or those Renaissance courtesans manipulating their way around male aristocracies and theological orders… they can say more about what it means to be a human, a man, a woman, a whore, than any crud Channel 4 could shit out. Unreal fantasies can expose real feelings, yearnings, memories, dreams or the politics of our erotic lives and social classes, in the same way that the high drama of Greek tragedy, Italian Opera or Shakespearean farce will tell us more about humanity than some bit of !Shock Horror! in the tabloid presses.
Don’t get me wrong, kitchen sink dramas can be robust in how they detail the tone, aesthetic, dynamics of daily life and as such, can tell sharp, lucid tales about people, particularly people who otherwise seldom get a proper hearing. But they can’t get at the richness of human consciousness - the primordial soup, the lizard brain, the id, the ego, the animal, the child - that persists in us, that often motivates our ambitions, desires. ‘Real’ fictionalised dramas, often about poverty, crime, violence, are more compelling and authentic than ‘reality TV’, but all the same, they tend to treat human life as though we are only motivated from the without, not the within.
Julie Roberts as Vivian in Pretty Woman
But reality TV doesn’t even get to the conscious level, it just voyeuristically glosses over the top. The emotional petrol that fuels the popularity of the sex industry is seldom exposed through underlit expositions of women in lacy bloomers telling their tale of wonder/woe, cross-cut with awkward male bodies with blurred out faces, sullenly extolling the vices of the bachelor life, any more than desire is revealed through over-glossed porn shoots. Pretty Woman, taken at face value, is utter fluff, but it knows that the lust to be a main character in an intense but improbable affair, which elevates both lover’s spiritual state …sustains many people daunted by life’s persistent tendency to disappoint. Secret Diary of a Call Girl skirts over many of the pitfalls of being a high class escort, but it gives a liturgy for the dream many young women have of living comfortably, autonomously and possibly within the bowels of the big city. One of my personal indulgences, Cheri (based on Collette’s novels about courtesans) is a clunky, but sumptuously shot elegy to the bitter sweetness of aging beauty. There is that earworm modern lullaby, “do you want the truth or something beautiful?” I’m not convinced those things are as mutually exclusive as they might seem.
Michelle Pfeiffer as a retiring Courtesan in Cheri
Cora Leigh, Yorkshire & Travelling Escort, Companion & Dominatrix xxx
Independent Escort, Dominatrix & Companion in West Yorkshire & The United Kingdom
Memoirs of Happy Hooker
Does anyone recall the phrase “happy hooker”?
The concept that underpinned it was all the rage in the noughties, the decade in which liberal sex work politics were most effectively cemented. Lots of new(ish) ideas about escorts and other lay-for-pay gals (porn stars, glamour models, general strumpets) filtered into the mainstream. Stuff about sex worker’s rights and breaking stigmas around promiscuous and/or transactional female sexuality and so forth. And a prolific array of films, books, journalism, memoirs, and other medias, which portrayed us casual concubines, somewhat over-earnestly in many cases, as a charismatic, effervescent people, unworthy of the loathing and disgust that had hitherto came our way.
Indeed, though much of the pink-poodling about high class escorts and modern day courtesans was motivated by the same individualistic urban consumerism that was just en vogue in the ‘sex and the city’ zeitgeist. And it could be argued, though it all seems somewhat passé now, to have helped counter a long swell of fairly troubling historical attitudes to women who stepped outside of presumed acceptable sexual and social bounds.
For example, as I am currently in Yorkshire…1970s Yorkshire proved a bleak period for sex workers, as the frankly heart rendering attitudes towards ‘unruly’ women came on full display during the femicidalism of Peter Sutcliffe. The police and the media participated in vindicating his violence, because his victims were women who were, outrageously, ‘out and about’. And that isn’t just a euphemism for sex worker; some of the women killed by Sutcliffe were literally, just ‘out and about’. Having a glass of wine. Without their husband. Heaven forfend. That was enough to cast them in shame and to, if not justify, but ‘mitigate’ the barbarism that ended their life. Many will remember the particularly dispiriting pronouncement by the police officer Jim Hobson, after Sutcliffe killed a middle class, teenage girl: “he has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls.”
