The Rawness

Ever since Governor Eliot Spitzer’s scandals, newspapers everywhere are doing profiles on call girls left and right. Some are about individual call girls, others are about the overall call girl industry, but the one conclusion many of these stories have in common is the description of a secret segment of sex workers that come from good backgrounds, have day jobs (some of them quite reputable), don’t walk the corners like streetwalkers and cater to wealthy, esteemed clients.

Many of these women live a secret existence that their family, friends and even, yes, their boyfriends, have no idea about. You could be meeting these women in clubs, in your social circles or at work and have no idea you’re dealing with a call girl. That fresh faced girl you see in the hottest clubs that you assume must be living in Manhattan or Williamsburg through a trust fund or on daddy’s dime? She might be a ‘tute!

The NY Times had a good article about this quiet phenomenon. But here’s a part of the article describing a call girl named Xi’an that really jumped out at me:

While it is impossible to know exactly how such a shadowy enterprise operates, what is clear is that sex is being sold for high prices.

And when it comes to price, Ms. Xi?an shared a secret. When someone pays her $1,250 an hour, he gets exactly what he would for $200, her rate when she started out. The difference is psychological, she explained: ?The more somebody pays for you, the more they?ll respect you.?

“Tell a guy you’re $100 and they’ll treat you one way ? tell them you’re $1,500 and they’ll treat you better,” Ms. Xi’an said in a telephone interview from her home on Long Island. “I’ve heard a lot of girls saying, ‘Is this girl getting $5,500 an hour because she’s more beautiful? Is she doing something I don’t?’ The answer is no. But that girl is able to look a guy in the eye and say, ‘This is what I’m worth, and this is what you have to pay if you want me.’ And you have to be able to do that, and believe it.”

It’s funny because even though Pimp Week is supposed to be over, this article about prostitution offered such a good life lesson that I had to revisit the world of sex workers yet again (Really I’m not obsessed, I swear). The life lesson is, don’t ever sell yourself for cheap in the short run in hopes for a long-term benefit.

This goes for women packaging themselves as a fuck buddy in hopes of getting a relationship later, for men packaging themselves as girlfriends with penises (aka emotional tampons) in hopes of getting sex later, for service providers charging clients ridiculously cheap prices in hopes of getting loyal, more lucrative business later or a skilled, experienced employee asking for much less than he’s worth for a salary in hopes of being better rewarded later. (This of course doesn’t apply to entry-level positions where you don’t yet have the experience or credentials needed to demand a higher salary, regardless of how skilled you may actually be. In these cases, it makes sense to be paid low at first to get your foot in the door and gain experience)

I read a marketing book a few years back called The Invisible Touch: The Four Keys to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith (highly recommended!) that perfectly breaks down why discount customers are horrible:

Discount customers come and go. They are more likely to appear in red ink than black; your hidden costs of acquiring and serving them as clients probably exceeded what they paid you.

Discount customers refer no one to you; they don’t stay long enough to form an impression – and they are not very good judges of quality anyway. If they were, they would know that most economies are false ones, and that few service providers are low-cost providers by choice.

Discount customers are not your business; at best they are cash flow. But most likely, they are a cost that you do not need and should not incur.

The discount client is not buying you, or the quality of your work, or her regard for you and your service. She is buying your price tag. She is not loyal to people and companies; she is loyal to price tags. You cannot build a lasting business on discount shoppers, and you cannot build a satisfying business and experience with them either, because they do not value you and your work. In fact, in their continual efforts to get you to charge less, they are vividly communicating to you that your work is not worth to them what it is to you. You do not want or need these customers, and yet service businesses take them on by the millions every day. And then they wonder why their work – never mind their income – is not more satisfying.

And to prove the book right, look at what happened to our call girl Xi’an when she started off charging cheaply: “[Xi'an]‘s first employer farmed her out on Craigslist for $200. Her first client lived in a project on the Upper East Side, and afterward refused to pay.”

The attitude of the discount customer is the same as that of the fuck buddy who won’t commit, the chick that keeps you in the friend zone to listen to her problems nonstop and the unappreciative, low-paying boss. In fact try this exercise: reread the above passage from Invisible Touch substituting “discount customer” with terms like “fuck buddy” or “friend zone girl” or “unappreciative boss” and the word “business” with “relationships” or “career” and you’ll see the analysis still holds up perfectly. They are not buying your quality and they will never fully appreciate you; they are buying your cheapness.

Know Your Worth.

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