New York VIP Escorts

When I started this series eight months ago, I thought I understood escort work. I'd consumed the same media everyone else had, formed opinions based on movies and news stories and cultural assumptions. Then I started actually talking to escorts, listening to their stories, sitting with the complexity of their lives. Now I realize that almost everything society believes about this work is wrong. Not just incomplete, but fundamentally, damagingly wrong. Society's first wrong assumption is that escorts are victims who need saving. This narrative is everywhere, in laws supposedly designed to protect sex workers that actually endanger them, in charity organizations that treat adult women making autonomous choices like trafficked children. The escorts I've spoken with aren't victims. They're making calculated economic decisions in a system that offers them limited options. "I don't need saving," one escort told me bluntly. "I need health insurance, le...