That word. Innocent. It’s so wrongfully loaded. To bring home the point, I recall some moons back, an article in The Guardian about police attitudes to women in the sex industry who were murdered, and one officer quote always resonates in the darker recesses of my memory; “They are shit, killed by shit, who gives a shit”.
So. There is that.
I daresay the vilifying idea that women whose business is sex are a tawdry bunch, probably still lurks about, although less routinely and unabashedly. It is also possibly true - far be it from me to make grand anthropological statements without proper study - that the archetypes ‘happy hooker’, or her less glamorous sister, ‘the hooker with the heart’ that got their nose into popular culture - have been serviceable in this regard. It was humanising, to a degree, but also somewhat cloying. There was time, in the late noughties, when you couldn’t move for workaday memoirs of escorts and bordello bad girls, lining the £1 bins of The Works or WhSmiths, and other such dignified literary outlets. These were knock offs of the very successful and critically lauded The Intimate Adventures of A London Call Girl by Brooke Magnanti and her Manhattan predecessor, Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, themselves riffing on an old history of whorish pulp, like the original ghost written Happy Hooker, Madame Xaviera Hollander’s classic in the prostitute canon.
Indeed, the prostitute/courtesan memoir is an old tradition - I myself am currently trying to peel through my namesake, Cora Pearl’s diary (she being the English darling of the 19th century demimonde, a French culture of women of dubious morality) though am finding it delightfully/frustratingly, and no doubt unintentionally, ‘postmodern’ in its casual attitude towards characterisation and narrative structure. To give you an idea, if Quentin Tarantino was a Victorian courtesan and he wrote a memoir, it would’ve read like Cora’s.
But though women of ill-repute have often found themselves popularised to the novel/memoir, in the noughties and early parts of the 2010s, this writerly jive seemed to go into full production, with the same three stories being told repetitiously, with varying degrees of literacy…1. the glamorous, snarky, middle-class girl who plays hooker for a few years, because she loves sex and handbags, before becoming an academic/scientist/journalist/lawyer/wife of a bigwig…2. the rags to riches story about the counsel estate mudlark who makes it good through whoredom, only, as a consequence of drugs and pimps and general excess, makes it back to rags again…3. the tragicore memoir, the story of someone trapped in a cycle of relentless abuse and hopeful escape.
Brooke Magnanti & Billie Piper, actress in the SDOC adaptation
I’ll be candid; I’ve never really enjoyed any of the ones I’ve picked up. The conjecturable truth is…just because someone has a sort-of interesting life does not de facto mean they will write an interesting book. And I know this to my cost because I’ve had a go myself, and it was utter horseradish. And I’m ok with words and stuff, but memoirs are a tricky beast to tame, in the writer realm. The Intimate Adventures of A London Call Girl is by far the strongest of the modern iterations I’ve put my nose to. Its sharp, structured, observant, and oddly moorish, but the main character (presumably some version of Ms BM herself) is somewhat difficult for me to get along with; self-absorbed, oscillating between arrogance and entitled insecurity, rude to other women and oddly sterile and unfeeling in her attitude to life and sex, despite protestations to the opposite. And if it were more obviously fictionalising, there might be a knowingness to this; her ‘character’ could be drawn as some anti-heroine, like Plath in The Bell Jar, whose suicidal protagonist is wilfully tricky to like.
But Magnanti seems blithe to her own character flaws, which make it an ultimately strangely discordant read, especially because in the moment it’s so easy to get through. Which is why, in the end, it qualifies as junk. Fun, clever, sharp junk. Things that are fun but ultimately ephemeral, are junk, by definition. And I can’t help feeling that the ovations from the literati about it at the time was an over exertion bought on by the lazy prejudice that hookers wouldn’t be able to string a sentence between them, let alone write a competent beach read. Indeed, there was a period when Magnani’s name had yet to come out of anonymity, that the pundits were sure! she was actually a middle-class man. Martin Amos perhaps.
