Wanna be an independent full-service escort in the US? Not sure if it’s for you? Included is tips on getting started, marketing, how to increase your income, male sexual psychology and getting them to hire you again, networking, branding, dealing with the emotional burden, safety, and more!
My credentials: I escorted from 2018-2020 (I of course no longer escort, however if you happen to see a woman in the ads who looks very similar to me you should hit her up). I charged $1200/hr (with discounts for multi-hour sessions), and earned 50k on my highest-earning month.
Escorting is more difficult to develop widely applicable strategies for because the business is invisible. With online sex work, successful techniques spread fast and get adopted as new defaults because everything is clearly visible. With in-person sex work, all you know is what you do. I also worked primarily as high end (initially charging $800/hr for the first month or two before raising it over time to $1200), which means I am not experienced with lower-rate, higher-volume work; two elements that strongly impact the kind of experience you’ll have. I also am speaking to the US market, which has many differences from other markets around the world, primarily legally. I am assuming you are female; while male escorts can in fact do well, this article is targeted towards women.
I conducted two surveys, of 165 escorts and 411 clients, and I’ll be referring to findings from these surveys throughout this article. The survey is not meant to represent all sex workers and clients; I gathered responses from my social media, in sex worker forums, and on fetlife, so it’s more a reflection of “people from the western world who follow me or sex-friendly social forums”. But hopefully this is the kind of person you are, so it might be good data for you!
I’m also experimenting with likelihood ratios (“LR”), instead of p-values. The program I’m using to calculate them is new and there might be some errors, and though I’m doing my best to double check, keep this in mind! Also be aware I checked a lot of correlations, and didn’t do anything to control for the… likelihood ratio equivalent of p-hacking (be kind with me I’m still learning).
(Likelihood ratios basically are how much more likely the given correlation is compared to no correlation at all. For example, “r=0.3, LR=100” means that the maximum-likelihood correlation was 0.3, which the data says is 100x as likely as a correlation of 0.)
Deciding if you should try this
A summary of things: many of these points I go into more detail later in this article.
I probably don’t have to go over the cons, because you already know them. In-person sex work is very highly stigmatized; if you live in a conservative community, if you ever want to work with kids ever, if you have a job that might get mad and fire you, if your options for romance are with men who don’t like sex work, then this is an extremely high-risk thing to do.
The safety risks are very different from online sex work; it’s common for escorts to completely conceal their identities and faces online, which actually makes it much less likely to get outed to your employers or family. There are, of course, risks to your legal and physical safety, though they can actually be quite minimal given precautions I’ll address later.
This work is also emotionally hard for some people, as the job carries huge social weight and touches on a ton of vulnerable chords of our sense of self worth. You might carry away feelings of disgust, shame, or hatred. Not everyone feels like this, but if you do, I would not recommend escorting (or if you do, putting your prices extremely high so you at least get paid a lot more for fewer total experiences of disgust and shame).
As for the positive side, this job is fully self directed; you decide who you see, when you see them, for how long. You decide your rates, your vibe, where and how you want to work. It’s highly flexible, which means you can do it while raising kids or working another job.
Also: money; even low-end escorts make hundreds of dollars per hour of work.
Typically the bigger the city, the higher the rates; in NY and LA you can probably tack on an extra few hundred to your hourly, while in a smaller city like Spokane, WA the going rates might be 20-30% less.
This means if you’re looking to work as a high end escort, it’s worth either moving to a larger city or establishing a regular travel schedule to the large cities.
Physical appearance also matters a lot, but compared to online work, your body matters more than your face (as the face is typically hidden in advertisements). I’ve made an extremely rough, super general calculator here to help estimate how much you might be able to charge hourly. This is by no means definitive, it’s only meant to help you get a sense of your possibility range and if it might be worth it for you.
Keep in mind this is not set in stone; a lot of other things matter too, and I’ve seen smoking babes charging $300 and women not considered traditionally attractive charging $800+.
Basic Demographics
The average hourly rate reported was $477, and the median $325. The median monthly income was estimated at $5,000.
The average length of time escorts had been working was 4.5 years (median 3). The average age was 29, the average number of times per year they were tested for STDs was 6.5, and 45% were in a serious relationship, engaged, or married. 30% expressed they either planned to quit escorting or that it was only a side job; 21% intended to retire early. 62% used a condom for genital penetration (but not oral), 29% used a condom for genital and oral penetration, and 9% reported not using a condom at all.
The #1 Question: Safety
How dangerous is the job, really?
I asked people in my survey about some Bad Things they encountered on the job.
8% reported legal trouble
8% reported being arrested
16% reported physical assault
17% reported contracting a STD
29% reported being stolen from
41% reported sexual assault
These numbers are not great, and it’s not ideal to go into a job where you’re close to a coin toss away from sexual assault. But for what it’s worth, escorts still reported an average job satisfaction of 5.3/7. Also, I’ve been sexually assaulted on the job (which was sort of my mistake; this was the one guy who I thought I’d screened but actually hadn’t, and if I’d screened him I would have not met him) and I consider escorting totally worth it and would happily continue if my Onlyfans ever takes a plunge.
People reported more Bad Things if other negative experiences were associated with the job as well – like feeling shame or getting into escorting out of desperation (r=0.28). In general, my impression both in person and from the data is that class and attitude matter a lot. If you’re careful, deliberate, if you have the luxury of not taking clients you don’t want to take (which honestly is not a very high bar), if you have confidence you can be successful, if you don’t have a lot of shame around this, if you can charge higher rates with fewer appointments, you’ll likely end up with the kind of targeting and clientele that tend to be safer.
In general, I’m going to be advising you from the perspective of pursuing high-end escorting. This guide will likely help even if you’re not, but my goal here is to get you the most income for the least amount of work. After all, higher hourly rates are correlated with a higher total income, without more hours worked.
How To Get Clients
You’re gonna have to get photos, a website, an email, and put up ads.
The very first step typically is the photos. You’re going to need a set, ideally 15-20 (but you could get away with 7-8), of high quality photos to show off your goods. Unlike online sex work, escort photography typically is much more high-end; think closer to lingerie catalogue than casual selfies. I’m not sure if this is effective, but it’s the norm, probably because you’re trying really hard to convince men to drop several hundred dollars on you because you’re luxury.
It’s common to hire a photographer to pump out these sets of photos. Most websites don’t allow nudity in the photos you use in your ads, so make sure to get plenty, if not all, non-nude content (typically lingerie).
Lots of escorts choose to use only non-nude content on their websites as presumably a branding choice; such as, “if you want to see me naked, you’ll have to see me in person.” I can’t tell if this is a good move; I suspect it’s less important here than in online sex work, because even if you show nudity, there’s still much farther to go (actually seeing you in person). But still, not showing nudity can signal high class, dominant, powerful, and might be more likely to attract higher power men who are looking to “unlock” something they feel few other people have seen – your nudity.
But who knows? I showed nudity, and I did pretty well.
