Some people, comfortable as they are in their moral straitjackets, believe they know all there is to know about escort work, most of it gathered from documentaries, podcasts, and headline news. Women display themselves like supermarket items. Men shop and select. The result is a brief commercial union in which the goods are consumed and both sides are satisfied, though for different reasons. The women in this scenario are always desperate or coerced or bought and sold like chattel by unscrupulous flesh traders who have pushed them into the tawdry traffic as part of huge criminal enterprises. Escorts, called by their rougher name, prostitutes, have no choice in any of this, no minds of their own.
Far be it from me to undo this paradigm.
That’s why, now retired from that life, I like telling the stories of others, women (mostly) who have shared their stories with me over drinks or coffee in London, where, thanks to the money I put away, I now own a flat of my own.
Today I want to briefly tell you a story of sexual politics, this for lack of a better definition. It concerns Mandana, a lovely Iranian Jew, and Adil, a Shia Muslim born to Pakistani parents. Both Mandana, who has been an escort in her free time for six years, and Adil, an investment banker, reside in London. I have obviously changed both their names and intimate details.
Adil, who works long hours and perhaps as a result is single, found Mandana on an upscale dating site that has its share of escorts, mostly women looking for money on the side but not averse to meeting the man of their dreams, if such a man exists, which I find dubious.
In any event, Adil saw Mandana and fell for her, then the two began to see each other regularly on a pay-per-meeting basis. She made good money, he liked her company in bed and at dinners, and the two sides seemed pleased with the arrangement. Rarely if ever did Adil bring up his religious affiliation, and rarely did Mandana mention her Jewish faith. In bed, it just didn’t matter.
Rarely if ever did Adil bring up his religious affiliation, and rarely did Mandana mention her Jewish faith. In bed, it just didn’t matter.
Maybe you know already where I am going with this and why the story matters.
For a time, Mandana was truly smitten with Adil. She even imagined them together outside their escort connection. She thought him kind, considerate, and decent.
When the Gaza war broke out, neither side openly broached the subject. Adil, as a finance man, did not see himself as a taker of sides.
But then things turned ugly.
Civilians were suddenly in the mix, women and children. Hospitals were damaged or destroyed. In their meetings, Adil began to speak of “his people” and how Israel was hurting and killing them, at times indiscriminately. So it happened that one evening after (good) sex Adil launched into an anti-Semitic rant, or that was what Mandana heard.
She was shocked, as Adil had never before spoken that way and they seemed to have agreed to a moratorium on the subject of the war, a subject Mandana wanted no part of as her parents had fled Iran to escape a regime that persecuted Jews and sought the destruction of Israel. She was in her own words a secular Jew. Sacred holidays such as Yom Kippur played no role in her London life.
But Adil’s outburst awakened something in her, a something, indignation, that she had felt for months while scrolling through images of Gaza. Why was this happening? Her conclusion, after some homework, was that Israel, and Jews, had been provoked, and that no peace could ever come to the region until groups like Hamas, which she likened to Al Qaeda, were eradicated. Children would continue to die until terrorist groups were eliminated. Her own country, in the view of her parents, was one large terrorist state.
All of this I heard over several long talks we had, since I disagreed with her.
No matter.
As soon as this divide leapt into the open, Mandana and Adil felt a change in their relationship.
As soon as this divide leapt into the open, Mandana and Adil felt a change in their relationship.
She was charging too much, he said.
She replied that nothing had changed in six months and that she had spent nights with him without asking him to pay the high amount that went with a full night.
He texted less often.
Emojis disappeared, in particular the hearts.
And then it happened.
One day, as she was dressing to leave his flat, he said enough was enough. She was taking advantage of him, he said.
Again, the matter was money.
You are, he pronounced, like all Jews. You take as much money as you can to ensure you can kill Arabs. You are a Jewish whore.
She wanted to scream but did not.
She cried instead and told him he was from that instant canceled.
And he was.
Neither side made any effort to make peace with the other. As with the conflict on the ground, the die was cast.
Mandana is now both angry and bewildered. She has become more politically active and has joined a group that provides support to widows of Israeli soldiers killed in the widening war.
Of Adil she knows nothing. She continues her escort work, the money matters, but avoids men with names that suggest they might be Muslim. She wants no repeat performances. She has even become a bit paranoid, thinking a Muslim man might harm her. The irrational has become the norm.
I have nothing to add to this story. Those who consider escort work objectionable, if not immoral, will shrug it off as bollocks.
I feel differently. I find it sad. I find a world that creates these horrors even sadder. And I mourn not only the dead but those hurt both emotionally and mentally by a conflict that has brought the worst humanity has to offer, something so many people after so many big wars promised never to repeat. That pledge, and not this story, is bollocks.