In any case. I wasn’t fond of the image of an independent escort the book bought around, the whole hating other women, seeing yourself as ineffably cool and ‘one of the boys’, never sat well with me. But there again, that wasn’t a malady suffered only by escorts writing frothy books, it was a product of its time. Think how loved SATC’s Carrie Bradshaw was once upon a time and how disliked she is now. Pre-recession Anglo society was marked by ‘main character syndrome’ and its just not stood the test of time. It doesn’t come off so well in the more cynical, wordly, ‘we are all in this together’ 2020s. Maybe it was a necessary stage of something; in order to get society to be more mindful about the fact that sex workers are real people, needed a touch of the Thatcher style of feminine ego to get it in the presses. And all things considered, these happy hooker books probably offered some kind of service against the dehumanisations on show in the Sutcliffe affair. Even the tragedy versions of the prostitute memoir make the more distressing iteration of the sex industry - sex slavery and trafficking - less of a question of bad women, than bad situations.
And so, I’ll not likely go back to reading any of the ones I have collected, gathering dust, and won’t harm myself (and others) by writing one (this blog post is harm enough). But I guess I should graciously thank them.
Cora Leigh, Yorkshire & Travelling Escort, Companion & Dominatrix xxx
Independent Escort, Dominatrix & Companion in West Yorkshire & The United Kingdom
Class Whores
“In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.”
William Golding
Class, class, all is class. Us British are as moved emotionally and culturally by the notion and fact of class, as the Yanks are about race, or the French about sexuality, or the Italians about, I dunno,…art, masculinity… sofrito mix? It’s a vexatious issue, and a degree of intuitive sensitivity is needed to understand the fine tissue of social expectations permeating around one’s presumed class or status. Oh, we are supposed to be over it all that now; we are a post-class society educated into mobility; the noble Americans showed us the way! Off we clambered from the precarious ladder of class and into the great colossus of material inequity! If we follow them all the way down, we can be free to fill our pockets full of rank success, from the castles made of sand of poor health care, junk food induced chronic sickness, lawless police knock abouts and feral firearms going off hither and yon.
But, in any case, we are not, are we? I still feel the sticky oppressiveness of anxiety amidst the files of the petite bourgeoisie; who is making more money, who is set to inherit, who has made the wiser real estate decisions and nabbed a more respectable bit of fluff to plop into said real estate. All hidden under the skirts of middle class banter, a conversational style that manages to be both foamy and acidic at once - the bitchy put down which is actually deeply respectful which is actually deeply seething - a finely brewed bouquet that my nose is too unsophisticated to grasp…
Have you have had what you perceived at the time to be a ‘good old laugh’ with an old workmate and later, as you peddle home (on the bus, in the Saab, at the back of the horse drawn carriage) you realise they had spent the better part of the conversation putting you into whatever they imagined your place to be? It’s hit you, suddenly, like a cluster fuck of old coat hangers falling out of your Ikea flat pack wardrobe, in your eclectically decorated Victorian terrace.
Or maybe they weren’t? Maybe that quip about how great it was to “see you going across in the world” was one they always pull out at dinner parties, like a magic trick, and quite by coincidence, what with your chronic lack of promotions, it was just too on the money for you. And maybe the kindly/sickly bit about how “brave” you are to try online dating after the hard time you have managing your bank balance or your belt size, was just a kindly meant projection of their own deep malaise? But, bugger it, why not hate that smug arsehole anyhow? Just in case. Because you’ve been at enough British dinner parties to know the smell of quiet, projectile disdain is everywhere - like sulphur during the ether crisis - so how the hell are you ever to truly know? Sod giving the benefit of the doubt, you’ve done it too many times already, you’ve been the butt of too many ‘playful’ aren’t you doing poorly, jokes. So why not spend all night searching his Instagram for fat, drunk, shit car, ‘unfortunate looking’ girlfriend pictures … buckle in, pull on the gas mask and have a good hunt for minor misfortune. We’ve all been there.
Perhaps that faux politeness is the brilliance of it. The smoke and mirrors of passive class judgements, the slippery uncertainty of coded one-upmanship and the classic battleground that is the “vanity of small differences”. And is it preferable to the more overt, highly weaponised, tanked to buggery competitiveness of the aformentioned culture of the American dream? Is it possible to get the theoretically open field of its affirmation and aspiration culture, without all the guns and bitches and electric chairs and garrulous arrogance and supernaturally white teeth, and all that other blood-splattered sherbet?
The sex biz has its own needling umbrages about class. Vertically and horizontally the ‘whorearchy’ is alive and well; in some corners disputes plunder on about whether sadomasochism counts as sex, or pornstars are ‘taxonomically’ still prostitutes. In others, anxieties about transactional sexuality are mollified by odes to courtesanry, elitism and luxury. These in turn inflame the insecurities of less privileged or aspirant whores, who present their irritation about the high-mindedness of escorts who claim some professionalism as satirical popping of deluded balloons, although the energy of insecurity is always gently belabouring when folks gush forward to slash down tall poppies.
