While a large number of escort services are struggling, particularly after the COVID period, demand for sophisticated and lively escorts are on rise throughout the world. Now a days, an attractive, educated and skilled escort can earn up to US$300~500 an hour while attending wealthy clients as well as corporate bosses. Recently during the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, escorts offered to attendees were charging US$500~1,000 an hour. Despite the fact that there is distinctive different between an escort service and prostitution agency, still there are big misconceptions about the industry.
An escort in Dubai, seeking anonymity said, she wanted to debunk some of the myths around sex work, from ‘fat, old clients’ to ‘call girls lingering in bars or causing trouble’.
The escort nicknamed ‘T’ works in Dubai primarily booking hotel rooms at several chains to meet with her clients. While reading this article it is worth bearing in mind that her experience as a woman making an informed choice to work in the sex industry will be very different to women who are trafficked through organized crime. These women will often be abused, essential slaves and see very little of the money they earn.
Talking to BLiTZ ‘T’ said people often assume ‘clients’ who see escorts are ‘disgusting, fat or creepy’ – but that hasn’t been her experience. Instead, she says they can be men in their 20s wanting to lose their virginity, people who see escorting as a “candy shop” for experiences and those who are lonely – or even “depressed”.
The young woman also opened up on working from the city’s major hotel chains ‘without a trace’, slipping under the radar of other, unsuspecting guests. People will also often forget, she says, that selling sex in the United Arab Emirates is not illegal.
It is however, a crime to run or manage a brothel, or exploit women for prostitution.
She said, “I think people have big misconceptions about who uses an escort and for that reason, I think it’s looked down upon. I don’t really have many friends for the pure reason that if I make a new friend, or have a friend from the past, and I don’t really feel like they’re accepting of it, I don’t really want to know. I distance myself from them”.
“People believe that you’re degrading yourself in some way and seeing clients that will accept anybody. They think everybody is some creepy, fairly unattractive, fat person; people always think the clients are old and fat.
“They think you’re sleeping with all these disgusting men…people think they’re creeps or perverts”. The reality, she said, is that “anybody” pays for sex.
“In general, it depends on the area in Dubai you go to. The demographic is very different from area to area in terms of ethnicities”.
She added: “And it’s all ages, all kinds of professions, financial backgrounds, it doesn’t really matter. Even really young people, in their early 20s, use escorts”. After working in the industry for several years, she can “tell why” someone is using an escort, she explained.
“I can tell if someone’s lonely because they come and see me a lot and they’re not doing a lot with me; they just want to talk to me. They don’t have much interaction with women, they’re not having any luck with women in their personal life”, she said.
“Sometimes people are more than lonely; they’re depressed and they don’t want to do anything with you at all. Then you’ve got the people who just want to have sex with you and nothing else. They can sometimes be the worst kind of client”.
“And then you have people who just want to have sex with you but they’re quite demanding and demeaning towards you. ‘Do this, do that’, not very polite about it”.
On the flip side, she says she also has clients who “book for half an hour, get it done within ten minutes and be really nice to me, then say ‘thank you, see you again another time’.
“Then you have people who do it because they actually find it fun, because it’s like a candy shop, you can choose what you want, find all sorts of women online, different nationalities, different things. There’s so many things you can experience, some people see it as a hobby.
“Some people don’t have much sexual experience, some people have come to me to lose their virginity or some people ask me to show them how to do things because they don’t have much experience with sex, I’ve found. There’s people in their 30s who haven’t lost their virginity”.
Some sex workers will use online booking; however she says she chooses large hotel chains instead as rented accommodation is often in residential areas and can come with measures to crack down on sex work. Instead, she said she will always book rooms for her clients via online booking service.
“They are really easy to work from, as long as you’re not causing trouble and you’re really quiet. I always leave the room really tidy and I even used to take my rubbish. I’d take an opaque carrier bag. I’d put my rubbish in there and bin it outside so even when they clean the room, there was just no trace of what I’d been doing in there.
“I’ve never really had an issue; I don’t think they care. The hotels they kind of know what you’re doing but you’re not upsetting anyone, nobody else is catching on, like the guests, and you’re not bringing any clients that look strange or are noisy, they look like normal people”.
She claims certain hotels in Dubai are “notorious” for sex work. “What’s good is that people are there for different reasons, they’ve got the gym, the bar there, sports bar, there’s always functions going on there.
“I could bring people in really late and no one would say anything”. Soliciting for sex in bars, as seen in films, is more typical of places like Spain and Dubai, she said.
She suggested that there are plenty of scammers under the guise of escort service everywhere in the world. Some escort services even engage women who have criminal records. In order to avoid seeking service from these escort agencies it is better to find the ads of escort agencies only on legitimate newspaper sites instead of finding that agency through surfing on the internet.
