“Dear Samantha, my husband has just left me and our two kids. I am in my 40s, reasonably attractive and want to take my power back. I read your book and was so inspired!”
“Dear Samantha. I couldn’t put your book down! I felt it was me you were writing about! I was born to escort. I just don’t know how. Can you mentor me?”
“Dear Samantha, is it true you need to have a pretty vagina to become an escort?”
These are just a few of the thousands of emails I get from women worldwide since my first book Hooked hit the shelves two years ago.
The media-friendly word ‘empowerment’ is bandied around loosely these days. I didn’t really even know what it really meant until after Hooked was published. I certainly didn’t intend to ‘empower’ women with Hooked; that is not why I wrote it.
But it seems as if I have spoken to a massive tribe of women who felt they were lacking that exact word. And the funny thing is most of them are NOT sex workers; just normal, run-of-the-mill housewives, divorcees, unhappily married wives, single mums, and/or women in high powered jobs and had enough of the unbreakable glass ceiling.
Doctors, lawyers, teachers, bank managers, even a women who worked for the tax department… these are all just some of the women who have reached out to me wanting me to train them into becoming ‘empowered’ sex workers.
So why did I out myself to the world as an escort? Why did I write such a raw and honest account of my journey from enjoying a successful career as a journalist to giving it all up for sex work?
Because quite simply, at the age of 37, I’d found my calling. I realised quickly the sex industry wasn’t about sex at all. I realised the women I met in the industry were some of the kindest, most compassionate women I’d ever met, that the clients I met were not after porn star sex but mostly a shoulder to cry on, a non-judgemental ear to listen.
I realised sex work made me a better person. I learnt compassion. I learnt the most beautiful souls can be in the most unconventional bodies.
A common thing people ask me now is “It must of been so hard to come out… how have people treated you since?”
This always makes me smile. Like I had drowned my kids and now have to face the wrath of society, feeling the twitch of net curtains as police escort me into a car.
Not that I work in a perfectly legal industry, an industry I absolutely love and cherish, and that I get paid an extraordinary amount of money to work my own hours.
Is it so hard to stomach that a professional mature woman makes an educated, sober and informed decision to walk out of her dreary workplace, trite office politics, lousy wage and long hours to become an escort where men now pay me close to $4000 for a three hour dinner date?
Can someone please explain to me why it is OK for women to be doing this for free on Tinder but it is not OK for a woman to be charging for her time?
Of course – everything comes at a cost. There is always a price to pay. And I’ve talked about that in my second book Back on Top. Dating is hard, love is even harder. There are still a select few – and only a few – that judge. What is it – fear? Anger? Have I triggered something in them; some kind of insecurity?
To me, feminism is not waving angry placards screaming or hating men. It’s about women being in charge and in control of their lives and their bodies, without fear of misguided judgement. The last time I checked it was 2017.
Back on Top by Samantha X ($29.99), published by Hachette Australia.
