Reply #1 doghead's post
continued from above:
<<<
The big part of my job started at the door. You don’t pay attention to the envelope he has. You pretend it doesn’t even exist. You’re smiling because he’s a handsome man, and there’s chemistry. If he’s shy, you offer him a glass of wine. If he’s super shy, you ask, can you massage him, there’s nothing wrong with a massage, right?
Sometimes I would say, “Oh, you’re so handsome,” because people like to be flattered, even if it’s not true. People like to believe the better things, because believing better things is easier. And guys who are paying $1,000 an hour really believe the better things! If he can afford $1,000 an hour, he already thinks he’s cool. When a guy’s got money, he thinks he’s cool, cooler than regular people.
They all wanted you to come, and they wanted you to come more than once. The 60-year-old guy who wants me to come five times before he has an orgasm believes it’s because he cares about me. But it’s because he wants to prove to himself that he can still make a young girl come. (I told lies for a living, but the biggest lies in the world are the lies people tell themselves.) So of course I pretended to come. And I learned that the best, most convincing, easiest way to show my clients I had an orgasm was just to say, “I just came.” That’s it. Nothing fancy. I’m not that good an actress, and it’s not necessary, anyway. “Oh, I came” would always do the trick. They believed it. They were so proud. The truth is, for most girls, you can’t tell: It’s like God, or love, you don’t see it, but you believe it exists.
As important as it was for me to do, and say, certain things, equally important was what not to do and say. I didn’t ask about the guy’s family. Not because it was crossing any boundaries (you’d be surprised at how many men brag about their kids) but because what if someone had just died? That would make him sad. I never, ever wanted to make a client sad.
For the same reason, I didn’t talk about anything that was bothering me. In Russia we have an expression: “If I’m hungry and you’re full, you won’t understand me.” A billionaire doesn’t understand what shitty problems I have. It’s bad business. Telling your guy might get him to help you once, or twice, but it’s going to turn a potential regular, long-term client into a non-repeat customer. A guy will complain to you over and over, but he doesn’t want to hear your complaints. I promise you that.
I tried to be entertaining. I would tell clients I just got back from Dubai, or Hawaii. I’ve never been to either place, but I learned about them on television and I told stories about all the sheiks in the marble hotels in the desert, and the big waves at Oahu. It made me more exotic, more interesting. Guys like to fuck women with pretty faces and slim bodies, but they also like to fuck interesting girls.
I don’t eat a lot. Once a day I ordered vegetable fried rice from a place around the corner because it’s fast — five minutes to cook, five minutes to deliver, five minutes to eat — and if I spent two hours in a restaurant, that’s at least $1,600 I was not depositing into my bank account. I eat slower now, but still not a lot.
If a guy wanted to take me to dinner, I would have a salad, and juice. No garlic, no onions, no coffee. Nothing that stinks. Even if he doesn’t mind, other men will. I rarely drink and don’t do drugs. Payment in advance. Condoms, of course. No discussion of price over the phone.
I was available 12 hours a day, noon till midnight. I was always prompt, always nice, even when the client was rude. One or two bad reviews can hurt business.
I liked to book two or three days in advance. If a guy emailed and said, “Hey, what’s up, are you free later?” I wouldn’t see a guy like that. It’s better to have two great, dependable clients than 10 occasional customers. That’s what’s called the “80–20 principle.” I read it in a business book.
I would travel with clients. I wanted them to know I was special, but not bitchy. So when I told them I wanted first class on the jet, I didn’t say, “You have to treat me right!” I said, “I have really long legs and in coach they get cramped and then I lose my flexibility, I cannot do doggie style so good.” That seemed to do the trick.
Even though what I really want to do is to be a film director, or a psychologist, I study business, too. I had to. One of the biggest things I always read was to learn from your mistakes.
My biggest mistake when I started was when the guy asked if I had a boyfriend, and I said no, which was true. Then when he asked why not, I said “Because he couldn’t fuck me good.” I said that because I thought it would get the men excited. But what happened is the guy would try to fuck you so hard. So hard! I could tell it wasn’t the natural way they did it, it was awful. So after that, when a guy would ask why I don’t have a boyfriend, I would frown a little and say, “Well, he was Jewish and I didn’t want to convert because it would have killed my parents,” and the guy would look at me and hold my hand and say, “Oh, I totally understand, poor thing,” and all the guys would be so sweet, and gentle. Even the Jewish guys.