You should also decide if you want to show your face in your photos. Most escorts don’t. I’d recommend censoring your face when you first start out and get a feel for the landscape; you can always decide later if you want to upload the uncensored photos instead! I’ve anecdotally heard that face-showing doesn’t have a huge impact on earnings.
But deciding this early helps with taking the photos, so you can arrange things to block your face or pose where you’re looking away.
After you have photos, make a website. I’m slightly outdated on this; lots of escorts use Squarespace and Wix, but keep in mind lots of companies don’t want anything to do with sex work and will remove you if they notice you’re doing escort stuff. I use BlueGravity for hosting, which is a bit complicated and I’d recommend trying one of the easy-build sites first.
And of course, you have to choose a name! As usual, make sure to check namespace – search escort directories for your considered name to see how often it’s used. High-end branding is important here, so you might plan on going for something more traditional or classic – I nearly went with the name Esther King (narrowly avoided by a roommate asking if I was trying to actively repulse clients); an example of a good name is Mara Blake. Femininity is also really important! Names like “Eve” and “Emma” are common. You want to stay away from names that signal lower-class in your area. Last names are less important, but make sure they’re unique and easy to remember. The holy grail is getting your full name as a flat domain – e.g. “Estherking.com”, so keep an eye on what domains are available!
You can include whatever you want on your website, but most escort websites have a standard set of things – an introduction (a few paragraphs about you and your personality), a rates page (listing how much you charge for different amounts of hours), an etiquette page (where you outline behavioral expectations and stuff like if you want them to shower and how to give the donation, more on this later), a page instructing you how to book (some girls include a typeform application, others just ask you to email them), and a gallery of photographs of you.
You can also include stuff like tour information (if you travel, when and where) and a list of stuff you like so they can buy you a gift if they feel like it.
The copy on most escort websites sound the same, I don’t know what’s going on or if everybody is hiring the same writer to do their websites? There’s a strong desire to appear high end, so the text is usually stuff like “You see me walking down the marble staircase, silk fluttering from my pale legs as our eyes meet under the Parisian sun”. I only slightly exaggerate. Everybody seems to be pursuing some exotic advanced educational degree, to have traveled extensively, and to be unnervingly elegant. Her website implies that booking her will make you superior to every other man, that you will become enlightened by plowing her platonic ideal of a pussy.
Most men don’t care too much about the finer details of your textual vibes, but some do; I’d recommend reading through several other websites to get a feel, and figure out what you want to signal. You’ll get the clientele you attract! Some do signal IQ pretty well (also here’s what probably is the single other libertarian escort)
Get an email, ideally protonmail (secured if sending to another protonmail account) with your name, and list the email somewhere visible on the website (for screening purposes, more on this later).
Some escorts advertise themselves as low volume, typically associated with higher ends. I asked escorts what they thought “low volume” meant, and the median response was 3 appointments a week, whereas clients thought it meant 5 appointments a week.
Ads
Ads are the next step – how people find you. There’s several websites to choose from, but the general gist is you upload a few photos, write some text about yourself, and link to your website and social media. Here’s many (but not all) of the popular options. They’re listed in order of correlation to hourly rates, from most to least; so the first had the highest correlation with escorts reporting using it, and their reported hourly rates.
Eros – the most expensive, charging hundreds of dollars for a prime listing for a single week in a big city. It also is birthed straight from the asshole of Satan, having a reputation for the worst website to touch the face of the earth. It takes a long time for them to approve your ads, and half the time they’ll reject anything you submit without telling you why (as the ad slot you paid $400 for inches closer to its scheduled release, ask me how I know). It does, however, get clients; escorts reporting using Eros also reported the highest income (though this might be just because they have enough money to afford it). It tends to have the classiest escorts. Before Tryst (below), I got most of my clientele from here.
Slixa – A friendlier option, medium-expensive, they tell you what’s wrong with the ad so you can resubmit. Not huge traffic, a lower total number of listings, probably worth throwing a bit of money at in the beginning to see if it’s worth your time.
Tryst is the newest up and comer, and my personal favorite. It’s free to list, and you pay monthly for different priority in the stack. It’s got by far the most customizable search, and as far as I can tell has the most total users. For me, most of my traffic ended up coming from Tryst.
P411 – I haven’t used this website, but it’s popular, has high use among high earning escorts, and (as far as I can tell) features a verification and review system. Some escorts refuse to participate in websites that have reviews, more on this later.
PrivateDelights – another popular website with reviews, but correlated with reports of arrest
SeekingArrangement – This website, unlike the above, professes to definitely not allow escorts, and makes it difficult to be explicit about it. Most men connecting through the website anticipate paying around 50-70% less, as women tend to be willing to accept less money if you give them a veneer of not being a real sex worker. You can still attempt to do clear sex work here though – “PPM”, or pay-per-meet, indicates that you want to be paid per meeting, and this is the way to start out the discussion. Seeking Arrangement also had the lowest correlation with arrests,
Dating Apps – Advertising on dating apps has gotten harder since the advent of Onlyfans, as there’s been crackdowns on anything resembling sexy advertising. You can try putting a wink-and-a-nudge in your profile; some have success with this but be prepared to buy burner phones if you want this to be sustainable.
Bedpage is the spinoff from Backpage, a bit lower end, and also dirt cheap.
Eroticmonkey – also cheap
SkipTheGames – an ad site most correlated with reports of arrest
Adultsearch – also correlated with reports of arrest.
Freestyling?
Freestyling is the art of picking up clients in person, typically done by looking cute and hanging out alone in a place where horny men of means congregate – for example, casinos, or a nice bar. I haven’t freestyled, but from my understanding the trick is to flirt heavily with a man, and then either imply or outright state that you’ll be available in exchange for some generosity. If he seems hesitant or strings you along, don’t be afraid to leave him and move on. This is apparently a numbers game, and eventually you’ll find a guy who’s excited enough at the prospect of being with you that he’ll be down to part with whatever your rates are. This is likely more feasible if you charge the kind of rates that men are likely to have on them in cash. Basic safety applies here – rotate your freestyling locations, as staff of the places are often trained to keep an eye out for people like you.
Other Media
Most escorts have Twitters, which are great places to verify that you’ve been active for a while and seem mostly human. A lot also use Switter, the inevitable backup when Twitter gets around to banning all of the escorts. Lots of clients can find you through Twitter, and use escorts networking and crosstweeting each other as discovery.
Screening
So you’ve got your website running, your ads up, and now you’re getting interest from men. What now? The answer is screening!
Screening is the process of checking information about clients before you see them. You can choose whatever level of safety you’re comfortable with, but one of the most common setups you’ll find is requesting:
1. Two references from other providers they’ve seen in the last 6 months
2. Photographic proof of employment (e.g., a photograph of your work badge or a link to a corporate website with your face listed)
The goal here is twofold – to demonstrate the man is a respectable client (by checking his reputation with others), and to verify he’s not a cop (with evidence that he seems to have a normal job).
