Escort Manifestos & Stay in their Lane

29 Mar

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.