Here are just some of the ways being a prostitute took a toll on my ex-girlfriend's life:
- To prevent her close friends and family (and me) discovering what she was doing, she had to create, maintain, and remember an extremely elaborate cover story that explained how she was spending her time and how she could afford to buy expensive luxuries like $1k handbags. The cover story featured a fake high-paid career, a convincing but pretend skill set, and an entire fictional workplace including a boss and named coworkers with distinct personalities. The paranoia and mental exertion required to maintain this cover before family and friends was constant, never-ending, and disabling for her. A single mistake could reveal the entire fraud to everyone, as, eventually, it did. Right from the start of our relationship she seemed on edge, and maintaining this pretense got even more difficult for her as I came closer to figuring out what was going on.
- She had a huge guilt complex. She'd told me that she'd been recently tested for STDs and that she had slept with a couple of guys before me within the last year. It turned out that she had been sleeping with about 20 guys a week during the months before we met, and she continued to do so even while we were actually dating. To hide this she had invented all kinds of cover stories. For example, she claimed she was taking tetracycline because of a "skin problem", and she refused to French kiss because she claimed she "didn't like it". It turned out the truth was she had a mouth infection that she was trying to protect me from; I got it anyway.
- She had become so skilled at lying that she had come to depend on it in other areas of her life. I'd go so far as to say that she had become a compulsive liar. I discovered as the plot unraveled that almost everything she had told me about herself and her life was false. This includes big things - like where she was working, how she was spending her time, how she got her money, etc., - and little things that most people wouldn't bother lying about, like why she took so long at the store, or how much ice cream she had really eaten. She lied because it was convenient and had become easy and habitual for her. Her lies were not easy to see through, they were sophisticated, believable, coherent, perfectly delivered, and (mostly) flawless.
- She had lost touch with her own sense of intimacy and eroticism. She perceived sex as being routine and mechanical; she was numb to most of the physical and emotional sensations, and she just couldn't enjoy it any more because every touch reminded her of her ghastly job. Ironically, as a result of this, she was lousy in bed. She made me feel like a client, not a lover.
- She put her own health at risk. For example, she admitted to having used the sponge one time when she was expected to be with a client during her period, which can be quite dangerous. She'd gotten careless about protection and was routinely having oral sex with clients without a condom.
- As a result of having to be so alert and spritely on very late night shifts, she had become addicted to cocaine and ecstasy as a way to keep herself awake. I knew about her past drug habits and she had quit drugs by the time we started dating, but she had been seriously screwed up by both. If you're not familiar with the long-term effects of frequent ecstasy and cocaine use, Google them. Apparently almost all of her colleagues in the trade were also addicted to one or both, and some to heroin too. They hadn't become prostitutes to pay for their habits: they'd picked up the habit as a way of coping with the demands of the job they had voluntarily taken.
- She had become an insomniac. What was keeping her awake? The terror of somebody finding out; the huge amount of preparation that had to go in to her every word and action to maintain her cover; the nightly analysis she had to do of the day's events; the process of sifting through what she had said during the day to remember it well enough that she could keep her story consistent; combing through everything other people had said to look for clues about their suspicions; all these were making it impossible for her to get sleep. I didn't even know she had insomnia until the night I found out the truth, because she was so good at hiding her inability to sleep and her constant state of extreme fatigue.
- I have never felt more uncomfortable than that night I find out. I didn't tell her that I knew at first, but I of course couldn't sleep either, so we both lay there in bed, both pretending to be asleep, but both clearly and definitely awake, both wondering what was really going on in each other's heads. Neither of us got any sleep at all. I would have talked to her, but I felt physically threatened by her presence in my apartment and needed to think through the consequences: how would she react to finding out that I knew? Would she get violent? She was probably wondering the same. Her life really must have been a living hell, and that night I got to experience her hell too.
- She was totally crushed when I told her that I'd found out, but I think one day she might get over the sense of guilt and betrayal. Her parents found out too, and she will have to live with looking into their eyes and knowing that they know she was once a hooker for the rest of her life.
- She lost touch with her other career aspirations. The pay was so good that she didn't need to have any other kind of job. A very smart girl, she had a high ranked bachelor's degree from a top flight university. But she had a big gap on her resume, had done no career networking, and her skills and knowledge had atrophied thanks to all the sex, drugs, late nights, and time away from real work. She was trapped into prostitution - not by any external forces, but by her own actions.