When asking references a client, you will ask “Could you give me the email and website of two providers you’ve seen in the last six months?” When he sends you this information, you need to verify a few things –
- The escort he referenced seems established and legitimate; sometimes men will create fake escort listings and websites that they control, to give themselves a free reference. Check the linked social media, see if any of the accounts are new, make sure her photos are consistent and possibly reverse image search to make sure they’re not stolen.
- Check that the contact email listed on the escort’s website is the same email he gave you. Sometimes men will link to a real escort, but provide a real-sounding but fake email they created. This happened to me – someone else used me as a reference for another escort, but gave her a fake email that was slightly different from my actual email. Luckily the escort checked my actual email and let me know!
When emailing the escort, I usually said something like “Hey, [name] contacted me from [his email] and mentioned he’d seen you. Did you see him, and if so would you mind letting me know if everything went smoothly?” Make sure you include his contact information – the escort will probably have to look him up in her records, as she likely won’t remember him by name.
Typically the escort will respond in a day or two with “Yes, I had no issues.” Sometimes they might give more information, like warning you if he’s a high effort client who likes to go multiple rounds or if he’s pushy and you’ll have to stay on high alert.
Once you start seeing clients, expect to get used as a reference and to start getting emails from other providers asking about clients you’ve seen. It’s considered extremely good form to respond; this is a collective safety system we all use to help each other, you rely on their information and they rely on yours.
You can choose how you handle references; how many you want to ask for or how far back you’ll accept.
If the client is a first-timer with no references, you can choose if you feel comfortable seeing them. I did, but on the condition of more information – I required a phone number and photo of his ID, which helps with better blacklist checking. Make sure to carefully check the photo of the ID for any hint of photoshop.
In addition to checking references and employment, it’s also good to run his information against a blacklist. There’s a few out there (like VerifyHim), but the biggest I’ve found starts with “S” and is one that’s known but not super widely publicized, and I’d prefer not to signal boost it to a wide audience. If you’re an escort and would like a recommendation to this blacklist, please send me a request at aellasinbox@protonmail.com from your escort email with a link to your escort website.
With blacklists, make sure to run their information carefully. If you have his phone number, run that. Try variations on their email – search just the part before the “@”, in case they use different email providers. If they have a name like “Barbedrodney295”, try searching just “Barbedrodney”. Some men will frequently switch their email to avoid blacklist problems.
If you add a client to the blacklist, do not tell the client. This will only let him know he needs to switch up his info, and will be more likely to get access to another woman in the future. This can suck, but it keeps others safer.
If you run a client and find bad entries on the blacklist, do not tell the client. In these cases I typically either stopped responding, made up an excuse, or said I was fully booked.
To make sure they’re not police, you want to make sure they’re employed elsewhere. As I mentioned you can do this by asking for a link to something like LinkedIn where their face is shown, and then making sure the face that shows up on your doorstep is the same (and sending him away if it’s not). Some escorts will ask for the client’s real name and employment, and then call their company and ask if the client is employed there – then either make up an excuse or simply hang up.
Occasionally, a client has been unable to provide references or proof of employment; I once saw a newly successful higher-up drug dealer who understandably had no linkedin to give me. In cases like these I required a 1-hour coffee meeting, public-only, where I charged 30-50% my typical rates. This allowed me to get a sense of who they were as a person, and I imagined it’d be an annoying amount of effort to go through for police who might prefer easier targets.
You’re an Escort, Not A Prostitute
Remember: it’s not a crime to escort. They’re paying for your time, and you just happen to be quite a slutty woman; what happens between you two is at your discretion and your business and is independent of the money.
And so, many escorts refuse to discuss sex acts over email, and treat this closer to how you might a date where you’re probably going to hook up. The norm is to put nothing in writing that indicates any illegal activity. Assume there’s a police officer on the other side of every email.
Some use abbreviations to refer to sex acts; it’s up to you if you feel comfortable doing this. I personally did not. If a client asked about sex acts, I would respond with strong clarification that in my personal life, I might or might not enjoy such a thing, but as a reminder our exchange was about time only. I have one escort friend who considered even this too risky, and would simply not respond if asked about sex acts.
Many refer to money as donations or gifts, indicating that this isn’t even in exchange for time at all, it’s freely given and nontransactional.
For payment etiquette, a common strategy (and one I followed) was to ask the client to not mention the donation, to leave the donation on the counter or the dresser, and then excuse themselves to the bathroom. When they’re in the bathroom, you can then take the money. This way there’s no discussion of payment and no direct changing of hands.
If you’re meeting in public, the request is to include the donation discreetly in a small gift, such as a book or a magazine, so that the donation is ‘hidden’ inside, and you can ‘discover’ it later.
Remember: in every possible way in your interactions with the client and the exchange of money, you want to avoid giving off the appearance that you are doing prostitution. Don’t say or do anything that could be viewed as prostitution-esque; maintain clearly that you are selling your time only.
You can in fact get issued an escort license in some cities (e.g., San Francisco or Grand Chute, or Jefferson County, WA). I don’t know if this is a good idea, neither I nor anybody I know has applied for this, though I seriously considered. It’s possible it might grant you some legal protection, but also possible it might give you some legal issues, as it puts a lot of information about you in a government file that clearly states you are in fact an escort.
It’s probable that police are more likely to use specific escort directories for stings; the ad websites most correlated with reports of being arrested were AdultSearch (r=.28, LR=930), PrivateDelights (r=.26, LR=328), and SkipTheGames (r=.24, LR=146). It’s unclear if this is causative, but I’d avoid them anyway.
Location And Hotel Safety
So your client passed screening, you’ve managed to avoid any talk of sex, and now you’re going to meet up!
Incalls are where they come to you, and outcalls are where you go to them. I also did a survey of clients, and 2/3rds of them prefer incalls; this matches with my experience. You can charge extra for either incall or outcall, whichever you want to get compensated more for.
You have a few options for incalls – your place, a secondary place you rent yourself or timeshare, a short or long term hotel.
Your place has the bonus of being convenient and no extra cost, but comes at the risk of clients now knowing where you live or neighbors getting suspicious of high male traffic. If you see very few clients and have a rigorous screening process, this might be a good option for you.
You can also rent a second place; this still has the problem of neighbors getting suspicious, but at least you’re safe from clients knowing where you live. Often multiple escorts will split the cost of a place that’s used primarily as an incall.
Most common is hotels. If you only have one or two clients, particularly around that hotel-elusive 11am-3pm time zone, a whole day of rental can be excessive; I used the app Dayuse, which allows hourly rentals during the day and has saved me thousands of dollars. I booked 4-star hotels almost exclusively; 3-star hotels didn’t feel classy enough to match my brand, and 5-star hotels ate into my profits too much.
I picked 4-5 hotels I liked and mostly rotated through them to avoid staff getting too suspicious. I also developed a fake story if need be for if they ever asked why I kept showing up for a few hours in the middle of the day (tho I never was asked).