In Harlots, the ‘respectable’ pimp Will, when confronted by a client made irritable by a price hike on his girls after a move to a finer house said, (words to the effect) “I can get twice the price for some sweetmeats, if they come wrapped in a pretty paper!” I’m conflicted. Cocks enter cunnies in much the same fashion, irrespective of pomp and ceremony, and yet eroticism often has need for magical thinking - the mystifications of seduction - to get it furnaces going. But there again, perhaps that is a romantic affliction I carry that many don’t share. Indeed, whenever I get my hopes up about the dreamy possibilities of sexuality, I come across the sterility and cynicism of popular pornography, and I am disabused. But it's also because I am instinctively troubled by a conflict I have between the ‘ political troubles’ of elitism and the threat of mediocrity that arrives out bitter humbling, disguised as just egalitarianism. The digital age has given escorts a cornucopia of public relations possibilities, and many take to it with aplomb, and others (clients and escorts alike) watch nervously at the potential creep of higher prices and more competitive standards. The paradox of self improvement; as you gain more ground, you find yourself with ever greater expectations.
Well, I’ll not solve the riddle tonight, perhaps because its raining, perhaps because I’m tired, and perhaps, as a person of ‘middling’ aspiration, as a whore and enthusiastic mediocrist, because I never take it upon myself to have a strong opinion or a definitive answer. And thus, as is appropriate, tomorrow, you’ll find me in Leeds, on a poor day, in a middling hotel, with a fine bit of lingerie, a high dose of enthusiasm and a offering a positively gaudily ambitious good time.
Cora Leigh, Yorkshire & Travelling Escort, Companion & Dominatrix xxx
Independent Escort, Dominatrix & Companion in West Yorkshire & The United Kingdom
Whore on the Train
I’m going to have a prolonged mardy about trains, is there a more British activity?
I’m taking a wheeled tuna tin to Cardiff from Manchester, my gargantuan case packed with an unnecessarily large quantity of silk, condoms, and cocoa butter. My over-enthusiastic preparedness is being transported by an inadequate vessel for what is, I believe, a fairly long journey. I’m still awaiting the progress of economic, cultural, gastronomical & technological innovation to hit local transportation. I’m not really asking for a lot. For my £100 return ticket I want a comfortable seat, a roomy flip desk, a clean toilet with coconut, rather than ammonia, scented toilet paper, and an actual buffet car. Not a little plastic cul-de-sac, pilfering astronaut food for re-mortgaging prices, stocked with stodgy paninis with viscera that manage to be both piping hot, and curiously devoid of any texture or flavour, save for the faint taint of sour mayonnaise. And diet colas, which are, in all senses, the putridity of evil boiled down to its liquid essence.
I should be a restaurant critic, the dream ticket.
British Rail sell me some actual recognisable nosh, please, for the love of Wicca. We live in an era when technophiles are discussing the possibility of nanobots being injected into the neurological structure to create a simulation that is three dimensionally life like, and proponents of biosphere living used to protect against the gaseousness of industrial pollution* and you can’t even get a table-cloth waiter service to serve me a reasonably priced, organic chicken salad or lobster ravioli with a real cappuccino or Chablis. Where is the progress, I ask you? Hell, the utilitarianism of modern Yankified city connection & consumption must be a regression, I’m certain. Oh, for the days (I imagine once existed) when some top-heavy Tilly, salt-buttered a piece of tiger loaf, wedged it with real cheddar and served it with a medicinal tot of brandy! Hay, if you were born in 1900 and thus were nicely middle aged around the period of Brief Encounter (the cosiest bit of cuckolding that exists anywhere to my knowledge), can you let me know if this dream of ye old England I have is anything close to reality…? No pedantic responses please, just dreamy ones.
I’m getting from A to B though, right? And I have a seat. I could be on my feet in a vestibule from Kings Cross to Exeter, loitering next to some pleasingly garrulous pink cheeked Foxton’s employees, trying to work out what a space the size and shape of a train toilet would fetch for in different area codes of the Capital, “That piss box is prime real estate, you know”. I did indeed once overhear this very assertion, and smell aside, considered how I’d fit into said train toilet, a stylish Japanese style capsule furniture set.
