My experience with a prostitute – a feminist perspective

I was on vacation in Atlantic City – a two-week break from my year-long deployment in Iraq. At about 3 a.m., I ran into and eventually had drinks with a woman who I eventually brought up to my room, thinking this was going to be a mere casual hook-up, things that people do on vacation and in bars. Come to find out, before I initiated sex, and we were flirting, she told me that she is an escort and spends time with men for money. In short, it was the beginning of a business for pleasure transaction.

Though my mind was fogged with alcohol, red flags went up – firstly because I’d felt horrible that I’d taken an hour of this woman’s time already, just talking to her, with the full intentions of having sex had she not been a sex worker. Secondly, I had never been in a situation like this before, and didn’t know exactly what to do to tell her I had to intentions of buying her body for my own pleasure.

Having already wasted an hour of her time, with her assuming I knew she was an escort (a term she says she prefers), I made a deal: while I was most certainly sexually attracted to her, my values wouldn’t allow me to actually pay to have sex with her. I would, however, pay for her time to listen to her story and learn something from a group of people I’ve spent to much learning about, yet never had never actually sat down and spoken with.

So there we sat, in my hotel room, and over Jack Daniels, talked about her life, choices and perspectives. She is new to the escort industry, she said – and became an escort after much careful consideration – mostly for the stigma that comes with sex work, but also consideration for the dangers she faced, and the way society and the government look upon her.

I don’t even know where to start, but I’ll lay a few things out to get the ball rolling:

1. Being a war vet does not make you manly. This guy proves it.
2. Sex workers of the sort he met do it because they choose to. Exploitation was not part of the equation.
3. His vagina still had sand in it from his deployment.
4. Prostitution is amoral. Get off your fucking high horse.

There is nothing wrong with respecting a whore for her work -she puts in the time and effort to produce a satisfactory product. There is also nothing wrong with acknowledging a whore as a person because they are people. Big whoop. There is something wrong with patronizing them and being condescending.

If he doesn’t find hiring a prostitute kosher, he should have just said, “oh, well, not interested,” and went back out to find a normal girl. Instead, he sat with her, blue balls crammed up in his pantyhose, and talked.

Of course, if you really believe it is immoral and should be outlawed and that women who choose to go into the profession are secretly coerced, then you probably respect the guy. I think he’s lacking in testosterone.

(Anti-prostitution laws were passed as health-care measures, at least superficially. The real reason was ugly women who wanted to put an embargo on imports. If you get my drift. And my drift means intercourse. For money. Penis. Vagina. Cash.)

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