When choosing a new hotel, I looked for a few things – larger hotels are better, because there’s higher volume and less chance they’ll notice you or any oddities. I would usually call in advance to ask if their elevators used a keycard or had a freely accessible staircase; it’s very annoying if you have to go down and walk with a man upstairs from the lobby while still trying to be discreet, ideally they just knock on your hotel door and you’re good to go. Even worse, some hotels will ask your client who they’re there to see. The client will say the room number, and then the hotel desk will give them your legal name, typically by calling you and asking “Miss X, there’s a Y here to see you” where the client can hear. Make sure the client can painlessly slip past the front desk and into the elevator with no issues to avoid this trouble.
In the private blacklist I mentioned above, there’s a section for hotel reviews, where girls will report if they had bad experiences with hotel staff, and I would often check the reports there for locations to avoid.
Seeing lots of clients in a short period of time at the same hotel is probably the biggest red flag to staff, particularly at smaller hotels. If you’re going to see a lot of clients, try really hard to get a larger hotel, or try rotating hotels pretty regularly. Most hotel workers don’t care (I lurked hotel worker discussion groups for a while), but it’s good to avoid raising suspicion anyway. Make sure to stay well dressed, clean, and polite, to indicate to them you are a responsible adult who is not a threat. And if you’re staying multiple days, tip well! You want the housekeeping on your side.
A habit I picked up from a friend who got me into this: I also would wrap the discarded condoms in toilet paper, stow it in my purse, and throw away outside the hotel after I left, as I didn’t want to risk housekeeping finding any evidence.
If you are going to the client’s hotel, it’s a lot easier. If he wants you to come to his house, this can be a bit riskier, as houses are much more isolated and it’s less likely someone will hear you if you scream. Some escorts I knew would refuse to see a client at their house until the second appointment, and would only have a first time appointment at a hotel.
Meta-escorts?
Do you need your own security escort? Some do; they have a boyfriend or something drive them to the location and wait in the car outside. It’s generally good form, particularly with higher-end escorts, to not have your security escort visible at all. I did not use a security escort; instead I installed a location-tracking device on my phone and gave access to two friends I trusted. I also would designate checkin times, where I would text shortly after my appointments ended to verify I was okay.
You’re in the hotel room with a stranger, now what?
How To Escalate
The first time is scary! But it’s less scary than you might think; after my first time I remember being shocked at how easy it was.
I’m going to describe my system here; it’s very likely that something different might work for you. This is meant as a template to get started if you feel utterly at a loss, and if anything here doesn’t jive with your vibe, then don’t do it!
Before the client arrived, I would place condoms and lube within concealed but easy reach of the bed, usually in the nightstand drawer at hotels. I would do a quick teeth brush and make sure my genitals smelled okay, and I’d connect my phone to a tiny speaker (to fit in purse) for music. I’d place the “do not disturb” sign on the outside of the door, and lower the lights to something that would allow us to see but also slightly obscure any buttcrack hairs I might have missed (more on buttcrack hairs later).
My strategy depended on the length of time I was booked for. Generally speaking, sexual activity lasted around 30 minutes, and I tried to position this closer to the end of the appointment. If you go at it too early, he’s probably going to get horny again afterwards and attempt to sneak in a second round right under the wire. This is generally speaking; lots of guys are longer and shorter, and some will do strong initiation on their own and you don’t really get a say in the speed.
But roughly speaking, for each length of appointment I’d aim to start the sexual activity:
1 hour: 15-20 minutes in
1.5 hours: 30-40 minutes in
2 hours: 45-60 minutes in
(2.5+ hours almost always started out with dinner)
Keep in mind, if you require his showering at the appointment, that you have to squeeze time for that in there too, and many will want to shower again after sex. Both of these are typically done on the clock!
In another tip picked up from my friend, I had music playlists I made for different lengths of time, and I started the playlist exactly when the client entered. I knew which song was in the middle, and which were near the end, so I could tell how much time we had left without looking at a clock (an impolite move if you’re supposed to be enjoying it). Wearing a small watch is also useful for this!
My default strategy was this: I would invite the man in, we’d sit down and talk for a while. I’d establish physical contact in the conversation by touching his hand when laughing at a joke, or crossing my leg so it bumped into his. I would become increasingly charmed, utterly fascinated by his life, and I asked him to explain to me concepts I already knew (remember, they like you smart in order to validate their identity as a man who likes smart women, and they still love teaching you things).
(I’m being a little sharp here but this is basically a common internalized strategy women use when genuinely attracted to a man; I did legitimately like around 80% of my clients, and a small % were really wonderful and I still think about them.)
Eventually, after the right amount of time elapsed and when the moment felt right, I’d lean in for a kiss. We’d make out, and would act increasingly hot and bothered before I’d eventually descend to perform oral sex. After this, things get much more varied, as men have very different preferences for position, length of time, if they want to perform oral on you or not, etc. – but typically, I would then climb up to a cowgirl position if they didn’t direct me otherwise, and ride until I wanted to die.
Condom Use
Remember to grab the condom! Most escorts use a condom for genital penetration, but not for oral. I did the same (in my survey there was no correlation to indicate this resulted in higher STIs). Keep an eye out for improper condom use! It’s very common for a guy to place a condom on his penis the wrong way around the first time; he pulls the condom out of the wrapper, places it on the tip of his penis and attempts to roll it. He then finds that it’s not rolling, because the roll is going the wrong way. He flips the condom over and then rolls it the correct way down. As his penis made contact with the now-outside of the condom, it’s no longer clean. I would usually try to place the condom on myself to avoid it, checking the roll with my fingers before touching it to the penis. But sometimes they want to do it; I’d just watch them, and if they did it wrong I’d just grab them another condom.
I used Skyn Elite condoms – great feel, very thin, and latex free (in case a client had a latex allergy).
I would keep a few condoms of multiple sizes in my purse, and keep the smaller prepared in the nightsand. After encountering the peen, if it happened to be too big I got to be like “wow, you’re too big for my condoms! Luckily I have a backup mega bazooka condom for this fat stack of salami.”
For lube I used Uberlube – nobody had a bad reaction to it, and it came in a nice, classy little tube that fit in even the smallest of purses.
Getting Down To Business
My data is definitely unique to me because I had a regular strategy, but still reflects some degree of male preference; I tracked 70 of my appointments and here’s the stats:
I perform oral: 91%
Client orgasms: 80%
Cowgirl position: 66%
Missionary position: 64%
Doggystyle position: 37%
Client performs oral: 59%
I orgasmed (real): 16%
Spoon position: 9%
Prone position: 7%
One of the downsides of sex work is that you’re heavily incentivized to do what they want, to make them feel good. If you don’t make them feel good, they won’t hire you again. If you happen to easily orgasm, congrats – you have the privilege of being able to be honest and make them feel good. If you don’t, then you’re faced with a choice – fake your orgasm, or don’t and risk them not hiring you again.