Ahhh, memorable British rail experiences! What about the time I was caught in carriage with some guerrilla football fans, dancing with their fists? I had to wedge myself as far into my seat as I could go, the safer option than those fools who tried to make for some kind of exit. I got some chubby man arse in my face that day, but that is infinitely better than being the unintended landing strip for dozens of troglodyte punches fired up on Fosters. The air that day was rife. That’s all I can call it. Rife.**
British trains are not just an emblem of bad food, overcrowding and thuggishness, but nihilism. I was once on the train when some anguished soul - vanquished by desperation or disappointment - threw himself at its eviscerating mercy. I weeped for him, behind my copy of The Guardian’s Saturday supplement, and peered over to see the captain of the vessel, having assessed the damage, moving solemnly through the carriage. His cheeks were blue, the rims to his eyes salmon pink and his focus absorbed in existential crisis. He, one hopes, had just had the worst experience of his life, but was greeted by two harumphing Veras in the seat front of me, complaining about their missed hair appointments. What was the hold up? they lamented. The curl and sets just wouldn’t last another day, much like that poor fellow. Across the carriage a young Keats, a man after my own sentiment, composed an elegy on a sepia paged paper back, and read it to a generally inpatient carriage.
This ditty was not supposed to be about trains, it was going to be some romantic ode to the pleasure of touring. But in a fashion, the grey, musky swamp that is British Rail is a good pinpoint for what pleasure isn’t. Its inverse, its antithesis, its natural predator. We all ferment within its bowls semi regularly, patiently resenting the profligacy of its indifference to daily misery. And the temerity of its shareholders for daring to charge us the same price it would cost us to get from Bristol to Bordeux than from, I dunno, Bath to Stroud (the colonic entry point of hell***). How to do they live with themselves? I’m someone who tries to take pride in the things I put out into the world, and if doing a better job takes me longer and costs me more, that usually seems worth it. I don’t know who any of the shareholders of the major train companies are (and I can’t search engine it because the train WIFI is much too paltry) but they roll about in their inflating profits whilst spewing out into the universe a product that I would challenge them to find but one enthusiastic, green smiley faced customer of. Aren’t you embarrassed guys? Just a little? To be just so crap at your job?
I write this in a vestibule among concentrated mass, confronting the inadequacy of their journey with an amused disappointment. Shared shoulder shrugging, gentle guffaws, “oh dear” we all say in unison, as the trolly dolly, selling £4 stale bara brith and when-did-they-get-so-small? Mars bars, barges through, taking out shins as it goes. Someone says; “Hay, remember when Parisian police officers lost their lunchtime beer rights and they just fucked the place up? They take no shit. Why are we living like this”. It wasn’t a question, but a resignation. Then something about interest rates and energy prices and politicians being all the same. I, and others nod, absent minded. Police officers rioting you say? There is something seductive about that thought. Here I am, lusting after testosterone fuelled chaos, whilst quietly sipping Styrofoam tea, miraculous in its insipidity, surrounded by the light stink of social dilapidation. It’s the British way.
I love touring I just don’t like moving; when will the teleportation come into common practice? Before I hang up my handcuffs, one hopes. But I’ll be in Cardiff soon. I’ll get into my apartment and fill a bath with water and rose oil and put on some Portishead and sink myself in. I’ll lurk at the bottom of the bath like a stingray slithered on the soft rocks of the ocean floor. Then I’ll dry off, slather myself in some Sanctuary cream and peridot coloured silk, and then lounge, until someone else comes to lounge with me. I shall be cleansed.
Cora Leigh, Yorkshire & Travelling Escort, Companion & Dominatrix xxx
Independent Escort, Dominatrix & Companion in West Yorkshire & The United Kingdom
*That second one I have actually made up on a whim, but it sounds about right, and if it isn’t happening, let me know, and I’ll quickly draft the proposal for a solid dystopia for all interested publishers.
** This is also all pure fabrication, but it sounded plausible. And isn’t that the real problem with Britain today?
*** I’ve not been there but I know this to be true because I have seen The Office. At least 4 times. That’s reconnaissance.