Heart of gold

Chablis

NO one would have thought it likely that the relatively conservative woman I was at 55 would do an about-face two years later and become an escort.

At 57? Do I hear raucous laughter? Perhaps not, in the year 2002. Women are liberated now. Older women are in fashion. Think of Dame Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg . .. and Joan Collins. ten years my senior, who only last year was featured in the world's press wearing froufrou white underwear, and looking so far from sexually past it that I'm sure many a male reader enjoyed a little fantasy as he turned the pages of his broadsheet.

Unless one is troubled by physical illness, being old in one's fifties and sixties is now a matter of choice, not a fact of life. It is true that many women still dwindle sexually in their fifties, but I hope that there are many who will choose, as I did, to embrace the new freedoms that come when fully active motherhood is behind them.

Embracing new freedoms is one thing. Choosing a career that is as potentially dangerous as circumnavigational yachting or climbing mountains is another. Why escorting? I was a married woman who had been faithful to two husbands — the second time for more than 20 years. A grandmother. What prompts such a woman to become an escort?

The thought was initially voiced by a friend. With my marriage ended in all but name, I had three brief but wonderful affairs. There was love in each of them. To believe that a sexual liaison, because it is brief, must be loveless is to close one's mind to possibility. My mind was wide open to possibility. When three men, all of them younger than I, not only told me but showed me very clearly that I was still a woman in every natural and desirable way, I was ready to believe them. One of them laughingly suggested I ought to 'do it for a living'. The prompt was in place.

But it was a pressing need to earn a realistic living again, coupled to three years of rejected applications for more conventional jobs that would pay enough, that caused me, one final frustrated day, to look at escorting sites on the Internet. chose the one that looked least like a porn site, wrote down the telephone number, and after a little wrestling with my fears dialled and made an appointment for the following day. I had very little hope that I would be accepted. If! didn't feel too old to renew my career in the business world. I knew that I was certainly too old to be an escort.

Not so. I would do very well. Older women are much in demand, said the website proprietor; there was no doubt I had a future if I wanted one. Within two days my details were posted on the website. My new career was about to start. All I had to do was learn how to use a mobile phone — does that sound ridiculous? I can troubleshoot problems with my PC but I had never owned a cellphone.

So I met my first client and I became an escort. What does that mean? Escortagency websites make it clear that a client pays for an escort's time and for the pleasure of her company. Is that all'? Of course not. If all a man wants is to spend a couple of hours enjoying the pleasure of a woman's company, it is most unlikely that he will need to pay for that privilege. No, a client hires an escort on the understanding that the woman whose company he will share is a woman willing, at her discretion, to share with him the pleasures of her body.

Prostitution. It is an ugly word. And yet if I am paid by clients who hire my time in order to enjoy my body, escorting is merely a euphemism. But to me there is a difference between what I do and the experience of a woman obliged to tout on street corners while sleazy men pass in cruising cars. The Internet has changed the face of the sex industry. Men who wouldn't dream of going anywhere near a red-light district are happy to make contact with an escort of their choice by email and cellphone. A woman sitting at her computer can be choosy, and very careful, about which contacts she is prepared to follow up.

Even so, if beauty contests have been likened to meat-markets, surely a woman who regularly shares her body with men she neither knows nor expects to see again must inevitably end up feeling she is little more than a lump of meat. No, not inevitably. The day I feel that I am becoming a piece of meat I will no longer be an escort.

Words of caution are necessary here. I am not a young girl. I do not have children to house, clothe and feed. I have no overwhelming load of debt to service; no drughabit either, pushing me to make money at whatever the cost. No pimp bullies me into work that I do not care for. No agency arranges meetings which I am obliged to attend, accepting their client evaluation as right and having to suffer by it if wrong. I am an independent escort. I vet and choose my own clients, often exchanging several emails and phone-calls before any meeting takes place. I have a system of security checks which I adhere to closely. And if I do not wish to see clients at all, for any length of time, then I don't have to.

Moreover, I make it very clear to each potential client that, although I am an escort, there are sexual practices I am not prepared to engage in. No shaving pubic hair, no anal sex; whips and chains are not for me. Prudish? Very probably. Sex toys, I imagine, might be amusing if used with discretion on an occasional basis. . . .

'Good grief!' I hear some exclaim. 'Does this woman find any clients?' They would be surprised. However large the market for what I still think of as 'kinky' sex, there are enough men who hire an escort with a view to nothing more outre than an hour or two that includes sensual massage, a bit of raunchy cuddling and 'normal' sex, which may or may not include what is commonly termed a blow-job. Good men, kind men; men who are easy to talk to and pleasant to be with. For one reason or another they find it convenient to hire an escort from time to time. Perhaps they are married, but the marital bed has faded to a memory, or perhaps it has always been a place of apologetic thrustings in the dark. Men faced with that problem may prefer to resolve it by calling an escort, rather than risk the marriage-wrecking potential inherent in having an affair. A life, a wife and a home remain intact. Children's studies, and so their futures, are not threatened by disruption.

Perhaps the man is a widower, or a divorcee, lonely at times for a woman's company but after years of marital strife, or bullying, unwilling to venture down that road again. Perhaps he is one of an increasing number of men whose work takes them so frequently from base that they have little chance to put in the time required to establish a relationship in the normal way. There are shy men, men who have problems with their sexual performance, and men who are merely curious. Many a younger man's long-cherished fantasy is having sex with an older woman. Clients come in all shapes and sizes, and with many different motives, but one thing is certain, in my experience — the popularly held idea that all such men must be inadequate, and are very probably nasty and perverted too, is a myth.

I have liked every one of my clients so far. We share a mutual respect. Each of us has, and keeps, a sense of dignity. With one I have felt a little sexually uncomfortable; perhaps I will not hear from that client again. If! do, I may decide not to see him again, or perhaps I may decide to accept the opportunity to work on what I feel might be a weakness in myself.

And then there are the clients one looks forward to hearing from. They are fun. They are the good lovers; that is a bonus. But if a client is not a good lover, I am not obliged to submit to indignity, or to any discomfort or pain. An escort is expensive. That presupposes a certain amount of expertise. There is satisfaction, I have found, in helping a sexually clumsy, or inept, man to relax and accept that at times it is better simply to 'lie back and enjoy it' under the attention of a sensitive and caring woman.

Would I want my daughters to do it? In a word — no. I am new to escorting; but, that admitted, I doubt whether it is a career most women could gain much from (except financially) before they have done many other things that are part of a 'normal' woman's life. Being an escort certainly wasn't on my original agenda.

But have I found it degrading? No. In being an escort there is promise of a renewed independence for me. I am enjoying life again. Through escorting I have encountered another part of myself. Unexpectedly, I find there is also much for me to learn — about my fears, my strengths and weaknesses, even my prejudices. It is another step in my quest to know, and fully understand, the woman who lived for years, neglected, tucked quietly away inside the daughter, the mother and the wife.