Most men, I found, were interested in attempting to make me orgasm (though often not good at it), and cared quite a bit about my pleasure. A few didn’t (high correlation with dudes who wanted you to wear specific stuff, imo). I found nearly all of them to be very respectful and kind.
I found the vast majority of men did not request any unusual fetishes from me. I got a handful of foot fetishes, a handful of roleplayers, and one guy who did not need to wear a cock sheath but was very into wearing a cock sheath – but most at least behaved very vanilla.
It’s not uncommon for them not to orgasm! Some are older and simply can’t; others are really nervous, others have porn-dick and your vag is too soft for the required hand-slamming that’s by this point their only hope. It’s almost certainly not your fault, and be careful not to blame them either. I acted like it wasn’t a big deal at all, like I saw it often (which were both true). I was careful not to be overly reassuring, as I didn’t want to convey that this was something important enough to do a lot of reassuring about.
Some want to go for multiple orgasms; this is up to you. Some, typically lower-priced, higher-volume escorts, will have an explicit one-orgasm-only policy. Higher-priced, lower-volume escorts tend to be more girlfriend-experiencey, replicating the experience of a one night stand with someone you’re super into, and so won’t explicitly limit the amount of times anybody can orgasm (that would be weird to do with a one-night-stand).
(The absolute worst are the guys who don’t particularly want to cum again but force themselves just to get the biggest value for their money. I hate you)
Cowgirl can be hard and exhausting. If you’re not very good at cowgirl, it’s worth it to practice twerking in the cowgirl position on your own. Youtube videos are great at this – remember the movement comes from your legs, not your back!
(Fun fact; there was possibly a negative correlation between my likelihood of real orgasm and his physical attractiveness (r=-.12, LR 7.5), but a positive correlation between my real orgasm and how much I liked his personality (r=0.18, LR 60))
Boundaries
Some clients will try to push your boundaries. Maybe you don’t want butt stuff, and he keeps trying to slip a finger in; maybe he wants to talk to you in a way that makes you uncomfortable, or wants more dick sucking than your poor jaw can handle. Prepare yourself beforehand in reacting to this; it can be hard to say no to a client who’s paying you, especially if he seems nice or threatening, or if he’s pushing very slowly. I often would allow a boundary to be pushed, and then decide never to see him again, because I am nonconfrontational.
My worst experience with a client (the one I accidentally failed to screen! if I had I would have seen other women reporting similar experiences!) was someone who did had a few warning flags beforehand:
A) He pressured me to drink more alcohol. I typically have a max of one drink, but he heavily encouraged me to drink more (which I did).
B) The appointment was 1.5 hours, and he spent over 1 hour of it at the hotel bar with me, consistently ignoring my increasingly strong suggestions that we migrate upstairs.
C) He put the donation directly into my purse when I went to the bathroom. Opening up my purse without my presence or permission is bad.
D) This one is ‘after’, but he pushed our session well past the ending limit, giving me no opportunity to take a graceful break.
This client ended up being very rough with me, hitting, biting, and choking me quite hard, as well as telling me aggressive, degrading stuff about me being a “whore” who deserves this. At no point did he ask permission to do any of it. I remember evaluating my chances at escape, trying to figure out if hotel staff would hear me if I screamed. But I at no point gave him an indication that I did not like what he was doing. I was afraid that if I showed any resistance, that this would count as an escalation and that he would hurt me. As I was trying to figure out the chances he was gonna get murdery on me, I emitted fake moans of pleasure. As I headed out the door I was cheerful, kissed him, said I would be happy to see him again, and then I GTFO’d.
(Unfortunately, reporting this client to the police wasn’t an option, as I was afraid I would be arrested myself.)
My point is that I viewed myself as a person with good boundaries before this; the boundary violations came in slow and steady, and I didn’t find any individual one worrying enough to pay attention to before it was too late – and when it was too late, I was afraid to institute the boundaries. If anything makes you feel strange, trust yourself, don’t dismiss it as probably being oversensitive. If your gut intuition evolved for anything, it probably was for detecting danger around men and sex.
Ending the session
So what happens if your time is coming to a close and he’s still pounding away? I try to increasingly signal ‘let’s end this’ with all the subtle power I have within me (like asking him to cum). If he’s not getting the message, I’ll whisper into his ear that I’m having so much fun but we don’t have much time. If he still doesn’t get the message, I’ll stop him saying I have to pee; I go to the bathroom, and when I come out I make sure the tone has changed; like “Damn sucks we have to end on such a cliffhanger, I hope I get to see you again to finish.”
Having to boot people wasn’t common for me; in my survey 35% of escorts checked the “I wish more of my clients would leave on time” box.
You can go over time if you’d like, but be careful of blurring boundaries of personal and professional. If you’re going to go significantly over time, you can discuss payment – lots of escorts have a pre-set in-session extension rate. If it’s just a little over, it’s up to you. I tended to be very firm, because I’m a super heavily compartmentalizer and this was necessary to protect my ability to enjoy my clients. One of my friends would regularly let her clients stay an additional 10-15 minutes if they were slow, as she considered the extended goodwill to be worth the extra time.
Tipping
In my experience, it was not standard for clients to tip; I got a gift or tip on 15% of my appointments. I put a line on my website explaining that tipping was not expected and I wouldn’t be upset if they didn’t, but that it was nice if they had an utterly fantastic time. Most escorts don’t mention tipping on their websites. Most of my tips consisted of around $100-200.
Who Are These Clients And Why Do They See You?
The men who saw me had generally white-collar professions; according to my personal spreadsheet, we had:
Finance(x4), lawyer(x3), engineer(x3), artist(x2), CEO(x2), doctor(x2), hedge fund manager(x2), software engineer(x2), AI, biotech, data analyst, movie director, electrician, investment advisor, manager, marketing, perfumer, producer, real estate investor, screenwriter, special effects designer, student, teacher, think tank, vice president, writer, and youtube creator. The median income for my client survey was 100k.
The average age of the man I saw was 46, and the avg reported on the survey was 41.
I found clients tended to fall into a few groups; here’s some of my stereotypes:
- The young and inexperienced. He wants to “know what it’s like” and is torn between his inability to attract women in real life and the roaring sex drive of his 20’s. They tend to be more shy, and to have been taught to treat women carefully and really really want you to have a good time. The occasional virgin is in this category. (from my personal records, the younger a client was, the less time he spent talking; r=0.24, LR=621)
- The busy businessman, who could probably attract women if they tried but they simply don’t have the time. They flew into town yesterday and are leaving tomorrow, they’d love to go on a date and relax with a pretty woman tonight, but can’t be bothered to spend hours on dating apps or making a gamble at the bar. They want a sure thing. These tended to tip better, be wealthier, and have the most interesting conversations.
- The married man – he married a long time ago and built a life with the woman he loved – but now she doesn’t want to have sex with him. Maybe he’s tried to talk with her about it, maybe not, but one thing is clear – she would absolutely not tolerate him finding sexual fulfillment outside the marriage. So he is seeing you, because you’re a neat and tidy sexual experience that isn’t a coworker or a neighbor and isn’t going to mess up his personal life.
