Selling your body can never be a good career move
LAurA BIrBeck from Worcester had a respectable job as an air hostess, but do you know what? Babes, it was just too tiring. she was expected to work long hours. Be nice to the public! sometimes even serve them a choice of hot and cold beverages, plus snacks.
That’s the awful thing about a job, isn’t it? It can really eat into your leisure time. so the 27-yearold has quit British Airways and become a webcam porn star.
Laura now strips off for adult internet channels. All she has to do in the morning is get up, put her clothes on — and then take ’em back off again.
No more of that pesky shift work, no more taking orders from the chief purser, no more landing cards needed in row 15.
Laura, pictured right, was with BA for two years and, based at Heathrow, worked on long and short-haul flights, with job security and a career plan in front of her. No longer. she won’t be the first pretty girl to cash in on her charms, even if a porn career can be brief.
As the saying almost goes, beauty fades, but stupid lasts for ever — even if the short- term gains are lucrative.
There are also ‘live shows’, where men call in to speak to Laura. Heaven knows what they chat about, but it probably isn’t the quality of egg sandwiches on the Heathrow-to-Miami route. While not exactly commonplace, this sort of career change is not unknown. This week, the BBc’s Victoria Derbyshire interviewed a marine biologist who works as a £900-aweek prostitute to pay off her £20,000 student debt.
KNOWNonly as Louise, she says she’d rather work in her London brothel than in a petrol station for the minimum wage. clients pay £70 per half-hour and she receives £45; to be honest, I’m rather surprised at the low rate.
‘I’m stubbornly defiant about my right to do this kind of work without people inflicting their moral judgments on me,’ Louise says, and who is arguing? It’s her life and perhaps her situation is a sign of the times.
The huge demand for the kind of services that at women such as Louise and Laura provide won’t go away.
In the world we have created, society is awash with pornography, while new generations are highly sexualised as a direct result of that t corrosive saturation.
I remember when seeing ga a porn film was a scandalous alous affair; something that men e in i dirty di t macs went to special cinemas to experience. Porn magazines were hidden under the counter, or wrapped in the shame of brown p paper. Yest Yesterday, in a little new newsagents in Dunblane, I noticed that the po porny mags were un unashamedly displayed a alongside comics, p puzzle mags and tins of shortbread. Meanwhile, sexg grooming gangs pr proliferate in our cities. An Another four men were jaile jailed yesterday for groom grooming young girls on snapcha snapchat and treating them ‘like t trophies’. ophies schoolchildren look at porn on their mobiles in the playground and it is rare to go to a fancy London hotel cocktail bar without seeing glamorous working girls with older, richer dates.
A male friend says you can always tell they are prostitutes because they look interested in what the men are saying.
so Louise and Laura and many others like them have made their choices, adding to this monstrous, easy profusion of sex, sex and more sex.
Perhaps I’m supposed to think what they are doing is noble and feminist, but that would be difficult. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t wish such a life for her — and if that’s judgmental, then so be it. I’d rather she served drinks on the plane or petrol in the garage.
Prostitution and stripping were once last-ditch economic choices of women with few options. For smart, educated women in 2018 Britain to go down that route not because they have to, but because they want an easier life and more cash, well, that is something rather less admirable.
Not that it is an easier life. Not in the long run. Nearly 30 years after it was released, Pretty Woman still casts a sickeningly rosy glow over the world of prostitution, with hooker Julia roberts shopping on rodeo Drive and waltzing into a fairytale ending with handsome, rich client richard Gere.
In real life, the successful sex worker has a more grisly existence. she must be comfortable not just in her own skin, but with the most intimate parts of strangers’ bodies, while being happy to expose her own. she must have a practical approach to erotic moments and facilitate the private fantasies of others, while somehow holding on to her soul and authenticity.
None of that is easy. All of that is emotionally damaging.
The money might be good, the lifestyle might be improved, but what real worth is extra cash in your pocket against the soulcorroding existence of being a sex object, a physical receptacle for the urges of strangers?
Once you go through that door, it is hard to get back to the sacred land of yourself.
Nevertheless, I wish them both luck. They’ll need it.