- She was addicted to the sex, the danger, and the money. Even though she rationally accepted that she needed to stop doing it for her own sanity and health, she couldn't bring herself to actually stop. I doubt anything will ever live up to that adrenaline rush for her ever again.
- She had a huge sense of shame about what she was doing, which she covered up and compensated for with an elaborate set of beliefs and rationalizations to justify her actions. She'd convinced herself emotionally that prostitution was morally just fine, and that nobody was getting hurt. Yet at the same time she knew rationally that she'd cheated on hundreds of men's wives, wrecked a few families, and caused herself, her friends, me, and her own family, a huge amount of pain and trouble. That shame was so bad that she wasn't able to actually experience it without having a serious breakdown. So, she seldom ever let herself actually experience it - instead, she vigorously defended herself psychologically, and would verbally defend herself at length against any attempt by anybody to talk her into sense about what was going on in her life. You could call that a kind of insanity: she was certainly very disconnected from her own reality.
- She told me that she'd had knives pulled on her by various clients. She had a long scar on her arm that she claimed she got in a traffic accident; maybe that's true. The story was convincing - but then, so were all of her other stories.
- By being a hooker, she immediately excluded herself from the dating pool of most serious desirable well-intentioned caring men. To get such a man again in the future she will have to lie and cover up her past, and she'll forever live with the paranoia that he will find out, either directly, or by someone from her past who knew about her escorting tipping him off. Could you live with that constant insecurity?
- The easy flow of money creates some very strange financial implications. For example, let's say that you are so happy with your income that you decide to buy your parents a big expensive anniversary present. They look a bit surprised that you can afford it, but they know you're doing well at your job and that you just got promoted (because that's what you told them), and they thank you for the gift. Let's say it's something really useful, like a dishwasher. The following year, your parents find out that you were working as a hooker, and that's how you could afford it. How weird is life going to be in the kitchen in your parents house now, both for you, and for them? Are they going to get rid of it? Or do they leave it there so you all have to live with the enormous feelings of discomfort that are evoked whenever you set eyes on it?
- There was a big cost to me of all this too. I had a lot of sleepless nights thinking about it all, and I spent many weeks dealing with the fall-out and trying to help her get her life back on track. As a direct result I missed a certain big opportunity in my own career - I obviously couldn't tell my manager what was going on - and paid not a small price. She is aware of this and will have to live with that also.
- When men give money to prostitutes, they are feeding a (mostly dark) economy that really does include all the kidnapping, violence, abuse, false imprisonment etc. that you hear about. While you might say you aren't participating in any of that working as a high class escort because you want to and nobody forced you into it, it's nevertheless true that by feeding a man's addiction to prostitution, you're making it more likely that he eventually pays someone to have sex with him who has been forced into prostitution against her will - and he almost certainly won't know that is the case at the time. So in a sense, by working as a prostitute, you are indirectly putting cash in the pockets of the criminals who are committing the civil liberty crimes that rope people into prostitution, and of course if you have a pimp, you might be putting that cash directly in his or her pocket. Do you want to be a part of that?
- Being an escort greatly increases your risk of getting various serious and nasty diseases, not just STDs, but diseases you wouldn't necessarily think of at first, like chronic pelvic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, colds, depression, etc.
- Psychologically, the effects of prostitition are similar to the effects of sexual abuse; the most notable unpleasant effect, other than the general insanity and life disarray I outlined above, is that you gradually become disassociated from your body, i.e. your body no longer feels like it is part of you. Like I said, you're better off washing dishes.
- Prostitution is a dead-end career - it's a short-term thing, and you'll be out of a job probably at 30, almost certainly by 35. If you've saved enough money to retire, that's great, but you probably won't (see ridiculous spending and drug habits above). Besides, if you have, your cash will still be stuffed into a mattress because you can't take the risk of depositing it into a bank account without declaring it as taxable income - which you can't do because, in most states at least, prostitution is not legal. Cash in mattresses has a terrible tendency to get lost, burned or stolen, depreciates in value due to inflation, and looks pretty stupid in a briefcase offered as payment for a house, so even if you have $1m in hard cash, realistically it's not going to last you the next 50 years of your hopefully not too shortened life. Prostitution doesn't come with a 401(k), so what career are you going to revert to when you are out of that sexy job you can't put on your resume? It's been 10-15 years since you had a normal job. I suspect washing dishes may now be your only option.