There’s also “Hobbyists” – a slightly derrogatory term that sex workers use to refer to a type of guy who treats escorts a bit like pokemon; gotta catch them all. Hobbyists tend to want quantity over quality, tend to be less interested in connection with the woman he sees, and to write and read reviews (often detailed and graphic) for escorts, sort of like a conquering trophy symbol. Hobbyists tend to prefer seeing lower-priced escorts.
I estimate about 80% of the men cared a lot about my experience, and about 20% viewed me more as an object. Again, my experience is higher end; the lower end you go, the more likely you are to get booked by men who are less respectful of your boundaries. Escorts who charge lower prices are more likely to have requirements for the clients they see, typically for them to be over a certain age or to be of a specific race.
There does seem to be, unfortunately, a racial association with how well they treat you; I’ve encountered numerous reports on forums of people avoiding specific racial groups. I suspect this effect shows up at the lower end of price range; at my rate of $1200/hr, I personally saw no difference in how I was treated by different races.
Wealthier clients tended to book longer appointments (r=.29, LR=1.5e+8), spend more total on escorts (r=.56, LR=1.5e+34), see escorts more often (r=.2, LR=18000), and be in a romantic relationship themselves (r=.15, LR=100). They also were slightly less likely to indicate that reading reviews for an escort before meeting her was important (r=-.19, LR=1600); my guess here is that wealthier clients tend to be more personality-oriented in choosing escorts, and that review sites tend to emphasize sexual aspects (while reminding clients of the uncomfortable fact that she has in fact seen many other men).
Clients who feel shame about seeing escorts report enjoying interacting with escorts less (r=-0.37, LR=1.9e+13), tend to be a bit younger (r=0.19, LR=1500), were slightly more likely to report seeing escorts who used photos that were misleading about their appearance (r=-0.17, LR=305), and slightly more likely to report being unable to get laid elsewhere (r=0.17, LR=443).
Clients who prefer younger escorts tend to see escorts a bit more often (r=0.15, LR=97); clients who prefer older escorts tend to enjoy interacting with them a bit more (r=0.17, LR=487) and place more importance on personality (r=0.14, LR=62).
Who They Want You To Be
But, as is basically common knowledge by this point, the majority of the men you see will be significantly interested in getting to know you as a person, and being known by you. They talk, a lot, it’s good to encourage it with lots of questions. You operate a little bit like a therapist and confidante, most men do not want to fuck just a body, they want to fuck a soul, and it’s important to present yourself whole and aware as you shudder with delicate feminine ecstasy under their fat stack of salami.
You are here to be the ideal woman; you want nothing from them they don’t want to give, you are fascinated by their words, you find their jokes hilarious, you are touched by their struggles to get where they are, your nipples get hard when they glance at your lips, you are playful and show them a childlike wonder at the world, you find the stories about their wives charming, you are split open at the heart and begging them to touch you, you are beautiful and heaving and witty and insightful, you are very smart, you find them smarter, you will think of them later, you won’t ask them to call you later, you will never get upset at them, you don’t need them to take care of you. You are the woman that only exists when a few thousand dollars are resting on the nightstand.
I wax a little poetic here, but it’s largely true, and probably you know it and have been shaped by it in your life already.
They still want to work for it at least a little (and sometimes a lot), to prove to themselves that they earned this in some way besides the money. I would sometimes “get frustrated” that I couldn’t orgasm, before asking them to shift position and then having a fake orgasm, in order to demonstrate that some effort on their part was in fact required. Remember to treat them as an equal, not a superior, to slowly dole out the perfect woman to them as they ‘earn’ it by charming you; don’t lay it all out too fast. You’re here to create the illusion that none of this is about money, and if it’s not about money then it has to be about something else.
You love sex. You are a sexy horndog who wants nothing but getting railed to china and back every day of the week. You took this job because you love sex, not because you need to pay your student loans. The money is just an ‘excuse’ to be a slut, a ‘why not make money off of something i love’, a side effect. Remember: men do not want to make you feel bad; this is not sexy to them. If they get the impression that you don’t like your experience with them, that you’re only pretending, they are very unlikely to return. Their fantasy is getting an opportunity to spend some time with a woman who is on the cusp of banging them anyway, and just needed a little financial reason to do it.
(To be clear; as an escort I did genuinely like most of my experiences with clients, although apart from a handful of memorable experiences with talented men, most of the sex was mediocre. But most of my sex I had on casual dates from dating apps were mediocre too, so whatever)
Women
Sometimes, women will hire you. In my experience this was very rare, and in every case I was hired by the woman as a gift to her man in a threesome. These have pros and cons; being a hired third wheel is super high variance, and is easier insofar as the woman takes up more of her man’s energy, and worse insofar as you have two people to pay attention to now.
Sometimes, men will hire you and another escort together, a practice referred to as “hiring a duo.” Some escorts advertise regular duo escort partners they’re familiar with and like working with, but some guys will want to hire you and another escort they like but that you don’t know at all. I don’t have a ton of experience working in duos. I typically meet the woman beforehand briefly to discuss preferences and limits. In the session, I’ve found the oral sex is generally faked on each other (it’s very weird eating out a coworker) by covering the labia with the mouth and then not actually moving the tongue. I don’t know if this is standard; it’s probably way more fun to do a duo with another woman who you actually enjoy having sex with.
Getting More Business
How To Look
This depends a lot on the kind of clientele you’re going for, but I found most men prefer an understated, girl-next-door kind of look; jeans, t-shirt, flats type deal. Even with keeping it real, it’s important to still keep it classy – be clean, put together well, pay attention to the details. You want to signal that you’re successful, responsible, and wealthy (remember, you’re doing this because you want to, not because you need the money). I wore a lot of minimalistic, versatile high-end dresses and chunky heels.
You can still express yourself a lot in appearance, as they like seeing your personality. Just make sure it’s not too extreme, too threatening or intimidating, too messy, or too sexy – they want to feel like they’re on a date with a normal girl, not with a whore.
Don’t wear lipstick, it’ll smear on them and they probably have a wife to come home to.
If you do wear perfume, keep it subtle, you’ll be very close and they probably have a wife to come home to.
If you wear a necklace, keep it short, like a choker, so it doesn’t swing into their eye when you’re on top of them.
If you wear rings, take them off before banging, so you don’t destroy their dick as you stroke it.
Wear clothing that’s not a pain in the ass to take off; soft, touchable things with quick ties and buttons are great.
Nice lingerie is a bonus (occasionally you’ll get a big lingerie fan), but I often found the men immediately discarded it and didn’t even notice what the lingerie looked like.
A change of underwear is good for before or afterwards, so you don’t have to arrive and depart in the same kinda sweaty string lace thing.
