Working as an Escort: Expectations vs Reality

I have never watched any of the Secret Diary of a Call Girl series but I am certain, from chatting to other sex workers, that it’s responsible for an increased percentage of women entering the sex industry since it first aired 15 or so years ago. Because I haven’t watched Secret Diary of a Call Girl, it’s unfair of me to suggest that it may have glamorised escorting somewhat. But given it made the TV, I am going with that glamorised-to-fuck assumption! Accordingly, this blog is all about the realities of working as an escort. And while it’s an unorthodox job, it is indeed labour and can be just a tiring/frustrating/boring as any other job could be. The difference with escorting, however, is that it’s an exceptionally well paid job. And that’s fair, because it’s also exceptionally high risk.

First things first, you could be forgiven for thinking escort work is all dinner dates and 5 star suites. This is especially true if you follow any London based escorts on Twitter. And while that is certainly a proportion of the work at the higher end, the vast majority takes places in less than 5 star surroundings, with a bottle of water or a cup of hotel room coffee. To give you an indication of my week last week, during which I did 3 outcall dates:

• Date 1 was in a 5 star hotel – an overnight stay + a lovely dinner with a very handsome fellow who was charming, gentle and kind. Fabulous night . 10/10.
• Date 2 was in a tiny shoe box of a house (not an issue in itself, just setting the scene) with a man who greeted me in only his underpants, and had toenails and fingernails so long I wondered if I should photograph them for the Guinness Book of Records. He sought niche BDSM services for 2 hours rather than sex. Thank God.
• Date 3 was with a man who didn’t want to leave the stuffy 4* hotel room, wanted 4 hours of shagging (ha!) and didn’t even consider, until prompted, to offer me any food or water. He’s dead now.

A mixed bag – and this is high end! We pray for date 1, but dates 2 and 3 come along more than we like. Just like the TV show mentioned above, the escorts who market on Twitter are curating what you see. And it makes perfect sense that they do, because they lay down expectations, making some of the men who employ our services up their game. It’s smoke and mirrors. Ultimately though, as laborious my week sounds, it was 20 hours of my life + travel time and it paid me nearly £3,000. I’d take it over an office job any week of the year.

Which leads me on to my next point: travel time. If you are an outcall escort, then a hell of a lot of time is going to be spent travelling. For those 20 hours, I travelled for a further 12 hours, bringing my working week up to over 30 hours. Outcall escorting outside of London is as much a driving job as it is a sex job! So you need a comfortable, reliable car. You need a sat nav. You need AA or RAC cover. You need snacks. You need good music (I highly recommend Erasure’s Greatest Hits as a mood booster). You need to work out where you’re going to park before you set off – and consider your safety walking back to the car after dark. You don’t want to limit yourself to one city or area, and I personally drive anywhere up to 2 hours from my home, for the right fee. Occasionally further.

Once you’ve accepted the variety of dates, and you’ve reconciled the miles you need to travel, you’re now ready to understand another reality of this highly paid job. You will be massively discriminated against by the banks. They don’t want your filthy, slaggy money! Sure, they’ll take the cash of arms dealers and Russian oligarchs, but a prostitute? NO FUCKING CHANCE. So now you need to start concocting some elaborate business plan in order to open a business bank account. Maybe you want to put your funds through a limited company? Again, you need to convince the banks that you are doing anything other than sex work. And then 6 months down the line, they might just shut your bank account down anyway because you’re deemed inexplicably ‘high risk’. Banks are scum, and you’ve got to navigate them. And then the cherry on the cake: HMRC expect you to pay tax on your earnings. And that includes VAT over the threshold. They want you to do this, despite the UK banking system doing everything it can to stop you putting your funds into the legitimate UK economy. Go figure this absolute shower of bastards.

So in summary, while you will have some wonderful times working as an escort I am quite sure, you will also have many more times where the clock starts to go backwards. It’s part and parcel of any job – you just get on with it. If you are a nervous driver, don’t worry, because within a year you’ll be a professional level advanced driver. You’ll be able to park your car in spaces smaller than your car. And you’ll be able to drive through major cities in a zen state without your heart rate breaking 70bpm. Finally, you’ll be frustrated, because despite you earning the equivalent of a GP’s or even a consultant’s salary, you will have to funnel it into the banking system in covert ways so that you don’t get blacklisted from the high streets banks one by one. And despite this, you’ll still hand your cheque over to HMRC each January, because hidden money is useless money.