A Prostitute And A John By Any Other Name

“Why are you with this middle-aged weirdo? Does he have a lot of money?”

—Parker Posey in White Lotus, Season 3, said to a pretty young woman coupled with an old, paunchy, baldy guy

I sometimes listen to a radio game show if I happen to be in the car when the program is on. Last week, the panel on the show was asked, “What is it called when a young woman dates an old man?” Immediately, one of the young women on the panel said, “I call it paying the rent.”

That really stuck in my mind. Was that practice common, more than just a very occasional arrangement? I started talking to people in my world about it, googling different adjacent questions. Here are some thoughts in response to what I found:

*When I googled “old men paying young women's tuition for sex,” which is a specific kind of arrangement I had heard about, I landed on an article in Bustle called “I Had Sex With A Sugar Daddy To Pay My Tuition.” It was written by Maya M., a 21yo woman who explains that she was short on cash one month. Because a friend of hers had made good money using web sites that connect Sugar Daddies—older men with money who are willing to pay for “companionship”—with Sugar Babies—young women who are willing to take the old guys’ money in exchange for sex—she decided to do it too. She writes: The “arrangement…appealed to me because I actually really enjoy sex, exploring my submissive side…and being pampered every now and then. As someone who is supportive of sex work in general and sexually curious myself, I didn't just allow myself to engage in this kind of behavior — I welcomed the experience.”

Two hours after signing up on a Sugar Daddy/Sugar Baby web site, she had a “date”. When it came to hammering out the details of their arrangement, he said he would pay in full after their sessions if he got to do whatever he wanted with her.

And then Maya M. writes this: “Suddenly, I realized something very important that informed the rest of my experience with this man, and the whole sugar daddy/sugar baby dynamic in general: There was a stark power imbalance.”

That this realization hit her at this point in their transaction was astonishing to me. Any arrangement where a man pays for sex and a woman allows sexual access for money screams power imbalance.

They negotiated. She didn’t want anal sex; he acceded, but said she would need to find other ways to pleasure him. She was willing to get tied up, but wanted him to solicit explicit consent first. Once they did all that—and good luck, Sweetheart, enforcing those “gentleman’s agreements” when you’re alone with him at his place—she did a calculus in her mind: “The amount of money was significant enough that it would allow for me to spend the rest of that month focusing on school and my volunteer work, and give me free time to sleep instead of hurting my body by working more than 40 hours of retail per week, 30 hours at my writing jobs, and 16 hours at school on four or five hours of sleep per night. I decided to go through with the arrangement.”

While her schedule does sound demanding, I’m struck by her description of her regular schedule as “hurting my body.” She doesn’t seem to consider having sex with a stranger for money—where ultimately you control nothing since the john holds the pursestrings and men are typically stronger and bigger than women—as potentially hurtful to body, spirit, or soul. I find this extraordinary, and more than a little heartbreaking. How did we get here? I get that it’s the money that convinces her to move forward, but I maintain that some things shouldn’t be sold, e.g., the safety and care of your precious self.

*Rachel Moran, a former prostitute, has written about prostitution movingly and honestly in her book, Paid For. Moran writes clearly that prostitution is men paying to sexually use and abuse women. The typical parameters of such an arrangement mean that a woman, who, as stated earlier, is usually smaller and physically weaker than a man, is alone in a room (or an alley or a car or wherever) with a stranger who has paid for access. The transactional nature of the encounter allows many men to feel entitled to do and demand whatever they want. After all, they’ve paid for it. Now they want their money’s worth. This is neither business nor sex between equal partners. It’s imbalanced from the get because the man is the consumer and the woman is the product. (I understand that men can be the product and occasionally women can be the consumer. I’m defaulting here to the much more common arrangement of men paying for sexual access to women.)

Moran explains in the book that she and other prostitute colleagues had to overcome their natural revulsion to their johns—to the way they looked or the way they smelled or the way they acted or their lack of hygiene. She writes that prostitutes almost always hate their johns, but they pretend to enjoy their encounters to get paid, payment clearly being the whole point from the prostitute’s perspective. Moran also says that men who hire prostitutes are training themselves to be sexually abusive to women, and that societies that condone prostitution fuzzy moral boundaries within that society in ways that harm everyone.

Moran writes eloquently about the effect on prostituted women: “What you are actually doing when you prostitute yourself is sanctioning and accepting payment for the sexual abuse of your own body. You go through all the negative feelings associated with sexual abuse, but in the sanctioning of it you have effectively gagged yourself. You have literally sold your rights of expression; it is a twin prostitution really, and its second component is at least as damaging as the first.”