Ninety percent of my clients were married, and most were bankers. If you know an investment banker who tells you he’s never been to an escort, you know a saint — or more likely a liar.
About a third of the guys liked to watch me masturbate. I’d say 98 percent wanted to go down on me. Fifty percent told me what big dicks they have. The ones who bothered me were the ones who really did have giant dicks (about one fifth of the guys who thought they did). No girl wants to take one of those on. Eighty percent asked if I came.
Some wanted to take me shopping; others wanted to take me to dinner. One guy just sat and looked at me like I was a statue. I asked him if he didn’t want to do something, to have some fun, and he just shushed me. Another guy just fucked me for an hour, and he kept making train noises, “Wooo, wooo, wooo.” I put my finger in his ass so he’d come faster, but it didn’t work. Finally I just lay there, didn’t even pretend I was enjoying it. That’s rare for me, to stop pretending. But come on. Woo, woo, wooo? It was annoying.
Men are all alike, but they’re all different, too. One guy paid me $20,000 a month and I needed to be available to him two full days and nights every week. He was 62, divorced, a very nice guy. I would have liked a couple other guys like him. Sometimes we went to movies, or to dinner. Sometimes we fucked. He had cancer and he said he loved me and wanted to marry me. I don’t know how much money he had. I didn’t want to marry him and find out he just had debt. And I wasn’t comfortable asking him how much he would leave me. This might sound odd, but it just doesn’t seem right to ask. Plus, I didn’t want to make him feel bad. For business reasons, and because I liked him.
He used to get four or five escorts a week, but he stopped after he met me because he said he loves me. I needed to be honest with him. So I told him, “I like you, but I don’t love you. I can’t fall in love in just a few months.” He said that was okay, I was young, I would learn.
I had another guy in his 60s, from Illinois. He said he wanted me to move to Illinois with him. “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.” I didn’t come from Russia to the United States so that I could live in fucking Illinois! I didn’t tell him that, but it’s what I thought. He said he had come to New York to find a wife, because New York was the best, and escorts in New York were the best. He said they all like to fuck so much. They all like to please you. I was in a bad mood, so I said, “We like to please you because you pay us!” We stopped seeing each other after that.
I had one guy videotape us having sex and when I noticed I grabbed his phone and erased it and told him to get the hell out of my apartment. I had another guy tell me he wanted free sex, or he was going to call the cops. I told him I would put his phone number up on Backpage.com and say he was a gay escort. You run into assholes, and you have to know how to handle them.
Young guys are bad. Virgins are awful. Young virgins are a nightmare. I had one guy, all he had done was watch porn and jerk off until he was 25. So it was “Do this position, do that position, turn over, turn around.” I don’t think he even knew how to talk to a woman. I felt sad for him. But I tried to be nice.
Clients fall into four categories. There are the guys who want to pay for your companionship. There are the guys who think they’re buying a relationship. There are the ones who think they own you. And then there are the couples. The first group is the simplest. The second, while they think they’re sweet, can be much more demanding. The guys in the third group were the biggest headaches. One guy demanded to pour honey all over me before he fucked me. I said no. He said he’d pay double and I said no. He said he’d pay triple and I said okay. The whole time, I was thinking about cleaning the sheets, and another two and half hours of hair and makeup. That’s when I decided that if he ever asked me for honey again, I’d charge quadruple. At least.
My favorite kind of client was the fourth kind — the guy who invited me over for a threesome with his wife, or girlfriend.
A great thing about doing couples: With a couple, you would go through the door and see a table covered with good wine, different types of cheese and fruits, like it’s a celebration of something. If it’s just a guy, you see a glass of water and an envelope on the shelf.
There were also more positive emotions — more emotions, period. With a guy, you feel like he wants to have it all, to make sure he’s getting his money’s worth. When it’s a girl, you can just relax and have your conversation. You can eat fruit.
Usually threesomes are two or three hours long. The couples were always shy, even though they had done threesomes before. (I was never the first for a couple. I’m not sure why.) I had to do the first step. “I’d like to get to know you better,” I would say, or, “I’d like to kiss you.” Even with the emotions and the conversation, I knew, they were not paying me to talk.
First I would be with the girl. Then the guy would be standing there and wouldn’t know what to do, so I would invite him to kiss with us. All of a sudden we’d all be naked, in the bed, but then it would be the girl and me having fun, and the guy doing his own thing, and honestly, I would forget about him. His girlfriend would definitely forget about him. I promise you that.
