By Esther
When I was involved in prostitution, I knew some young women who were recruited in Brazil and brought to the UK by people who told them that men in the UK pay large sums to take women out to dinner or be their companions at social events.
The women were promised that they would not be required to have sex with these men. The recruiters arranged for glamourous photos to be taken of the women before they left Brazil. They didn’t tell the women that, as illegal migrants, they would not be able to open bank accounts or sign tenancy agreements in the country they were travelling to and would be unable to access many public services.
Once the women arrived in the UK, they were controlled by others already here who sent them to meet buyers the controllers communicated with through a single, generic profile on a commercial sex website. If a buyer wanted to pay for an activity the older women weren’t willing to perform, they sent out younger women who didn’t speak English well.
The women were never paid to accompany a buyer to dinner or to an event without sex being involved, or to spend time with a buyer who was only seeking company, a version for men of the “lady’s companion” you read about in history books and novels from the 18th and 19th century.
Another young woman I met, an international student who had created an account on the same website having believed that this form of paid companionship was implicit in the term “escort”, told me ruefully that buyers who contacted her never wanted to take her to dinner.
An article recently published in the Metro newspaper promotes “escort services” as a means of reducing male loneliness. It refers to a survey carried out by the commercial sex website Vivastreet and claims the survey shows increasing numbers of sex buyers seeking companionship rather than sex since the pandemic.
The article doesn’t provide a link to the survey, information about how the sample it used was obtained, or how the survey sought to define “escort services” or “sex”.
The survey apparently involved over 21,000 people, including both sex buyers and “sex workers”, in 2022. The article claims that 24% of sex buyers surveyed said they paid purely for company, while 65% of the “sex workers” who took part said they had been hired for companionship appointments which didn’t involve sex.
To frame this data another way, 76% of the sex buyers who took part in the survey said they didn’t pay purely for company, while 35% of the “sex workers” who took part hadn’t experienced being paid for encounters which didn’t involve sex. That isn’t quite the same story, is it?
“Sex worker” is an umbrella term which includes people involved in all parts of the sex industry from stripping and webcamming to porn and prostitution. It has also been used by pimps and brothel-owners to describe themselves.
The euphemisms “escort” or “escort services” have the function of maintaining class distinctions in prostitution and sanitising what a buyer is paying for. They are frequently preceded by “high-end”, not for mere mortals. The fact that “high-end” means higher outgoings to maintain appearances, while the buyer still controls what takes place during the encounter, is never mentioned. It’s no surprise that this was the preferred term in the article.
Quotes in the article from two women about buyers paying them for “company” have the same elitist purpose.
The Metro article contributes to misrepresentation about the sex industry. It misleads readers in the UK and overseas about the income women are likely to receive from buyers if they create profiles on commercial sex websites and what buyers will expect in return. It will assist sex traffickers who already face less risk of prosecution in the UK than those who involve themselves in other forms of human trafficking.
The claim the article makes that higher-caste women in the sex industry are paid for conversation and company only is simultaneously an “othering” of women in the sex industry whose encounters with buyers always involve sexual activity and an acknowledgment that receiving payment to hand over control of sexual activity to another is inherently degrading.
If you are being paid for company and no sexual activity is involved, why would you call yourself a “sex worker”, a term which gives you priority access to in-person appointments at publicly funded sexual health clinics in the UK in recognition of risks to your health and the health of others not associated with mere conversation?
Are women in roles outside the sex industry where having sex with the boss or his friends is an unwritten part of your job description “sex workers”? Having a conversation isn’t criminalised, so why would you need full decriminalisation or legalisation of it?
Most sex buyers are married or in relationships. It is a myth that they are mainly lonely single men. How would paying someone to feign interest in a man, feign pleasure in his company and feign arousal if sexual activity does occur, support that man to develop meaningful and mutually supportive relationships in life?
The buyer quoted in the Metro article says he initially sought company through interactions with women on web-camming sites. He went from one part of the sex industry where the customer controls the encounter to another but claims it was just company he was seeking.
Control of sexual activity through payment is the opposite of an activity where both parties have autonomy over who the activity takes place with and what the activity consists of. Neither of the options he chose will have taught him about mutuality, meaningful companionship, consent or free sexuality.
Why would “company” to reduce loneliness necessitate a woman being in a state of undress from the first encounter? The objectifying expectation of the buyer is the issue demonstrated here. An expectation which has produced, and continues to drive, the normalisation of demands from men, and increasingly young boys, that they receive access to topless or naked photos or films of women and girls as a routine step prior to any meaningful personal interaction.
This normalisation itself drives recruitment into the sex industry, where commercial sex websites like Vivastreet are among those who profit the most. It is a marketing strategy because the biggest threat to the sex industry is free sexuality.
The confusion between the role a woman involved in prostitution or web-camming performs for payment and who they really are contributes to the mind-body dissociation we develop to survive emotionally. For your own safety you need to be wary of revealing too much about yourself and your personal life to a buyer.
A buyer who thinks regular paid encounters means he has some kind of relationship with you, rather than that this is a role-play for pay, is likely to pressurise you into accepting a discount or to put you at risk by stalking you.
Buyers also put themselves at risk of blackmail and extortion if they reveal too much personal information, regardless of whether their encounter involves sexual activity.
The enormous power imbalance between women involved in interactions with buyers in the sex industry and men who control, facilitate and profit most from it is partly the result of information those men have access to about buyers who owe them favours in return for maintaining their anonymity.
What deters buyers most is being exposed through any form of publicity. They have the greatest investment in maintaining the stigmatisation of prostituted women. If this were not the case, buyers would mention that they are sex buyers on their profiles on dating websites and in social situations where they are seeking relationships with women based on autonomy, authenticity and shared interests, mutual attraction and mutual support.