A couple of the comments on my recent post on paid dating (a.k.a. prostitution) took me to task for “haggling” on a “date.”
I fear I was unclear about either the general way such dates work, or what happened on this particular one. Money is rarely discussed – at least by me – before the last portion of a first date. Her expectations are unknown, as are mine. There’s always a little bit of an awkward discussion, which can go perfectly smoothly, can be a non-starter for one or the other, or there can be a brief bit of haggling.
On the date in question, no discussion had happened, and we were fooling around in a cab, and saying good night, when she dropped a shockingly high price tag.
I didn’t haggle, I said no. I’ll write more about this another time, but suffice it to say, she wanted me to pay her $70,000 a year.
This wasn’t a negotiation. She told me her price, and I said no, thanks.
And then she started harassing me.
lol. Thanks for the laugh. $70,000.
H wants to know if that comes with 401K and dental. 😉
Wow, first thought? I took up the wrong profession, hah! Second thought? What on earth did she think she had to offer that was worth almost 6k a month?
Right. Well, I also thought about asking for things like a sample of her work….
$6k a month? I charge that for a weekend. Though I’ll admit I suspect US and Australian economies are different on that front.
I’m not generally a big fan of drawing distinctions between different forms of sex work, as I feel that, generally, doing so plays into the hands of those who are not the friends either of women in general or of sex workers in particular. AND, I think that many people – johns and sex workers alike – take refuge in the notion that the kind of sex work with which THEY are engaged is somehow DIFFERENT, and for the most part, I think this is self-deception.
But…. (And you knew there was a “but” coming.)
You, Jane Threshold, list yourself as an escort on your Facebook page. I suspect that escorting is your primary (or one of your primary) means of income generation. The vast majority of women with whom I interacted on SeekingArrangement had non-sex-work jobs. And whatever the truth was, the story they peddled (most of them, convincingly, at least to me) was that while being a “sugar baby” was a lucrative sideline for them, it was just that – a sideline. They might have two or three dates on a busy busy week. In other words, both the role sex work played in their lives, and the product they were peddling, was a bit different than the one I imagine you’re peddling. I’m not comparing, not saying one is better than, or more than, or less than, another; just observing structural differences. The idea that someone might pay you $6k for a weekend is an entirely different proposition than that someone might pay you $6k for a month, for you to be available for 3 or 4 or 5 dates over the course of the month. I don’t even know how to do the kind of math you’d need to do to compare them.