And then after 30 minutes, she would remember she had a boyfriend and that he might be lonely. She would usually give him a blow job then. Ninety percent of the time I wouldn’t do much with the guy in a threesome. Partly because I was having so much fun with his girlfriend, but mostly because it wouldn’t have been good business. I didn’t want the girls to be jealous.
I loved doing couples, but I charged more than twice as much. I got $2,000 an hour, and the sessions were usually at least two hours. I charged more not because the work was harder — it obviously wasn’t — but because I could. That’s the cool thing about capitalism.
It was hard to quit. My psychologist said the best way to leave the business was to think about doing it the rest of my life. Usually, a girl thinks she’ll work one more week, save a few more thousand dollars. Or one month, one more trip to Las Vegas. But then another year has passed. I would see girls on The Erotic Review with 600 reviews. That’s 10 years, at least. I didn’t want to be one of those girls.
Some of my girlfriends have quit but they haven’t managed to stay quit. One got a job on Wall Street. They pay her $6,000 a month. I used to make that in a day. So did she. She escorts in her spare time. It’s hard to give up money.
Another girlfriend got a job at an advertising agency. Nice people, good benefits, interesting work. But she started at $80,000 a year. She knew she could make that in two months as an escort, so she decided she would just take the occasional client, just to “supplement” her income. Now she’s almost full-time at both jobs. She’s making money, but she’s a wreck.
I don’t know if I would recommend being an escort. I know that there are dangers. Getting arrested is just one thing. I read about the serial killers. Child trafficking. Violent pimps. I think those people should be locked up forever. But I never felt close to any of that stuff. I think it’s because I approached it like a business. My psychologist says I was lucky.
I miss some things, not just the money. I enjoyed to dress nice all the time, to put on makeup. Now I don’t have a reason to even put nail polish on, and I miss that. I’m wearing my T-shirt and jeans every day for weeks, and I do my own manicure and pedicure, and sometimes that makes me a little sad.
I’ve had one boyfriend since I quit escorting. I met him at a nice bar. He was just a few years older than me, very polite, a banker. When I met him, he told me he used to fly in his private jet to Vegas all the time. I believed him. But then when we went out, it was always, “Let’s just meet for drinks, why don’t you come over later?”
Since then I’ve been dating. I use the internet, and everyone — guys and girls — posts ads of themselves on Match, or OkCupid, or wherever, saying how great they are, how they like long walks on the beaches and they’re looking for fun, or love, or whatever.
Dating is weird. My clients were older than the guys I’m dating now, and these guys don’t have that much money. Clients, if they like you, they spoil you very well. Boyfriends don’t really care. They have their dinners with work, their ball games they watch with their guy friends.
Before my job I never did blow jobs for boyfriends. If they would ask, I would be like, “Are you kidding me?” Or if they would say, “Change positions,” I would be like, “What are you talking about?”
Since I quit, no blow jobs, either. If you’re dating somebody and he didn’t live good before, and you start giving him blow jobs and doing different positions, you can spoil him. I don’t want to spoil someone that much.
If someone’s not paying you, you don’t have to do blow jobs, you don’t have to smile all the time, you can be yourself. But after a while you feel like something is missing. The something is money. You’re sitting in the same apartment, you’re the same you, but something is missing. Your wallet is empty. Sex is sex, but money is money.
I don’t regret what I’ve done with my body, or my life. I had some good times and some not-so-good times. I’ve met some interesting people and some idiots. I’ve learned a lot about what men and women want and need.
I don’t eat $100 breakfasts anymore. No smiling blow jobs. I don’t hang out with some of my old escort girlfriends. I miss them, but I have to weigh, okay, on one side friendships with whores, on the other side, a family, and my future. So I make a choice.
In one of my film classes, we watched The Great Gatsby. Gatsby always wanted to be something better. He would never really do it, but he tried. The girls in this business, they want to touch this new world all around them, so they go to expensive stores, expensive restaurants. You want to be someone you have never been. If you’re a girl who is pretty and has dreams and maybe comes from a small town where men behave differently toward you because you’re prettier than the other girls, you think that will help you be something better. So you try.
It can help you get money, that’s for sure. But after, you have to find that world for yourself.
Svetlana Z is a 24-year-old former escort living in New York City.
This story was edited by Bobbie Johnson, fact-checked by Emily Loftis, and copy-edited by Lawrence Levi. Photographs by Pascal Perich for Matter.
Link : https://medium.com/matter/sex-is ... -money-e7c10091713f | |
