Debt, politicians & student call girls - another term begins

The rising tide of student escorts

Research from the European Union suggests that many female students depend upon the sex industry to cover their tuition fees and living costs, especially within the more expensive cities and prestigious centers of learning. According to one study conducted by the French students' union and published in ‘Sud Etudiant’ in 2006, an estimated 40,000 students in Paris aged between 19 and 25 currently work as escorts to pay their way through university.

Last October, Cambridge's Varsity magazine reported that hundreds of its University students were working as call girls to make ends meet. Of the several call girl agencies that operate in Cambridge, one claimed to have over 400 students and alumni on its books. Some head to London at the weekend to ply their trade, while others work the wealthy local region, but all are driven by the necessity of paying the estimated £3,000 in university fees without losing too much of their study time. The main problem is that many young students don't appreciate the 'going' commercial escort rates and some sleep with up to 20 clients to earn £1,000. Hired out at only £120 per hour, their worst fear is meeting someone they know and being publicly exposed, and all for £50 an hour.

The growing phenomenon of student prostitution is particularly prevalent in London, where rising student fees have radically altered both student demographics and behavior. Traditional British student life was once poor and care-free, but as students receive demands for fees above and beyond their loan capacity, the era of study today and earn tomorrow has all but vanished. A UK survey by Kingston University revealed that over 10% of students admitted to ‘knowing’ a fellow student who worked as a stripper or an escort. Given that the average UK student debt has risen to over £20,000, the pressing need to be sexually compliant is scarcely surprising. In another press report, this time from Italy’s Calabria University campus, it was found that female students frequently invited contemporaries to their flats for paid sex.

No casual visitor to London could possibly have overlooked the city’s public phone booths that teem with ‘tart cards’ advertising escort services. With modern graphical technology it must seem impossible for those driven by summer lust or sheer curiosity to determine whether the girls advertised therein are real, independent or are otherwise actively pimped. The Kingston survey suggested that between 2000 and 2006 there was a 50% rise in the number of students who entered the sex industry to pay their way through university. With British ‘punters’ spending in excess of £534 million a year on prostitution, the marriage of escorts and their clients is as much one of necessity as of providence.

As expensive modern educations often extend into the thirties, so debt-ridden college girls aged between 18 and 32 present prime recruiting territory for sophisticated call girl syndicates. The parallel socioeconomic systems of encouraging student debt and rewarding sexual service pervades from Miami to Moscow, and so recent reports of small armies of student call girls working our cities should come as little surprise. Many students though prefer the relative safety of stripping or webcams to escorting, as some webcam voyeurs are willing to pay hundreds of Euros just to flirt online with a cam girl in her underwear. Indeed, some student cam girls can earn as much as €3,000 from only a few hours a day spent in front of their computer.

Fresh scandals fuel the fire

The venerable tradition of high society morals and clandestine impropriety are as old as the Church and the State, and the ‘outing’ of those who indulge in the venal sins of wealth and power is a tabloid sport whose popularity far exceeds that of fox hunting. It can of course be argued that there can be no smoke without fire, and of late there has been a wildfire of high class call girl scandals hitting the headlines. There can be little doubt that the growth of an industry which charges up to $10,000 a night could not be maintained without a heavy demand for the procurement of attractive young courtesans. Unsurprisingly, high-end call girl agencies tend to be concentrated within major capitals like Washington, London, LA, New York and Las Vegas, although strangely, despite the prevalence of call girls in Paris, the advertisement of their services is strictly prohibited. Recent revelations have however served to illuminate the shady world of the modern call girl.

Perhaps the most tragic of the recent media exposés was the apparent suicide of 52-year-old Deborah Jeane Palfrey, otherwise known as the ‘DC Madam’. Her retirement plan was Pamela Martin and Associates, an escort agency that farmed the fertile soils of Washington DC. As is often the case, treading the fine line of legality led to her conviction in April on charges of racketeering, illegal use of the mail, and money laundering. A couple of weeks later, following a threat to name the politicians in her black book, Deborah Palfrey was found dead, hanged in her shed. As befits a high stakes political crimes, suicide was suspected, although Palfrey's Orlando condominium manager disputed the authenticity of the signatures found on her suicide notes.

