Comedian Kaytlin Bailey was a 17-year old high school senior when she first started escorting. I have previously linked to her story about her short career as an escort. This thread reminded me that it is worth another read. While her story might not be the typical way that girls start to do escort work, I don't think her story is that unusual. She is refreshingly frank and unashamed about her short history as an escort and she does not make any claims to victim status.
This photo from her Twitter feed shows her at age 17. I can see how she probably wasn't worried about any client questioning her age.
"I was motivated by a nagging curiosity, a voice in my head I couldn't tune out."
www.vice.com
When I decided to get into sex work, I did my homework. For years, I read about famous courtesans, real and fictional whores, tragic victims, and heroic femme fatales. But when I decided I wanted to find out for myself what crossing that line was like, I started by googling "Escort Raleigh, NC." I found a few websites, studied the ads, reviews, and chat boards and was relieved to find a FAQ. I reverse engineered the information from the frequently asked questions directed at prospective clients.
I was motivated by a nagging curiosity, a voice in my head I couldn’t tune out. And of course, like all teenagers (and people) I was attracted to the forbidden. Even though I was young—just 17—I wasn’t in a hurry. I spent weeks online, studying...
...From the message boards, I learned how background and reference checks worked, and that a fair amount of scrutiny was expected from “reputable” escorts. I learned ID checks and condoms were universal. I learned giving a client a warm washcloth after sex was a professional courtesy. I felt empowered knowing what the rules and expectations were. I insisted on things, confident hundreds of other women were enforcing the same boundaries. No client ever suggested that I was being too careful or too uptight. They seemed relieved by my dogmatism. They knew they could trust me because I was consistent and uncompromising. I never felt this way when negotiating with men in the hookup culture...
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Though Bailey was not traumatized by her time as an escort, six years after she quit she was shocked by the reaction of her fiancé when she confided in him about her experience. She wrote this column on escort blogger Maggie McNeill's site:
Kaytlin Bailey first wrote to me several years ago; she had started hinting at her sex work experience in her comedy act and wanted my opinion about coming out more fully. I was honored that she h…
maggiemcneill.com
People tell me I’m brave. I try to remind them that I might be stupid.
I will never sleep with anyone ever again who doesn’t know. Not after he threw me up against a wall, or held me down on the sidewalk until I apologized for the things I had “done to him” five, six, seven years before we met. I was never afraid of a client, but I was terrified of a man I loved very much, who I thought I knew very well.
I started working as an independent escort when I was 17. There were other things going on in my life: I was the president of my high school debate team; I maintained an impressive GPA; I had a nice, age-appropriate boyfriend to whom I had dutifully lost my virginity months before; my parents gave me a generous allowance; I didn’t drink or smoke pot. I had never been raped, but I was sure that if I ever was I would report it and that my rapist would be punished. I had never been hit by a man. All of that came much later. For the first few months I couldn’t even legally rent my own hotel room; I remember one incident where after-school detention cost me over $1,000...