Fascination with 21st Century Private Escorts

Stills from the The Girlfriend Experience.

With the emergence of this class of elite private escorts has come its respective representation in art and media. Several television shows and films in the last decade have attempted to portray the narrative of the upscale sex-worker, with Starz' The Girlfriend Experience providing the most recent example. Released in April of 2016, The Girlfriend Experience follows a prestigious law school student who doubles as an upscale escort, providing a niche market of clients with both emotional and sexual intimacy. (1) The show has been deemed "thrilling" and "darkly fascinating", receiving positive reviews from critics for "those moments where it morphs from one thing into another." (2, 3) A survey of the show's positive reviews reveals pop culture's deep-seated interest in the escort for her ability to both participate in sex work and assimilate within an elite, educated circle. Because it is culturally ingrained in American society that sex work is a desperate and degrading profession, characters like The Girlfriend Experience's heroine, Christine, interest viewers for the tension between their surface-level and hidden personas. Christine's portrayal as a driven and educated young professional is prioritized over her secondary identity as a sex worker. This stands in contrast to Pretty Woman's Vivian, who must demonstrate her wit and charm in order to earn the chance to rise above her circumstances. 

Former escort Ashley Dupré poses for Playboy Magazine

Eliot Spitzer confirms he received sexual services from an escort. 

Because it is in the nature of an escort's job to assimilate within polite society, rates of arrest and incarceration for escorts vary widely from their contemporaries on the street. From the Los Angeles Women's Health Risk Study, 60% of call girls last interacted with clients in the privacy of a home, in contrast to 12% of streetwalkers. (4) Because escorts generally solicit clients through websites or agencies, they are considerably less vulnerable to identification on the street and subsequently excused from physical restraint by law enforcement officials. While news sources appear to cyclically resurface the prostitute-as-victim narrative, the only time an upscale escort seems to appear in the public eye is when she is caught for fraternization with an important political figure. Former governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was exposed for his engagement with escorts in 2008, resulting in a political scandal, his removal from office, and loss of credibility. While the agency that she worked for is no longer operative, Spitzer's escort, Ashley Dupré, was legally pardoned for her actions and granted immunity in exchange for testimony. (5) In scandals such as these, the focus is entirely upon the reputation of the fallen man while the actions of his escort are seemingly exempt from the discourse; serving as evidence for the regulation bias inherent in sex work cases involving upscale escorts. While the escort is not socially pardoned for her involvement in prostitution, her identity as a sex worker went unnoticed until she became involved with a respected, important man. This inconsistency highlights her relative invisibility in contrast to the physical signifiers which demarcate her contemporaries on the street.