The political tidal wave that was the DC Madam first began in October 2006 when US Postal Inspectors posed as a house-hunting couple to access her property. Federal agents subsequently froze $500,000 of assets and seized papers relating to money laundering & prostitution. It transpired that Pamela Martin & Associates recruited escorts via the ‘Diamondback’, a popular student newspaper of the University of Maryland. Her girls charged around $300 an hour, the bargain basement for DC call girls, and in reality, given the small size of the bait, few of her Washington clients were big fish. An ABC news investigation into her phone records proved an anticlimax, but the scandal ultimately cost Ambassador Randall L. Tobias and military strategist Harlan Ullman their positions. Republican Senator David Vitter was the most prominent casualty of the DC Madam affair, and he found himself under heavy pressure to resign after he was linked to the services of both the DC and Canal Street Madams. A frenzied year of news articles and blogs on the issue has however exposed the deeply entrenched duality of American attitudes towards prostitution and society. On the one hand, the American culture of money and enterprise holds an enduring fascination for the sexually intense lifestyles of the social elite, but on the other, the deeply religious upbringing of most Americans fills them with a deep scorn for call girls and their hedonistic lifestyles. Once again, Palfrey’s passing proves the artists’ adage that fame and honor can only be achieved through death.

The fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer generated far greater political turbulence than that of Senator David Vitter, simply because he had created so many enemies during his public crusade against prostitution and corruption. The ghosts of those whom he had banished to the shadows returned a vengeance once he was unmasked as Client 9 of an upmarket call girl ring. Governor Spitzer was inadvertently caught during a Federal wiretap investigation arranging to meet ‘Kristen’, a New Jersey call girl, at his Washington hotel room. Once again it would appear, in New York at least, that nobody in power is innocent, and the respected 48-year-old father of three teenage girls was revealed to be just as human as any other influential middle-aged man with the opportunities afforded by money and travel.

FBI officials uncovered Governor Spitzer’s extramarital activities during the course of their investigations into the international call girl ring known as the Emperor's Club VIP. Detectives had planted an undercover agent within the prostitution ring, and Spitzer was recorded arranging to meet with at least one woman in his Washington hotel. After a three hour rendez-vous which lasted until midnight, ‘Kristen’ called to report that she had collected $4,300 from a ‘trouble-free Client 9’. According to the FBI, this turned out to be one of many liaisons with the girl, and Governor Spitzer had even booked her services for the future. Such lewd conduct could not have been less seemly for Spitzer, a man who had built his reputation by being seen to be tough on such moral turpitude during his eight year reign as New York Attorney General. During his time Spitzer had busted corrupt Wall Street CEOs and prostitution rings with equal candor, and in 2004 he had publicly spearheaded the successful prosecution of a major New York City escort service which led to the arrest of the call girl 'eighteen'.

The Emperor’s Club call girl ring was uncovered after banks had noticed frequent cash transfers from several accounts, some which were traced back to Spitzer, and filed suspicious-activity reports with the Internal Revenue Service. In the ensuing FBI investigation four people were arrested and charged with offences relating to prostitution and tax evasion after earning millions from their international team of fifty call girls. Mark Brener (62), was alleged to have run the New Jersey-based operation along with his girlfriend and ‘top madam’, 23-year-old Cecil ‘Katie’ Suwal. The two were charged with prostitution, money laundering, and of trafficking girls across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. The Emperor’s Club VIP was considerably upmarket of the DC Madam’s outfit, and routinely advertised the 'services' of top fashion models, pageant winners and ‘exquisite’ students for as much as $50,000 a weekend.

