About

I’m a sex worker, escort to be specific, and a former journalist – Associated Press in a major market. It didn’t take long for the glamorous reporter dreams of my college days to die. I loved reporting and writing. I adored interviewing. But the A.P. paid crap and the deadlines induced ulcers. I was actually happier at a family owned collection of weeklies where I earned next to nothing but got to review movies for an editor who allowed me complete autonomy.

Before too long motherhood beckoned and I had no intention of carrying my progeny around for nine months only to dump them for the majority of their waking hours into a bacteria infested “playroom” with a bunch of anxiety-ridden toddlers and a few minimum-wage care givers. Fuck that. I quit work and settled in for the long haul: birth to kindergarten.

Life was hectic but good, very good…until the divorce. Once again, the threat of long hours of third party care loomed over their blonde ringlets – a full day at school followed and preceded by hours of “after care” and all day, all summer “camp”. Not happening. Instead, as a newly single mother I became an escort – a $300/hr ($1500 for overnight) “elite” companion.

I ho’d when the kids went to their dad’s house or attended school. Sure, I felt like a failure at first, no longer able to impress anyone at open houses with my cool journalist credentials. But life got better, easier, and more secure. I decupled my wages and quartered my hours. Horseback riding, piano lessons, trips to Europe, a new house in a safe neighborhood, organic food that mommy prepared because mommy was home when the kids got home and when they were sick or on break from school. No longer a homemaker – I had become something better: a ho-maker.

Attitudes around sex work started to bug me – the random hooker joke at a cocktail party told by some bloated corporate fuck who assumed I was your typical well-cared for uptight divorcee. And media bugged me too. Suddenly, I noticed how many hookers were in the movies. I began seeking these movies out – Moulin Rouge, Sin City, Night at the Blue Iguana, Striptease, even Show Girls. I wanted to see myself in the movies. I wanted to know where I fit in the social fabric and how others perceived people like me.

Why, I wondered, were sex workers (strippers, call girls, crack hos, hustlers, ex hos, etc) so abundant in television exposes, news stories, documentaries, cable realty shows and mainstream films, while they were so marginalized in real life? Why were actresses pushing their grandmothers down the stairs to play hos while no one gave a whit about decriminalizing prostitution or speaking up for real prostitutes? Plus, I just knew some of these stars must have traded sex for money during their starving artist years but not one admitted to it.

Sex worker characters generally draw from the worst stereotypes and almost always wind up punished – dead, injured, in jail, insane and/or alone. I knew this wasn’t anything like my reality or the reality of my hooker friends.

Most of us have never been arrested and are quite sane (thank you happy pills). I’m in love. My children are thriving – CPS hasn’t taken them away (we don’t even have a case file) and no, my daughter hasn’t become a whore nor was she the high school slut – she’s in Harvard, on scholarship – swear to Goddess. The boy is insanely addicted to Glee and video games. They’re ridiculously wholesome and good. And, yes, they know. They still love me. They aren’t scandalized, horrified or in therapy. They’ve been raised with whores for a large portion of their lives. It’s our normal.

That’s me: The whore with the kid in Harvard and this is my blog.