While you might hear the words "Daily Mail" and "escort addiction" and mentally call for the check - I did - Andy Bodle's essay is suprisingly interesting. Misguided? Troubled? Worrisome? Sure - as only those things written with "now I know better" authority can be - but also thought-provoking. See, Bodle's not, he's at pains to tell us, the kind of guy who would have ever seen himself paying for sex. And he says now, "I'm ashamed of exploiting women, and of having supported a degrading, dangerous industry. I don't expect anyone to condone what I did.But now, after many years have passed, I want to explain why I was propelled into that addiction - and why so many other men are, too." And he;s still kind glad he did it!

Well-educated and successful, Bodle nevertheless had a disastrous history with women: mocked in school, painfully shy, and by his own reckoning stood up 27 times in the 90s. Cue violins.

When I hit 30, I hadn't had a girlfriend - or even a kiss - for three years. I was starting to feel desperate: lonely and with little to look forward to. I'd never seriously thought about paying for female company: my image of the sex industry was of kerbcrawlers and kneetremblers in needle-strewn alleyways. But, according to the article, it was very safe and very clean. You visited the girls in plush, rented apartments; you were paying for companionship, not sex.

Of course, although he treats the transactions like dates - insisting on buying the escorts dinner, bringing them flowers, and choosing to believe the pros "like" him - they invariably end in sex. And not shockingly, this boosts his ego. He gets 'hooked' - blowing through his savings, forswearing normal dating altogether. "My reasoning went like this: why should I hang around trying to pick up women in bars when I could meet far more attractive women with no risk of getting hurt emotionally?"

As we've seen, the man is susceptible to the media; not shockingly, he falls for one of the working girls, even paying for her to spend his birthday with him. "I was convinced, after that, that Hayley and I had a special connection. Maybe the whole Pretty Woman myth was true. Maybe, if I played my cards right, I could persuade her to quit escorting and be with me."

Um, no. His bubble is further burst when one woman mentions that his visit will allow her to pay her electric bill. And he has a revelation.

In a year of visiting escorts, this was the first incontrovertible evidence I'd heard that not every girl did escorting because they enjoyed it. Some of them were doing it because they had to. And even though Sylvia seemed to like me, even though I had helped her out in the short-term, I was helping to perpetuate that situation. Perhaps I'd been naive not to notice anything amiss before; perhaps I was just too immersed in my own self-pity at being single to worry about anyone else's feelings. But the truth is that up until that point, I had genuinely been convinced that all the girls I'd seen were selling their bodies entirely of their own free will.

When one escort starts crying, he leaves without sex and gives up the lifestyle, gradually easing back into non-paid relationships. While the depth of his delusion - or denial - is kind of hard to grasp, we try to stay with him. So, does he regret it? Well, here's where the article gets weird.

Many people say that men who use escort girls hate women. That may be true for some; but in my case, I believe those escorts stopped me hating women. I feel gratitude towards those sweet, beautiful girls for the warmth they showed me. Guilt, absolutely, that I helped perpetuate an industry that is unregulated and potentially unsafe - but also gratitude. I firmly believe that while some sex workers are escorts by choice, thousands of others are not. And the fact is, when you book an escort, you never know which you are going to get. And that's why I'll never again try to re-create the 'girlfriend experience'. The truth is that it's an unedifying sham.

Basically, what's at war here are what he thinks he should think about the women, and his own self-interest. Is he sorry he - maybe - exploited women and promoted an industry he finds problematic? Nah, it was worth it! And in some ways this piece underlies what many find worrisome about the world of high-class escorting (as opposed to the more obvious pitfalls and degradations of less rareified forms of sex work.) That in some ways it's the men like Bodle - lonely, naive, certainly self-deluding - who are a big part of the problem. Because while these men might treat an escort with respect and kindness, they're also buying into the fantasy - allowing them to misrepresent their own actions, and, more to the point, effecting the way they view real-life relationships. Take that telling admission that now he can have "more attractive" women with less effort - do we really think this superficiality and entitlement won't carry over into a normal dating life? To say nothing of "relationships" - which he admits he considers them - centered around pleasing him, fulfilling him, demanding nothing? Sure, good training wheels. And we're not even getting into the sex element.