Recent history has of course exposed other notable vice rings, including those run by Heidi Fleiss, unabashed Hollywood Madam, and Margaret MacDonald, the English ex-convent school girl who ran Europe’s biggest call girl operation until 2003. Miss MacDonald had established an international £700 an hour call girl agency to which she had recruited over five hundred women by the time she was finally arrested in a Paris hotel. MacDonald was no small time operator, speaking no fewer than seven languages in addition to holding a qualification from the prestigious Reims School of business management, an institution which she later claimed had given her invaluable insights into the workings of the European banking system. Her recruitment system was both simple and sophisticated, and involved placing small ads in free Paris newspapers and interviewing prospective students and air hostesses in restaurants and hotels along the Champs-Elysées. To attract clients she advertised her escort services in the International Herald Tribune and on the Internet, accepting appointments via mobile phone or online booking form. Miss MacDonald took a 40% commission and deposited much of her earnings within offshore Jersey accounts. Armed with a laptop, six credit cards, five mobile phones, countless SIM cards and several aliases to evade detection, Miss MacDonald was a wily and highly mobile madam who moved between hotels and apartments in Paris, Milan and Athens. She was eventually exposed by Laura Schleich, her former call girl turned rival, and charged with aggravated procurement for the purpose of prostitution, owing largely to Ms. Schleich's testimony. Miss MacDonald denied the charges and instead alleged that Miss Schleich had left her employ with the intent to establish an escort monopoly within Paris and the Côte D'Azur.

Sex and the 21st Century escort

A social prejudice has long differentiated between ‘call girls’ and ‘street walkers’, and the advent of the Internet and wireless technology has only served to increase the cultural and economic divide. The Internet has made the escort industry far more personalized, and many top call girls have discarded their masques to become cult personalities in their own right. Today's escorts are encouraged to market their services through blogs, web sites, and online message boards which allow their clients to sing their praises and to rate their sexual prowess. As holds true for any service industry, those who impress tend to get around and make money, while those who fail to keep their appointments or to please their paymasters often find themselves moving on. Webcams and chat rooms permit escorts and their clients to hook up online and to vet one another prior to consummating any business arrangements. Such technology also enables both parties to maintain intimate relationships over long distances despite the migratory nature of both the girls and their clients. Modern agencies employ expensive interactive Flash websites to advertise their escorts, complete with glossy portfolios, prices and customer ratings to attract and maintain the interest of the clientele. The use of mobile text messaging to book and to clock-in clients has become the norm, and, due to the large sums involved, wire transfers and online credit card payments have largely replaced hard cash.

In an international cat & mouse game of overt advertising, pseudonyms, money laundering and electronic surveillance, the use of electronic technology is not limited to procurement or advertising. Call girls routinely employ high-tech measures to avoid entrapment, including bug and camera detection equipment to uncover electronic surveillance devices. If an aspiring society escort wants to cash in on her youth and beauty and then to move on in society, then a clean record and an impeccable social bill of health are essential for later life.

A glamorous profession?

The aftermath of the Spitzer scandal reignited the debate as to whether call girls constitute unwitting victims of society or well-heeled social predators. A predictable tabloid hunt ensued to uncover the identity of the mystery call girl known as ‘Kirsten’. There were the inevitable media ‘scoops’, midnight vigils outside her New Jersey home, and false family histories of destitution spun around the exposure of one Ashley Alexandra Dupre, a young woman who eventually turned out to be of ‘respectable’ middle class background. Teen websites like ‘Girls gone wild’ published her pictures, her MySpace page was inundated with visitors, and Miss Dupre sued for all that she could get. Perhaps the darkest aspect of such cases, other than the girls becoming media pawns within the duplicitous world of city politics, is the polarizing effect these individuals have upon social attitudes. The feminist lobby presents the likes of Ashley Dupree, Christine Keeler, and Monica Lewinsky as hapless victims of sexual aggression, innocent women who are driven to economic sexual dependence and subservience by an abusive male-dominated culture. While this may certainly be true of much of ‘basement level’ prostitution, most of today's modern ‘high class’ call girls are independent, highly mobile, and may earn upwards of half a million dollars a year. The few who do come clean claim to enjoy much, if not all, of the sex for which they are procured, and certainly appear to relish the lavish hotels, luxurious travel and expensive shopping it entails. Whether such girls are seen as victims or vampires is largely a matter of social and sexual prejudice.

