The Truth About Female Escorts

Mention the term ”Female escort,” and perhaps the iconic image that comes to mind is the Julia Roberts character in the film, Pretty Woman. That film, like the term itself, seems to have a way of perpetuating that great American myth about the whore with the heart of gold. The French know better. In truth, the whore with the heart of gold is merely the stuff of American fable, in the same class with Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill. All this has come to America’s top of mind today because Ashley Dupre is speaking out on ABC television about her not-so-very-clandestine sexual rendezvous with New York Governor, Elliott Spitzer. The fetching Miss Dupre has made a curious public confession, that she was an escort, but not a prostitute.

Without firsthand knowledge of this business, I need to rely on what I’m told, and what I’m told by Miss Dupre, as well as other authorities on the subject, is that a prostitute sells nothing but sex. I guess I already knew that. So what was Elliott Spitzer buying that night? Well, if you believe the only other person who was in a position to know about this, it was about much more than sex. That’s because Elliott Spitzer was with an escort rather than a prostitute, and this entitled him to dinner companionship and intellectual conversation and even some measure of intimacy. And let’s not forget that all this was considerably more expensive than what a sane man would pay for simple sex, so there must have been some “value added”— to use a favorite term from the marketing world.

When I watched Ashley Dupre being interviewed by Diane Sawyer, she was not exactly a person that had “intellectual conversation” written all over her. But when she talked about dinner that night, her little eyes lit up, and I began to understand. Evidently, an escort sells a larger package, an expanded experience that includes anticipation and a build-up meant to simulate the seduction process, even though the outcome is never in doubt. It’s why the matador faces the bull with a sword instead of a hunting rifle. So my advice to prostitutes is to buy better clothes, wear less makeup, charge ten times as much as you’re charging now, and get ready to eat a lot of dinners.