It's easy, as women, to underestimate the self-esteem issues inherent in this kind of give-and-take. It's funny: when I ask some male friends (the type who'd 'never pay for sex') what they make of men who do, one word always comes up: "pathetic." A guy who can't get sex on his own terms seems, implicitly, more problematic than one who'd indulge in an unhealthy power dynamic, or a current system that allows for the degradation of women (even allowing for a best-case-scenario view of sex work.) And ironically, of course, it's this same kind of judgment that draws men like Bodle into "addictions" like the one he describes - a wish for that kind of validation. And tying self-esteem up with paid sex? Well, as plenty of women have found out, the Pretty Woman scenario rarely works out.

I Was Addicted To Call Girls: A Respected Script Writer Explains How He Succumbed To The Lure Of Paying For Sex [Daily Mail]

[Sydney, June 2. Image via Getty]

Sydney sex workers 'Ivy' (C) and 'Mish' (R) celebrate International Whores Day in Sydney on June 2, 2009. Sex workers angry at the cost of advertising in local papers staged a protest outside the New South Wales parliament. International Whores day, held on the second of June, commemorates the day in 1975 when a group of sex workers staged a sit-in at a church in Lyon, France to protest discrimination against sex workers AFP PHOTO / Greg WOOD (Photo credit should read GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images)

Wired reports that there is a new trend of sexual traffickers using sites like MySpace to recruit girls and then advertising them on websites that run ads for erotic services, like myRedBook and Eros.com.

Prosecutors have found that Craigslist has been one of the biggest advertisers of teen prostitutes. The site was named in at least eight federal child sex-trafficking cases in just the past year. Since Craigslist changed the format of their adult ads last November, forcing advertisers to pay $5 to post and collecting their credit card information, the volume of ads in their "erotic services" category has dropped 85-90 percent.

Police now routinely obtain warrants to search the computers and digital cameras of suspected pimps as they move their businesses online. They are also examining social networking sites, which experts say are providing pimps with a larger pool of troubled girls to prey on. Parry Aftab, founder and director of WiredSafety, which advises children on internet risks, tells Wired that some kids are unwittingly announcing their vulnerability on sites like MySpace.

"They may post sexual images," she says. "They may indicate that they're up for anything. They may indicate that they're more mature, and know a lot more things than anybody around them appreciates.... And like a weak fish broadcasting to a shark, they broadcast their vulnerability to sexual predators, pimps and sexual traffickers."

In some cases, pimps have started a relationship with kids by contacting them through their profiles, and eventually convincing the girls to run away with them. Shaun King, a LAPD officer investigating these cases says:

We have a bunch of fake MySpace accounts that we go after pimps with... Pretty quickly, if they get a vibe that you're open to such things, they'll draw you in.... We've had pimps buy us bus tickets.

In one typical case, a 30-year-old Florida pimp met a 14-year-old Ohio girl on the social networking site Urbanchat.com and convinced her to run away with him. The girl eventually escaped and the pimp and one of his senior prostitutes pled guilty to federal child sex trafficking charges in December. The pimp had the 27-year-old prostitute gain the Ohio girl's trust and convince her that if she drove with them to Florida they would help her get into modeling. It's not uncommon for pimps to use prostitutes to recruit other girls, but in an unusual twist two teen girls are accused of running a brothel themselves.

CNN reports that Tatiana Tye and Jazmine Finley of Arizona were indicted this week by a grand jury on charges of child prostitution and pandering, or serving as a go-between or liaison for sexual purposes. Phoenix police arrested the girls after a five-month investigation, saying that the girls recruited at least five girls from the ages of 14 to 17 from their high schools. Prosecutors say the girls rented an apartment they used only for prostitution and recruited the others by telling them about all the money they'd be making. According to a police statement, "they were told that it was better working for them as opposed to male pimps because they would not get beat up." The girls, who have denied the charges, will be tried as adults.

Pimps Go Online To Lure Kids Into Prostitution [Wired]
Two Arizona Teens Accused Of Pimping Other Girls [CNN]

Lauren A.E. Schuker's article goes on to count the many, many times a woman has been nominated for an Oscar for playing a stripper or a courtesan/prostitute: Natalie Portman, Charlize Theron, Mira Sorvino, Elisabeth Shue, Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, Greta Garbo, Nicole Kidman, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Basinger, Jane Fonda. The very first actress to win an Oscar was Janet Gaynor, who played a hooker in 1928's Street Angel.