I note the silencing that Moran writes about in the Bustle author’s account of her experience as a Sugar Baby. Maya M. needs to tell us that she values and respects sex work, that she loves sex, that she is looking forward to this fun evening of making money while having sex. The voice is so manically one-note that it raises suspicions. As a reader, it feels like watching someone put on a lot of mascara when their teeth are rotting. What happens to the soul in these sorts of “fun” encounters? Is it nourished and beautified? Are we allowed to talk about this?

*I’m reminded of Linda Lovelace, the actress in the 1970s porn film Deep Throat. In interviews and in her first autobiography, she maintained for years that she loved making the movie, that it was liberating and wonderful and sexually freeing. Later, she famously said that every time anyone watched that movie, they were watching her being raped. She had been forced to do things she didn’t want to do by her then-husband who was paid for her to act in the film.

That flip-flop is interesting. My own read is that, when you engage in something that’s kind of horrific, it may serve afterwards—for psychological reasons and as a kind of protective shield—to say you really enjoyed it, it was great, everybody should be so lucky. A cultural atmosphere that glorifies extreme or degrading “adventurous” sex acts, heralding it all as a new frontier offers a useful backdrop. With some distance—from the experience but also, in Lovelace’s case, from her abusive then-husband—it was later possible for her to describe in more fullness what had really been going on.

A more modern manifestation of this phenomenon was Lily Phillips’s stunt. In 2024, Phillips had sex with 100 men in a day. A documentary was made about it. In the documentary, as Phillips reflects on her 100 guys in a day, she cries, saying, “It’s not for the weak girls, if I’m honest — it was hard. I don’t know if I’d recommend it. It’s a different feeling. It’s just one in, one out, it feels intense.” I think it was a rare moment of honesty in an otherwise pretty constant patter about sex positivity. Still, after Phillips opened up in that way, she began planning her next project: Doing it with 1000 guys in a single day.

The 100 guys in the original project didn’t pay; it was first come, first served, if I understand correctly. But of course, for Lily Phillips, a “content creator” on Only Fans—the platform that allows “creators” to make “adult content” that “fans” then pay to view—the publicity resulting from her project drove beaucoup traffic to her site, which in turn meant she made big bucks. Some argue that this shows that Phillips is an astute businesswoman, the clever captain of her own ship. I maintain that some aspects of human experience should remain outside of the realm of shameless commerce, and while Phillips makes a lot of money, I believe there are costs to her as well in projects like shagging 100 strangers in a day.

Do you remember Maya M., the author of the Bustle article, explaining why she’s all good with having sex with a stranger for money? She wrote: “As someone who is supportive of sex work in general and sexually curious myself, I didn't just allow myself to engage in this kind of behavior — I welcomed the experience.” Maya M. was 21 years old when she wrote that article; Linda Lovelace and Lily Phillips were 23 years old when, respectively, Deep Throat was released and the “100 Men In A Day” stunt was executed. What was in the atmosphere that so convinced these young women to discuss sex and their relationship to it in the ways that they did/do (with the exception of Lily Phillips’s moment of brief candor)? That they LOVE what they do, they’re sex positive, they support sex work, everybody should do whatever they want with their own bodies, they’re sexually adventurous and curious, etc. and so forth?

The idea—promulgated by Gloria Steinem, Helen Gurley Brown, and liberal feminism generally—that “having sex “like a man,” without commitment, without emotional or spiritual investment, as a means to simply get off, provided an opportunity for women to ditch the patriarchal shackles of obedience and “good girlness”—That idea still has legs. Hookup culture, Only Fans, and dating apps wouldn’t have the momentum they do without it.

A young woman from my college comes to mind. She moved to San Francisco after graduation and got a job as a stripper at a club on Broadway. She worked in a glass tank, where she would strip and dance. The interior of the glass tank was lit, but the area outside it—where the men who came to watch congregated—was dark, so she couldn’t see most of them. Some would jerk off to her act. I remember asking if she liked it and she said, “I love it!” I need to allow for people having different reactions to the same situation (maybe she did love it), BUT I can’t help but wonder if some part of her was secretly somewhat grossed out, yet she felt obligated to report that she loved it because she considered that the hip, liberated thing to say.

Would the Bustle author Maya M., Linda Lovelace, Lily Phillips, and my college classmate want their daughters, nieces, and younger sisters to follow in their liberated, sex-positive footsteps?

*Louise Perry has written well and spoken eloquently about the canard, “Sex work is just work.” If sex work were just work, no one would balk over the boss who asks his secretary to give him a blowjob in the office. Sex work includes inherent dangers—seen and unseen, physical and spiritual—that most jobs don’t require. It also mandates shutting off the spiritual nature of sex, leaving behind another merely physical activity, more intimate than playing pickleball, yes, but stripped of its cosmic, sacred essence.