Today's upmarket call girls are in such demand that they can afford to be very selective about their clientele, and indeed the leading men who seek their services are regarded as being privileged to pay. If you doubt this argument, simply try and book a high class escort and see how many vetting procedures, verification checks, and references (yes really, and of the sexual kind) you will be asked to provide in order to be able to book a high class call girl. After all, no discriminating courtesan wants her affluent lifestyle to be ruined by bad personal hygiene, poor grooming, or by sexually awkward, aggressive men. In short, to see an upmarket call girl you have to gain entry into her exclusive club, be it the Emperor’s Club VIP or her own private sexual cabal.

The popular image of the ‘contented call girl’ is of course socio-political dynamite, as its very acceptance challenges orthodox feminist doctrine, although equally it could be used to justify the widespread culture of sexual exploitation that occurs within lower social strata. Most call girls however are urbane sophisticates, predominantly from college educated backgrounds, who expect intelligent conversation, intimacy and courtship, just as any other society date would. According to the ubiquitous disclaimer carried by all escort sites, any booking is for ‘personal companionship’ only and thus, from both a legal and practical perspective, sex is by no means guaranteed, even after advance payment. Escorts expect their clients to display at least some basic courtship skills, and so it is the escort who effectively calls the shots and controls the ‘date’.

Although some would argue that such high-end call girls represent only a tiny minority of escorts, a quick Google search reveals that there are in fact countless thousands of such upmarket call girls detailed upon independent escort directories, and tens of thousands more listed on agency websites across every major city. Here are some numbers returned from Google searches; escort agency (1,430,000 search returns), independent escort (738,000), and independent escort directory (179,000). However many top society escorts operate ‘below the radar’ and only advertise their services through discrete personal contact. It should be conceded though that the majority of escorts do not frequent luxury hotels, command thousands an hour, or experience an especially glamorous lifestyle, and there is of course that ever present risk...

One of the most recent high profile call girl cases was that of Natalie McLennan, then a 24-year-old native of Montreal. Ms. McLennan once boasted that she soon became one of the city's most highly paid call girls after joining the New York Confidential escort agency in 2004. Extrovert and apparently unphased by her profession, Ms. McLennan even featured on the cover of New York magazine in 2005. Her candid confessions within the July 2005 issue led to her being successfully indicted for both prostitution and money laundering, earning her a brief spell in Rikers Island jail before she plea-bargained in exchange for early release after serving only a month. Ms. McLennan elected to take the traditional route of the retired celebrity femme fatale, and has since written detailed memoirs describing her year as a ‘high class’ Manhattan call girl.

The reasons for Ms. McLennan’s career choice may seem strangely familiar. Coming to New York as a struggling actress (we will assume that she was not independently wealthy, although this is not always the case), she claimed that she was soon approached by an ‘agent or representative’ of an escort agency. Unsurprisingly she chose the door to easy money which is often opened to young, attractive women of good social background. After only a year in the agency’s service she claimed to have suffered anxiety and panic attacks, believing that the agency did not have her ‘best interests at heart’. After cashing out of the game with her lucrative exposé in New York magazine, she was duly arrested and turned State’s evidence. Within a month of her affidavit the New York Confidential agency was closed down. During the year that she worked as a call girl, Ms. McLennan reported having earned up to $2,000 an hour (with a 2 hour minimum booking), a sum that she claimed was far above the industry average of between $600 and $1,200 an hour. Ms. McLennan declared that she never felt unsafe, never carried mace or a Taser in her bag, and was never threatened on a date, despite her earlier assertion that she suffered from anxiety and panic attacks. The lifestyle she said had been ‘great’, her average client was 25-45, smartly dressed, polite and well-educated, and derived from the ranks of hard working and ambitious Wall Street lawyers, businessmen, and investors who simply didn't have the time to date. Some were married, around half weren’t, and many she believed felt that escorts presented a safer option than an affair with a PA or work colleague. She claimed to have become emotionally involved with a client on several occasions, and believed that most of them were seeking companionship as much as sex. Indeed she had heard of many escorts who found themselves marrying wealthy clients, the so-called ‘Pretty Woman’ fantasy, although it should be noted that Julia Roberts played a ‘street walker’ rather than a high class call girl.