False eyelashes are dangerous, as you’ll likely be squeezing your eyes shut hard or rubbing up against him
It’s up to you if you’re down to take clothing requests – in general I recommend against this, as this is a visible indication that you’re willing to change your self expression for them, and lots of guys register this as not genuine. But some guys do want you to wear a specific thing and don’t care too much about if you’re genuine, so if you want to hit that market then taking clothing requests are a good idea. You can mention you take clothing requests on your website (or they might bring it up themselves in email).
Pricing
How much should you charge? I’d look around at other escort ads and websites in your city to get a sense for what range of appearance charges what. Your attractiveness is important to understand when pricing yourself; in comparison to online sex work especially, your body matters more than your face. Keep in mind that other escorts tend to not be as hot as they seem to be in their photos; you’re seeing the carefully selected, most-flattering versions of themselves. The escorts I met in person were much more… normal seeming than the gorgeous vibes presented on their websites (I’m sure I’m included in this). Even still, monthly income in my survey was moderately correlated with self-reported attractiveness.
As a very general rule, I’d recommend erring slightly on the higher end of rates; at the very worst you just won’t get a lot of business, but the business you do get will be better quality.
Some escorts are nervous to change their prices, but I don’t think this is quite so big a deal. If you drop them, do it silently; simply update your website and ads, and bring it up to recurring clients if they ask. If you want to raise them, you should announce this so people know you’re doing well. You can grandfather current clients into previous rates; I often did a thing where I announced I was going to raise rates, but that I’d grandfather anybody in for a year who booked in the next month or whatever. Keep in mind this can be annoying to track and you’ll have to keep good records.
According to my survey, escorts who charged more per hour also got booked for longer appointments (r=0.44, LR=4e+7) and made more total money (r=0.59, LR=3e+15), even with fewer appointments. The sweet spot will be different for everyone though; one of my friends found she lost income after raising her rates $200.
Lots of escorts will charge an additional fee, typically around $100-200, for either incall or outcall; whichever you want to get compensated more for doing. I charged $200 for incalls, because I had to book a hotel and wanted to cover it; some escorts who use their own home for incalls will charge more for outcalls, because they have to travel.
Most escorts offer discounts for longer hours booked. You can adjust the discount according to how much you want to incentivize longer appointments, and this is very much up to your personal preference. You can see the spreadsheet I used to figure out my own early pricing here (tho I didn’t build it with public consumption in mind).
You can also charge more for traveling; if the client wants you to go somewhere three hours outside the city, be prepared to have an additional rate. Some clients might take you up on the elusive and prized FMTY (“Fly Me To You”), where they pay for your flight, and typically a bit extra for your travel time, and bring you to them for (usually) a longer appointment. It’s common for escorts to have separate FMTY rates listed on their profile.
You can also establish a cancellation fee within a certain amount of hours before your appointment; I requested something like 20% if cancelled 24 hours before, and 50% if cancelled 6 hours before. There’s a good chance they simply won’t pay you, and there’s no way to enforce them paying you, but if they do want to ever see you again you can require that cancellation fee first.
Some escorts require deposits before the appointment, where they keep the deposit if the guy cancels, or if they fear the guy might try to steal money. This is less common; I required deposits of 20% for long appointments (6+ hours), because I had a lot of time booked up that would be a painful loss if they cancelled. Deposits are hard to do because everybody wants anonymity and payment processers are cruel; I typically accepted amazon gift cards or crypto.
I recommend against negotiating rates! There’s exceptions (often providers will do negotiations with clients they really like who might want a unique arrangement), but by-and-large negotiating price indicates to the client that your boundaries in general are negotiable, and blurs the boundaries of your role as a provider.
Double Identity?
One strategy I’ve heard a few girls try is having two identities you run ads for; as your face might be obscured, this isn’t super hard. You list two different sets of ads under two different names, and you advertise two different price points. The goal here is to capture both low and high markets; for example you might get 15 appointments a month from your lower-priced identity, but could also grab 2 appts a month for your high-priced one, whereas otherwise you’d miss out on one set. Doing this is more work, and you have to be careful not to cross clients, but might be a good option especially if you’re very unsure what price point is best for you.
Tours
You can travel! Lots of escorts tour, which is basically to schedule a trip to another city, publicly advertise you’ll be there, put up ads in that city (lots of ad sites have a special designation for tours), and then book clients for that city. This is especially great if you live in a smaller city or if you’ve “exhausted” your local client base. Tours can be expensive, though; escorts sometimes charge higher prices on tours to offset this, or require deposits from clients who book on tours.
Shortest Appointment To Offer?
Some escorts will refuse to offer shorter appointment times, as a way to indicate that they are a “get to know you” kind of girl and not the fast-slam-bam type. Higher end norms are to offer 1.5hrs as a minimum appointment length; 1hr is midrange, and a 30minute minimum is typically lower end.
I started out with a 1.5 minimum, but eventually switched to 1hr minimum, but made the rate for 1 hour very expensive; only slightly less than a 1.5. I found this worked well for me; I rarely got bookings for 1 hour, but when I did I was quite happy about it.
Overnights
Overnights are when you spend the night with your client, and you can choose whether or not to offer this. I did, and stipulated that I required a minimum of 7 hours of sleep (to guard against boners poking you in the night), with a 14 hour total minimum. On overnights I would bring a sleeping pill to discreetly take before bed. Keep in mind very long appointments can be absolutely exhausting for some.
Reviews
Should you allow reviews? My recommendation is no, but some escorts do really like them. In my client survey, clients who reported reading reviews before seeing an escort tended (slightly) to be younger, poorer, book lower priced escorts, and feel shame about seeing escorts.
Reviews sort of break the spell you’re attempting to weave that you and the client have a uniquely special bond; reviews often are done by hobbyists, and tend in general to be more sexual than you might prefer. They also reinforce the view of you as a whore, and most of your work is in presenting a brand that is the opposite of nearly everything people think of when they think of whores.
Booking Assistants
Some people hire other people to manage their bookings for them; you might also run into one of these from another escort when asking them for client references. I used a booking assistant (someone I trusted in my local community and taught what to do) and it was awesome; just make sure they are very careful with screening!
Exclusive Arrangements
Sometimes, forms of exclusive arrangements can be on the table. Some escorts will advertise the ability to pay them an obscene amount of money in exchange for them only seeing that one client. I get the impression that often this is done quietly, under the table, where an escort sees many clients, one expresses an interest in taking her exclusive, and the they privately negotiate a price and the escort then takes her ads and website off the market.
(One of my most awkward appointments was with a pair of these; I was hired by a male-female couple, and when he excused himself to the restroom she told me that she was also an escort, had entered into a long-term exclusive relationship with him, and was trying to end it; she was hoping getting him to have sex with someone new would help. The session involved her trying to encourage me and him to have sex while he very clearly only wanted to touch her. As I rode him, he only looked at her. I felt bad for him, but he was consenting, but also holy shit it was so awkward.)
Some escorts have long-term, sustainable arrangements with only one or two clients, and they don’t run ads or accept any new clients. This can be the holy grail!
