Types of Pleasures Occurring through Paid Sexual Performances among Women Offering Escort Services

Even though offering sexual services implies for service providers that they have to deal directly with sexuality, research rarely focuses on their representations and emotional experience of sexuality. In order to explore both of these aspects, 16 women who either were offering or had offered escort services were individually met for two semi-directed interviews of about 90 minutes each. Most participants either pursued or accepted sexual pleasure in their interaction with clients, while a few others rather avoided it. In this article, I will first review the skills participants considered necessary for a good work performance (self-presentation as beautiful, feminine and sexy; listening skills and empathy; sexual competence). Following this, I will present the experiences of different types of pleasure they identified (regarding work well done; resulting from performing sexually; feeling sexual pleasure) and compare these experiences as well as the representations those pursuing or accepting sexual pleasure had in contrast with those avoiding sexual pleasure. Feeling comfortable in having sex outside a love relationship as well as in being paid for it renders these types of pleasure possible, while considering sexuality should be expressed only with lovers produces shame, disgust and much displeasure when doing the paid sexual performance.