You may sense a few inherent contradictions within Ms. McLennan’s account, although it is clear that while the rewards of upscale escorting are appealing, it is often by necessity rather than through choice that young, attractive students from modest backgrounds find themselves offered the same stark choice by society - namely sex & money or abstinence & poverty. Others though might claim that the same holds true within more conventional careers such as the law, finance or medicine. However we should at least applaud Ms. McLennan for being honest enough to suggest that the life of a call girl is neither all good nor all bad.

An inherent social problem, or one created by policy?

So are these impactive issues inherent within human nature, or are they of society's own making? The first issue contributing to the current dilemma is that of ‘social engineering’, namely linking professional wealth and social status to the provision of sex. Whether this occurs in the form of career prostitution or that of students being driven to escort work to pay their college fees, the same social precondition of sex for money applies. We have of course already covered this topic extensively, but there are other important social and biological factors...

A second issue relates to the apparent ambivalence shown by the authorities in the application of the gray laws that pertain to prostitution. Law enforcement officials often choose to turn a blind eye to high profile escort agencies that make only thinly veiled attempts to conceal the true nature of their commodity. Although escort agencies use all manner of advertisements from overt sexual images in magazines and newspapers to anonymous posts on Craig’s List in order to procure escorts and their clientele, law enforcement officials are nonetheless highly selective as to which of the torrent of available evidence they choose to act upon. The powers that be seem to allow much prostitution to continue unhindered, and this state of affairs is not helped by the gray area of the law that distinguishes between paid ‘companionship’ and prostitution. However, it would indeed be a dark day for society when the freedom of association is fettered. When all is said and done, it is nigh impossible for the law to draw a clear line that separates the provision of gifts, allowances, meals, and paid accommodation within normal sexual courtship, and the direct exchange of goods or money for sexual favors. Most upscale escorts expect to be wined, dined and showered with gifts by their clients, further blurring the distinction between ‘dating’ and escorting.

Assistant Philadelphia District Attorney Rich DeSipio, assigned to their sex-crimes unit, put the dilemma in a nutshell when he argued that while such sexual services are ‘openly advertised, so [that] you know ‘it’ exists, you're letting it go [despite the fact that] they're not taxed, or prosecuted, unless it becomes a quality-of-life issue or [implicates] a public figure’. So then it is not a matter of crossing the line, but rather an issue of how far across the line they step. Such ambivalent policies however serve only to send mixed signals to agencies and individual escorts, namely that it is okay to break the law, just as long as you don’t step too far across the line...

A third contributing factor concerns human biology. The fundamental biological instincts which drive women to spend large sums on clothes, make up and perfume in order to attract sexual interest, and men to lavish gifts and attentions upon young women to gain their trust, intimacy and, ultimately, their sexual favors can hardly be in doubt. However, it only requires a small step in the evolution of human social behavior for a courtesan to go from expecting her suitors to afford jewelry, cars and entertainment to demanding hard cash. As human behavior is hard-wired within our genes and development, it would clearly take more than just sweeping legislation to eliminate natural gender roles and to create true sexual equality, thus ending the ritual of gifts in sexual courtship. Science has even gone so far as to attempt to define the actual neural pathways which control such impulses, although whether the love ‘transmitter’ is dopamine, VIP, or endorphin is still hotly disputed. We do however know that dopamine is released into the brain in response to sex, and we believe that dopamine evolved as a pleasure signal to reward and reinforce gainful behavior. We also know that pheromones can signal male fitness and female fertility across a crowded room showing, despite our technological advancements, that we are still flesh and blood driven by hormones.

