I am now even more convinced that not all prostitutes fall into the sterotypical media portrayal: that is, they have been abused by family/friends/significant others, they do drugs, alcohol, they have self harmed. Why? Well, because I’ve recently read Belle de Jour’s book, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl and Miss S’ two Confessions of a Working Girl books.

Miss S states in her book quite explicitly that she has never been abused or done drugs or self harmed. As for Belle, her book was based on her blog (don’t have a link to it at present), and as you may know, her blog/book was made into a documentary series, The Secret Diary of a Call Girl. In which Billie Piper (as Belle) says–in the first episode–that she hasn’t been abused/done drugs/etc.

Add into that that I’ve known prostitutes; been good friends with them. None of them were abused or did drugs. So why did they do it? All of them said it was the money–prostitution is a fairly lucrative business, and was fairly easy for them to do. I assume they meant easy in that it could be done around things like school/other jobs, as two of them mentioned they were in school/working another job.

I think it was Miss S who said that the prostitutes like her, doing it because they want to be doing it, are annoyed by those who think they need saving. Because they don’t.

So. What are prostitutes selling?

Sex? Someone said sex?

Her body? Someone said her body.

Wrong.

Sex is merely a by-product of the session a client has paid for.

From reading the books, at a brothel, you will meet the ladies one by one for a brief introduction and from that introduction, will likely choose the one that interested you most, be that because she had perky tits/a firm ass/long legs/something else. So you’ve chosen Marina, gone to the room with her, and you have an hour. As far as Marina is concerned, you’re there because you want sex. There was no real reason you chose her over the other four ladies. Your hour guarantees her money.

And this is where what she’s selling comes into play. Marina is selling herself. Not in the dirty sense, but in the sense that when you next come in, or call to make an appointment, she wants you to come back and be with her. Because that means more money for her. The prostitutes I chatted with about this said that they will try to do right by their clients, to an extent. One said that some guys will come in and say they’d like to try a girl out for half an hour and if the girl is good, they’ll go for more time.

“Well, fuck them! I’m not going to bend over backwards to make them happy!” is more or less what she said when telling me about that. They don’t break the rules, but they might go further for you. Though this depends on the prostitute and the situation; it’s not an automatic thing.

But in any case, whether or not Marina goes further, she is trying to show that she was the best choice, that she can make your time a fantastic one. All because she wants you to come back to see her.

And speaking of people going for half an hour, that makes no sense to me.

Two hundred dollars for half an hour. Two seventy for three-quarters of an hour. Three thirty for an hour. Four ninety-five for an hour and thirty minutes. Six sixty for two hours. The cost of other time periods can be calculated by adding up the respective break downs.

Were I running the brothel: John Doe spends thirty minutes with Marina and comes back later for thirty minutes with Annika. That’s four hundred dollars. He’d done better to have an hour with one girl. Saving of seventy dollars.

Another situation. John Doe has paid two hundred for thirty minutes with Marina. He decides at the end that he wants another thirty minutes. As far as I’m concerned, that’s another two hundred–not the hundred and thirty that would make it the three hundred thirty for sixty minutes. I can’t tell you how the proper brothels do it–haven’t asked the prostitutes yet–but the way I’d do it seems like a reasonable approach. They were negotiated as separate sessions.

So why only go for thirty minutes instead of sixty if you think you’d extend the time?

This entry was posted by Alex Collins on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 9:30 AM and is filed under Prostitution, Themes, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.