Personal Stuff
Periods
Hormonal birth control can let you skip periods. If you don’t want to do this, the strategy I used was to buy sea sponges, cut them down until they fit in my vagina, soak them in warm water, squeeze the water out, and then slip it in right around my cervix. These are basically undetectable, and feel just like your vaginal wall, and depending on your vaginal shape it’s even undetectable to aggressive fingering. The downside here is getting them out; you have to squat, bear down, and fish around with your fingers, and try to get enough of a grip to pull, for what can often be a frustratingly long and exhausting period of time. You could try tying a string around it (but would be more detectable); I had slightly better luck using a bigger sponge and cutting a hole in it for my finger to latch around. I’ve once needed someone else to get the sponge out for me (and I once was the volunteer to help another escort pull her own sponge out).
Some other people report success with soft cups, but those can spill and I am not so brave.
Pubes
What to do with pubes and the aforementioned buttcrack hairs? You can leave them long, though keep in mind this is more niche, and you might benefit from having photos that hint or show pubes on your website so men know what they’re getting into.
But if you’re not advertising pubes, know that cleanshaven is the expected default. Waxing is ideal, so you don’t sandpaper your client, but shaving also works if you do it right beforehand. Laser hair removal is probably a worthwhile investment at this point!
STD Testing
If you tell your healthcare provider you’re an escort, they will likely very happily try to get you STI tested as much as humanly possible. The average escort reported getting STI tested a little more than once every two months; I got tested about once every three months. The amount you should get tested probably depends on how many clients you’re seeing, and the type of client.
Keep in mind there’s some things standard STI panels don’t regularly check for – stuff like trichomoniasis or myco/ureaplasma.
Handling It Emotionally
This job can be really emotionally hard in various ways; maybe you don’t get booked enough for the rates you want, and this can be a hard reflection on how attractive you are. Clients can be rude, or pushy, or uncaring, and keeping your boundaries firm can be very hard.
There’s also a lot of social shame that comes with the territory (often increased if your rates aren’t very high). I have a friend who felt disgusted and disgusting after clients, with a compulsive need to shower to get rid of their smell. Some are very attraction-oriented, and feel degraded by having sex with clients they find disgusting. This can be really hard to deal with; I don’t experience this personally, so my best advice is simply to raise your prices so you see fewer clients, and get rewarded more when you do.
Take escorting slow; this isn’t a race. If you do take an emotional toll doing this work, be mindful to constantly evaluate if it’s worth it for you, if this is what you really want to do. Consider finding other escorts in your area to be friends with (you can look up their ads and email ones you like!); having a likeminded community can drastically reduce the amount of shame you feel for this job. If you’re in a conservative culture you need to hide your job from, take active steps to find a more sexually liberated community to bond with. Much of the emotional burden is actively caused by the judgment of your social surroundings – so change the surroundings!
Most of my personal sex life has been unaffected by escorting, except in one key element – my standards have raised. Personal sex still feels just like it did before escort sex; I have no trouble bonding or wanting my partner, but I now am much less likely to endure free sex that I don’t particularly enjoy, or push myself to do unpaid sex acts that don’t really thrill me. It’s unclear if this is a blessing or a curse; going for exactly what I want feels good, but also it narrows the pool of people I can have sustainable sexual relationships with, as I’m less willing to compromise.
Taxes
The government still expects you to pay taxes despite it using those tax dollars to try to put you in jail for your job. If you choose to fund the government for this is up to you.
The government will likely expect you to report income that is consistent with your lifestyle, and if you don’t this can make audits go worse.
As far as I know, at the time of writing this, banks are required to report cash deposits over 10k to the IRS. How you choose to deposit is up to you.
I personally did report and pay taxes, as did the other escorts I knew. Most didn’t want the stress of trying to hide income.
Escorts often report a job that’s not ‘escort’ on their tax returns; any sort of vague, gig-based independent thing can work well for this; coaching, modeling, consulting, etc.
Legalization and regulation?
It’s possible legalization would make things worse than we have now, by driving down the prices and also reducing quality of life for sex worker (I have an escort friend who once told me “the day they legalize sex work in the US is the day that I quit). Legalization tends to come with burdens that give power to others; in that one county in Nevada where sex work is legal, you have to work in a licensed brothel, and you have to pay that brothel in order to work.
Other places might ban brothels or “living off the proceeds of a sex worker” for fear of pimps, but in the process this means a sex worker isn’t allowed to move in with another sex worker (now it’s a brothel) for safety, and isn’t allowed to support anyone else off the money she earns.
Some well meaning but utterly incompetent places think it’s a good idea to make it illegal for johns to hire a sex worker, but don’t prosecute the sex worker. This increases competition of sex workers for johns, artificially drives prices down, gives johns greater bargaining power over sex workers, and doesn’t fix the problem of johns trying hard to remain anonymous and requiring situations where you’re less able to go to the police if you wanted. Sex workers hate this.
The vast majority of escorts I’ve talked to want decriminalization, not legalization. We simply want it to be not illegal to do what we’re already doing. This would allow us to go to the police if we need to, would allow better screening services to operate without fear of being taken down (I couldn’t even name the best screening service here in this article!), without imposing additional burdens.
The Heart Of It
Most of this guide might seem a bit cold and calculated, but cold and calculated doesn’t mean there isn’t heart; I’ve “coldly” analyzed many things that I love or deeply move me. You can break down the romantic mating dance between men and women into brutal evo-psych theories about status and competition and shit-tests and pheromones, but the felt experience of romance is no less true or powerful – it’s just harder to write a guide about.
I’ve had many clients that I remember fondly and who mean a lot to me. One client I would regularly hold in close skin-to-skin contact as he cried, and I cried with him; another was young and vibrant and too big for the small world around him. Another was a quadriplegic, and yet another was a talented writer who valued rarely seen things in me and encouraged me to do great things without ever once implying escorting was beneath me. Another whose wife had recently died and found me as his first foray into being with another woman, because he couldn’t bear to fully date another person yet. I’ve had clients figure out who I am and show up asking me to tripsit them on psychedelics, wildly successful CEOs who treated me as an intellectual equal, or people who were dying of cancer and didn’t want to go out without another bang (I recently looked up one of my favorite clients and instead found his obituary).
A part of me really fell in love with these people, and I consider my experiences with them immensely valuable and I am honored to be able to have been there for them in that way. And the part of me that loves them gets furious when people mock all sex work as degrading or meaningless. You don’t know how deeply I’ve touched and been touched. There’s a thread of sacredness in here, of vital work that is profoundly healing and I will defend these men until I die.
And this is part of the strange world of escorting; you get the good and the bad, the men who push your boundaries and the men who respect you immensely. You get high pay in exchange for social shame, legal risk for many more hours of free time. It’s a wild world and I don’t regret a second of it.
And am I worried that posting this will destroy my ability to escort in the future – would it make men not want to hire me? My hope is that it will discourage the men who should be discouraged, and encourage the ones who know they’re more likely to make me actually happy.
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