Recent studies revealed that men took greater financial risks when shown erotic images in experimental trials. When men were shown arousing female images they proved more likely to take larger financial gambles than when they were shown neutral or frightening ones (imagine the effect of the genuine article...) The erotic images activated the same region of the brain that is stimulated when financial risks are taken, namely the V-shaped nucleus accumbens of the mid-brain - the very neural hub into which dopamine is released. When dopamine is released into this brain center which governs risk, motivation and reward, male subjects proved far more likely to raise their bets in a game of random chance. This might explain much of the current financial crisis, and it is perhaps no coincidence that strip clubs are found alongside the offices of those who gamble vast sums on investments, stocks and shares. The evolutionary association between sex and greed dates back millions of years to the assignment of the role of primary provider to the male. Naturally a man’s capacity to acquire wealth and to provide for a mate strongly affects his ability to attract sexual partners. Thus risk taking is thought to improve a male’s chances of attracting a sexual partner and ultimately of fathering offspring. However with great risk comes great consequence, whether it is in the form of death in a duel or bankruptcy. Thus psychologists believe that risk and sexual behavior are closely associated, and this also helps to explain why financial traders employ a range of sexual metaphors such as ‘massaging the market’ or ‘hardcore’ when on the trading floor. Indeed, higher testosterone levels have been linked to greater financial risk taking and also to irrational decision making.

A fourth issue relates to the cultural association of power, money and sex. The creation of a universal currency that can be used to buy everything from cars to entry into powerful country clubs has its downside. The most successful males are no longer the ones with the most powerful frames or the greatest sexual endowment. The new alpha males are those who can accumulate the most zeroes to the left of a decimal point on a computer chip, as Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Bill Gates have all demonstrated. Whether this virtual money is acquired through fair means or foul, money is power and power tends to corrupt absolutely, often leading to what psychologists call ‘delusions of invincibility’. With power and success comes confidence, and nothing is likely to relax decision making faster than a string of election victories, fast money and easy sex. Most criminals are eventually caught because their behavior goes unpunished, and ultimately this leads them to relax the safeguards and precautions which their high risk behavior once encouraged. If illegal or immoral activity goes undetected for long enough and garners sufficient reward, then social inhibitions and due caution are scattered to the four winds and a new morality of convenience is created to appease a once deeply instilled sense of right and wrong.

That said, we still hold our leaders to higher moral account, as their decisions and behaviors impact upon a wider sphere of society than those of us of lesser social rank. However the modern male faces a genuine social paradox, as the very reward he originally worked for, namely access to more sexual partners, is ultimately denied to him despite a greater availability. As Al Pacino so succinctly described the dilemma of the American male in his portrayal of a drug baron, ‘In this country, you ‘gotta’ make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.’ Clearly if the ability to attract sexual partners is biologically linked to wealth and power which are often only acquired in later life, yet society shuns successful males satisfying their sexual desires, then the successful male finds himself caught upon the sharp horns of a social and biological dilemma.

Social biologists have delved deeper into these apparent social contradictions, seeking to establish whether many social moralities are genuinely held or are just ‘for show’. Society tends to reward behaviors that are well perceived, and so social psychologists have revealed that lip service to false moralities represents an effective strategy for those seeking to glean social rewards from a minimum of effort. Indeed researchers found far more evidence of ‘moral hypocrisy’ than of ‘moral integrity’ amongst students, and electoral mood swings are just as hormonally driven and transient as those of a girl who decides to say ‘yes’ on a Friday night. The complex interplay and interdependence of sex, power and money are akin to the Holy Trinity, only few doubt the existence of the unholy trinity. All issues duly considered, when a young woman faces the choice of a life of drudgery or a career path of unlimited sex, easy money and an early retirement, it can only be a proposition that is hard to refuse...