Why do actresses take these parts, and why does Hollywood reward them? "There aren't and have never been a lot of great roles for women in Hollywood," says Patty Jenkins, who directed Charlize Theron in Monster. "Sadly, that creates this cliché that if a woman plays a prostitute, she wins an Oscar."

Jeanine Basinger (not related to Kim), who heads Wesleyan's Film Studies department, has a slightly different perspective: "The way to land an Oscar as a woman is either to take off your makeup or put on a lot more. You're either a prostitute/stripper or you're a mother/nun." Schuker adds: "As if to underline the point, Meryl Streep is up for an Oscar this year for her role as a nun in Doubt."

As for Marisa Tomei, she certainly embraced her role:

"My aim in the film was to honor the women I met and to represent them in a meaningful way. I wish there was a movie called The Stripper because I found out so much about these women, like the physical toll that dancing takes on a stripper's body, and on her feet, that we couldn't fit into the movie."

Clearly, strippers and hookers often have story arcs which are more complex, more interesting than roles like "quirky girlfriend" or "graceful wife." Can we blame actresses for being attracted to these characters? On the other hand, why does a woman have to play a sex worker to get props?

Stripping Your Way to Success [WSJ]

*Inspired by Shirley MacLaine's assertion that the best parts for actresses fall into one of the above categories.

Brandi M. took home the grand prize on last night's finale of Charm School, because the judges considered her to be the most changed for the better. (She went from being a gaseous stripper/porn star to a girl who could make speeches without note cards.) Runner up Destiney was awarded an internship at one Daniella Clarke's—one of the judges—stupid clothing line. For their final challenge, the final three contestants were supposed to help the homeless. It was fitting that they were assigned these three appropriately-dressed former contestants (Heather, Megan, and Brandi C.) to help them earn money on Hollywood Blvd.

Somehow, Megan looked more naked in this dress than she does in her string bikinis.

As for all the B.S. about how the Charm School judges helping the girls be more ladylike, don't worry, because if learning by example is any indication, these women won't be ruined from reality TV forever. At the reunion taping, Sharon Osbourne beat the crap out of Megan, who later went to the hospital.

But alas! The internet was "negative" and "judgmental" about the "mutually beneficial" agreement that nets her about $5,000 a month. She is back today with quotes from her sugar daddy in a misguided effort to set the record straight. The main thing she wants you to know is that she's not a hooker. She and her sugar daddy are just regular boyfriend and girlfriend. Their relationship is wholesome, you see. Her "sugar daddy" plays golf with her actual daddy, who of course doesn't know the financial agreement the SD has with his daughter. And there's more:

Q: So the majority of bloggers felt that our relationship was prostitution, with me as the prostitute and you as the john, mainly because of the financial aspect of our relationship. What would you say to them?
A: Well, I would say that I think of our relationship as pretty much a marriage. Just like a husband provides for his wife, I provide for you. I'm lucky enough to be able to financially give you anything you could want, and if people resent that then that's too bad for them. I think the biggest misconception with some of the readers was that we aren't monogamous. Neither of us have any other kind of relationship, whether emotional or sexual, with anyone else.

Well, Ms. "Beech", no one "resents" the fact that you're financially blessed any more than they resent any other rich person. The upswelling of negativity was because of the heinous, braggy attitude you had about the whole sordid thing. In this piece, you say your lifestyle should be the "envy of any young woman who enjoys life." And in your last screed, you bragged at length and in great detail about your lux life. Remember?

I rent a $1,600 apartment in the city, for which he pays the rent in full. I carry an AmEx Black card in both our names, and use it for things like shopping, spa trips, manicures, and tanning; the bill goes to him. And the company car I drive costs him around $700 a month for the lease and the insurance. I’ve even managed to build up a little nest egg over the past year—at his insistence—putting away around $12,000. All in all, he probably spends in the ballpark of $5,000 a month on my lifestyle…We went to London and Paris last spring, where we saw the sights and shopped at stores like Chanel and Dior. How many other college students are wearing Christian Louboutins to class?

I'm not going to get into the moral dubiousness of your proposition, or how narcissistic it is to assume that everyone wants to emulate your existence. Whether or not you're a prostitute is actually irrelevant when you consider your gross public materialism. (You even mentioned that the "job market was sliding into decline" in your first essay, so obviously, you know we're in a recession.) To boast about the egregious sums of money being spent on your grooming, wardrobe and upkeep is gross to the extreme in this kind of economic climate; I don't care who's paying for it.

