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, legal protections, and for society to stop criminalizing my survival strategy."
The assumption that all these escorts have been trafficked or coerced erases the reality that many women choose this work consciously, even if that choice is constrained by economic necessity. Yes, trafficking exists and is horrific. But conflating all sex work with trafficking helps no one. It prevents us from distinguishing between force and choice, from creating policies that actually protect the vulnerable without criminalizing everyone else. "When you treat all escorts like victims," another woman explained, "you take away our agency. You decide we're incapable of making decisions about our own bodies. That's not protection. That's patriarchy dressed up as concern."
Society also gets wrong the assumption that escorts hate their work and their clients. The reality is far more nuanced. Some escorts genuinely enjoy aspects of the work, the financial freedom, the flexibility, even some of the human connection. Others hate every minute but need the money. Most exist somewhere in between, experiencing the work as complicated, sometimes rewarding, sometimes degrading, often just exhausting. "It's a job," one escort said with a shrug. "Some days are good, some days are terrible. Just like any other job. But society can't accept that. They need us to either love it or hate it, to fit into their narrative."
The belief that ny asian escorts are uneducated or have no other options is another damaging myth. I've interviewed escorts with master's degrees, women who speak multiple languages, former teachers and nurses and accountants. They're doing this work because it pays significantly better than their other options, not because they lack skills or intelligence. "Society wants to believe we're stupid or desperate," one woman told me. "Because if you admit that smart, capable women choose this work because the alternative is poverty, you have to confront how broken the economic system is. It's easier to just think we're damaged."
The assumption that escorts are promiscuous or have unhealthy relationships with sex is particularly frustrating to the women I've spoken with. Many escorts have far more conservative personal sex lives than their work would suggest. Some are in committed relationships or prefer celibacy in their personal time. "People think I must love sex because I do this work," one escort laughed. "But I'm performing a service. It's not about my desires at all. By the time I'm done working, I never want to have sex again. The assumption that I'm doing this because I'm hypersexual is completely backwards."
Society also misunderstands the relationship dynamics between escorts and clients. The prevailing narrative is that clients are predatory men exploiting vulnerable women. The reality is more complex. Yes, some clients are terrible and some are dangerous. But many are just lonely, or socially awkward, or trapped in sexless marriages, or disabled, or grieving. They're not villains. They're people seeking connection in the only way they know how. "My clients aren't monsters," one escort said. "They're sad middle-aged men who want someone to make them feel desirable for an hour. It's not sinister. It's just human."
The belief that legalization or decriminalization would make sex work disappear is another misconception. This work has existed throughout human history across all cultures. It will continue to exist regardless of its legal status. The question isn't whether sex work should exist, but how we can make it safer for the people doing it. Every escort I've interviewed supports decriminalization, not because they think it's perfect, but because criminalization actively endangers them. "When the work is illegal, we can't go to police when we're assaulted," one woman explained. "We can't operate openly or access normal safety measures. The laws don't protect us. They just make us easier to victimize."
Perhaps the biggest misconception is that escorts are fundamentally different from other women. That they're a separate category of person, damaged or deviant or desperate. But the escorts I've met are remarkably ordinary. They worry about rent and retirement. They have complicated relationships with their families. They struggle with mental health and dating and figuring out who they are. They're navigating the same challenges as everyone else, just with one additional complication: their job is stigmatized and criminalized and misunderstood.
As I finish this final article in the series, I'm struck by how much I still don't understand. I've spent months listening to these women, and I've barely scratched the surface of the complexity of their lives. But I do know this: the stories society tells about escorts are designed to make us feel comfortable, to confirm our existing beliefs, to avoid difficult questions about economics and gender and power. The real stories, the ones I've tried to tell here, are messier and more human and more challenging.
These women aren't symbols or statistics or moral lessons. They're people trying to survive in a world that criminalizes their survival strategy while offering few alternatives. They deserve better than our judgment. They deserve legal protection, social support, and the basic respect of having their experiences believed and their choices recognized as their own. Until society can offer that, the least we can do is listen to what they're actually saying instead of what we assume they must be feeling. That's what I've tried to do here. I hope, in some small way, it helps.
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