Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law

by Alison Bass

  This playboy philosophy goes hand in hand with a postindustrial information economy that requires extensive travel and 24/7 work schedules. Bernstein and others contend that such work demands make monogamous relationships difficult. The decline in marriage rates, the doubling of divorce rates, and a 60 percent increase in the number of single-person households in recent decades are all profound shifts in family composition that have contributed to a redrawing of what intimacy means.5 As Bernstein argues, “Whether in the public sphere of work, in the private sphere of the family, or in the embodied sphere of desire, the postmodern individual tends toward ever-increasing autonomy and mobility, unfettered by any form of binding or permanent social ties.”6

  This sense of disconnect from community and traditional moral values is precisely what the late cultural critic Neil Postman warned about in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. His book was published on the cusp of the Internet revolution, in 1992, but it has turned out to be eerily prescient. Postman argues that a world dominated by technology casts aside traditional values in favor of “technical expertise and the ecstasy of consumption.”7

  Indeed, many consumers of commercial sex today are high-tech executives and traveling businessmen who prefer the “clear and bounded nature” of a commercial sexual encounter to the messy realities of an actual relationship.8 Take, for example, David, a clean-cut Asian man in his early forties who is a regular at Julie Moya’s brothel in midtown Manhattan. David is an entrepreneur who made his first million with a high-tech start-up. Even though he is married, he comes to Julie’s place for sexual variety, to experience pleasure without getting emotionally involved.

  Or consider Steve, a married thirty-five-year-old insurance manager who lives in a California suburb and has turned to prostitutes because sex with his wife has become infrequent since the birth of their child. For Steve, the “market-mediated sexual encounter is morally and emotionally preferable to the ‘nonprofessional affair’ because of the clarifying effect of payment,” Bernstein writes. Steve believes that seducing someone into an affair is inherently more dishonest than the “clean cash-for-sex market transactions” that he participates in.9

  Neil Postman would not have been surprised to hear that many men today turn to the Internet to find sexual partners who fulfill their longing for intimacy and adventure. According to Bernstein and other sociologists, such men are seeking a real and reciprocal erotic connection but one with no strings attached. They want a girlfriend experience for an hour, a few hours, even overnight, but in the end they are not interested in traditional attachments. Yet many of these men, who call themselves “hobbyists,” exchange notes in online chat rooms, discussing how authentic the sexual partners they paid for were, how well they approximated the girlfriend experience, even to the point of kissing and not asking for money up front. Some clients even boast of their ability to give their paid partners authentic pleasure. In a 2012 survey of clients who posted comments on the Erotic Review website, 70 percent of the men, when asked to list the most attractive characteristic of the sex workers they frequented, chose “they act like girlfriends and not like prostitutes at all.”10

  Indeed, while some men who post on this website are very clear that their relationship with a sex worker is fantasy and not based on any real or genuine connection, a majority of the men whose comments were catalogued in the 2012 study felt that their relationships with certain sex workers involved genuine expressions of intimacy, however limited by the paid transaction. As the study coauthors Christine Milrod and Ronald Weitzer note, these men feel “they are in a paid relationship — albeit part-time and remunerative — rather than simply paying for sex.”11 Here is what one such client posted about his relationship with a sex worker: “She’s been very open about her life and husband, as I’ve been about mine and my wife. We give each other emotional and intellectual support. When I think of her, I do not think so much about the particular sexual things we do (which are certainly fine) but about who she is . . . what she’s going through this week, etc. Yes, it’s a paid friendship — but it’s still a friendship. After all, a wife is in a real economic sense often essentially paid too (Bostongreg).”12

  Bernstein argues that it is “precisely the flexibility, transience and flux of postmodernity” that create clients’ yearnings for what she calls “bounded authenticity.” The act of sexual purchase, she says, “serves as a temporary salve to clients’ contradictory desires for both transience and stability, for fungible intimacy as well as durable connection.”13

  Needless to say, such contradictory impulses can cause emotional upheaval. According to the comments on the Erotic Review website, some men end up falling in love with the women they call their “providers” and that creates problems, particularly when the sex worker doesn’t reciprocate those feelings or makes it clear she wants to maintain intimacy only within the context of a paid relationship. A few men commented that they were particularly confused when a sex worker said she loved them; they didn’t know whether this was part of the fantasy they had created together or a more genuine emotion. A number of the hobbyists commenting on the Erotic Review website cautioned others about the emotional risks involved in long-term associations with a particular sex worker and talked about how to avoid getting hurt. As illustrated by comments posted on the website, for some clients, long-term relations with a sex worker can wreak emotional havoc (just as noncommercial sexual relationships can). At the same time, Milrod and Weitzer note, “For the majority of clients in our sample, the phenomenon of ‘‘bounded authenticity’’ is recognized and accepted. They cherish what they believe are genuine feelings but also realize that they are paying for intimacy during a set amount of time.”14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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