*Andrea Dworkin, the feminist author and activist, was consistently critical of pornography and prostitution. And boy, did she take a lot of shit for it over the years. She was accused of being prudish, anti-sex, puritanical. But I think she saw rather prophetically where all the sex-positive utopianism of the 1960s and 1970s was headed. Her focus was always on the negative effects on women, but I would add that these forces and practices harm men and children too. Here’s Dworkin from Pornography: Men Possessing Women: “Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny.” I appreciate her mention of the degradation of the soul.

*One of my sons told me that Only Fans represents a huge transfer of wealth. Ka-ching! Only Fans creators generated more than $6.5 billion in revenue last year. The platform’s owners skim 20% off the top in a kind of modern, digitalized pimpery. But it’s just a small fraction of Only Fans creators, like Lily Phillips, who make the big bucks, with the highest 10% of earners taking home 75% of what’s earned. Many many women and a few men creators earn very little.

My son’s point about wealth transfer is this: The men who are spending $6.5 billion annually on Only Fans subscriptions, pay-per-view opportunities, and tips are not spending that money on their families; on initiatives that might help the community; or on investments for the broader social good. They’re spending it on porn and a fantasy world.

*Web sites like whatsyourprice.com and seeking.com connect younger women with older men who pay for sex. They sidestep charges that they are facilitating prostitution with euphemistic language. The whatsyourprice.com web site describes two types of “members”: “attractive members” and “generous members.” The name of the web site makes clear that this is a financial transaction and “dates” will require that “generous members” pony up, while “attractive members” will be expected to give it up. From the seeking.com web site: “Seeking is the largest luxury dating site for the wealthy, successful, and beautiful….If you want to date the most beautiful women in the world, you need to bring more to the table than mere financial assets.” But make no mistake: You will need to bring financial assets to the table. The landing page for this web site suggests that women who join can “find hypergamy,” which is a sociologist way of saying marrying up. The site talks about matchmaking, but honestly, marriage does not seem to be the end goal here.

*I know a guy pushing 70 years old. He keeps two women, the age of his son and daughter. By “keep,” I mean he pays their rent and other bills, buys them gifts, gives them money when he sees them and when they ask for it. In exchange, he has sexual access to these women.

Each of the women in his harem has a child or children. He calls the women his “partners.” He met them on a dating app. After they sent him nude photos and videos of themselves, he started “dating” them, which led to the current array. I asked whether this was a model he respected, whether it was an arrangement he hoped his daughters and granddaughters would seek out. He said, “That’s the wrong question.” But he never told me what the right question is.

*Cicero wrote in How To Grow Old that, while older people can enjoy all the pleasures of the flesh, the constant sexual passions of youth naturally ease up as a person ages. This, in turn, says Cicero, allows mature people to focus on different pleasures, such as family, friendship, community, gardening (!), and reflection. Cicero writes: “Imagine…a person enjoying the most exquisite sensual pleasure possible. No one would doubt that a man in that state is incapable of using his mind in any rational or reasonable way. Therefore, nothing is more detestable or pernicious than sensual pleasure. If a person indulges in it too much and too long, it plunges the soul into utter darkness.”

Do you think Cicero wrote that because he is an anti-sex prude?

*Why should I care what people do behind closed doors, if they take money or not, if they crow about how liberated and sex positive they are? Because right action and goodness buoy all boats, but obsession, sexual consumerism, and broad-scale soul erosion degrade the society we share. The euphemisms and self-delusion in the sphere of sexual commerce are problematic enough, probably convincing some, maybe many, young people that this is a beautiful, cool, sex-positive direction to move in.

But there’s no accounting for the soul here, no acknowledgement that sex is a sacred, spiritual act, which is antithetical to financial transacting. Yes, yes, hooking is the oldest profession, blah, blah, blah. But when thoughtful former prostitutes like Rachel Moran speak and write honestly about their experiences, it’s hard not to see the dark spiny underbelly of all this.

When everything we are and do, everything we could potentially be is reduced to a financial transaction, there’s no heart or spirit or soul. There’s also no love.

Those who participate in such transactions but who understand and accept what’s going on live in a certain kind of desert, but at least there’s clarity about the arrangement and its limitations. (Although I think the soul cost is tragic.) For others who conflate financial transactions in exchange for sexual access with love or caring, how can their reality become anything other than murky chaos? I can’t imagine how everything wouldn’t be tinged with confusion and suspicion. What’s real? What’s an act? I pay her/them for sexual access. Does she desire me or does she desire the money I line her pockets with? We “love” each other. But what kind of love is bought and sold?

The beauty of love is that it exists outside of commerce. Someone with the potential to be a man, a contributing member of the community, maybe a husband, maybe a father, maybe a good neighbor becomes merely a penis attached to a bank account.

Creators, partners, sugar babies, sugar daddies, attractive members, generous members. A prostitute and a john by any other name are still a prostitute and a john.