The Sugar Daddy Replies [Daily Beast]
My Sugar Daddy [Daily Beast]

Earlier: Sugar Daddies: Easier Than Work-Study For College Students

Earlier: Father Gives Daughter Bikini Waxes, Rides To Work At A Brothel
•Dad Who Waxes Daughter's Bikini Area Returns To Tyra

.

Can I Be A Schoolteacher AND A Slut? from Pot Psychology on Vimeo.

And why did he think he'd be the one to ruin the marriage? "As a travel writer, I live an easy, pampered life. And like many without real cares, I am not unfamiliar with the urge to drive the happy bus off the side of the mountain just to see what happens," Sachs writes. "Complicating this is that disease of the brain called chronic male horniness. I used to tell people that the world will never seem more teeming with beautiful, fascinating, fuckable people than on the sunny afternoon when you walk to the post office carrying a box full of your wedding invitations."

My problem with that statement is not that he thought about fucking other people — everyone with a pulse, regardless of how much in love they are, thinks about fucking other people — it's that he attributes it to chronic male horniness, as if women couldn't possibly understand what it's like to lust after strangers. The John's reasoning is identical to Sachs's. Even fucking Marilyn Monroe gets boring, he exclaims. Well you know what, Adam, getting boned by George Clooney probably loses its luster after a couple of years, too! The fact that I even need to point out that all humans, regardless of gender, have biological urges is completely ridiculous, but I guess I'm going to have to keep doing it until men take intellectual responsibility for their wandering Johnsons.

Divorce: The Ultimate Aphrodisiac [Men.Style.Com]
I've Seen Every Kind Of Hooker Going [Letters From Johns]

If you are selling your time, undivided attention, and the (unspoken) offer of sexual entertainment, you're an escort. If you're selling a specific sexual activity for a certain amount of money, you're a prostitute. If you won't have sex with the man you're dating unless he buys you an expensive dinner, you're a (relatively cheap) prostitute.

Guides To Call Girl Work Out [The Sun]
Related: The Internet Escort's Handbook

Plot synopsis from the press release:

Mike Horner, who bears a striking resemblance to the former governor, eagerly places his order with the Pimperor's Club. As "Client 69," he agrees to fork over thousands for an all-expense-paid trip so that his mistress, Kristen, can meet him in Washington, D.C. Kristen, played by Cassandra Cruz, arrives at the governor's hotel to find him eagerly awaiting her arrival. Watch as the governor reveals his overzealous sex drive and gets sucked and fucked by his sexy mistress. "Client 69" is under the impression that he is going to get away with his sexcapade, but little does he know there are FBI agents on a stakeout in the next room. The agents, played by Van Damage and Veronica Jett, are so incredibly turned on by what they are overhearing in the governor's room that they decide to have some fun of their own.

Related: Porn Of The Opportunistic Moment: Hustler's "Gov Love: The Eliot Splitz-Her Story"

Perhaps those posts will lead Ms. Kirchner's mother to a deeper understanding of the oldest profession and her daughter's reasons for choosing it. But, says Morgan Winter on the Utne Reader's website, "There seems to be two basic motivations for writing about one's tenure as a hooker, neither educational. The prostitute either wants to glorify or vilify the industry and its consumers. Either of these seems simplistic and disingenuous. After all, not only are we talking about the oldest profession, we're also trying to understand arguably the most complicated physiological aspect of nature—sex—through books about themes that, if authored by anybody other than former prostitutes, would fall under the 'teen' section in the local library." Even with a more nuanced view of prostitution, I can't imagine any mother would be particularly thrilled to discover that her daughter was a hooker. I got an awkwardly scolding phone call from my mother when I wrote about foreskins. I can't even imagine what she'd say if I told her I touched them for a living!

Insanely Sane Conversation With My Mom [Bound, Not Gagged]
The True Stories Of O[Utne]

Related: Young Beauty Sells Her Body, Breaks Our Hearts
a href="http://gawker.com/5006394/diane-sawyer-rats-out-hooker-to-her-parents">Diane Sawyer Rats Out Hooker To Her Parents