Why I'm not a hooker.

The difference between sex and. prostitution isn't just that money gets exchanged. A prostitute accepts money in lieu of having his/her own desires met in the sex. If your hooker is any good, you're not just paying for consent, you're paying for sex that's all about you. You don't have to go down on a prostitute unless you happen to love going down.

I don't think this is inherently wrong--you don't pay a massage therapist to trade backrubs, after all--but it's an important thing to keep in mind when discussing prostitution. Prostitution isn't some women doing for pay what other women do for free, despite what the Freakonomics guys seem to think when they say things like:

Who poses the greatest competition to a prostitute? Simple: any woman who is willing to have sex with a man for free.

I don't know about you, but I've never had sex with a man for free. I've had sex in exchange for getting my sexual desires--partner choice, specific kinks, sometimes emotional closeness--met. Prostitutes, especially high-class ones, do have some say in which acts and which men they'll do, but not to nearly the degree a woman fucking for "free" does. I'm fairly sure that any prostitute who only slept with men she found panty-soakingly attractive and insisted that they fulfill her fantasies would go broke.

I'm also not a sucker for giving it away for "free" because prostitution in our current society involves a lot of risks unrelated to the sex. I like my day job, but I might do a couple paid fucks on the weekend now and then for extra cash, the way I work on festival event crews now and then--except that if I ever got caught at the fucking I'd lose my day job and a whole lot of possibilities in life. The money may be worth the sex (i.e, the dude-centric sex with ugly dudes), but unless I want to commit myself to the lifestyle it's not worth the sex and the risk.

And I don't want to commit myself to the lifestyle because odds are I can't be a $500 whore. (Also because I don't want to choose between lying to my dad and horrifying him.) I like sex well enough and I've got a decent work ethic, but I'm not conventionally gorgeous, I'm not great at mustering up enthusiasm for sex acts and partners I'm not into, and I'm downright terrible at the whole charming-sexy-manner thing that separates the "courtesans" from the Pac Hiway hookers. (I don't think I'm Pac Hiway material either, by the way, but somewhere on the Craigslist midlist. I could probably get somewhat more than my current salary, but not enough to compensate for the risks and sacrifices.) Just because a woman can get $500 an hour for sex doesn't mean any woman would get that if she played enough pricing games.

Certainly, prostitution isn’t for every woman. You have to like sex enough, and be willing to make some sacrifices, like not having a husband (unless he is very understanding, or very greedy).

Most hookers do have husbands or boyfriends; there are plenty of "very understanding" men out there. But me, I like sex enough to not be a hooker. Because it's sex that I like, not hooking, and no disrespect to hooking but those are two very different things.