What's a Nice Girl Like You....Doing in Prostitution?

by Pat Brown

If you are anywhere near my age of 54, you graduated high school in the the '70s, and you will remember Donna Summer's disco hit, Bad Girls, a great dance song that you couldn't get out of your head. The lyrics focused on girls who got into street prostitution; this is pretty much the only kind of prostitution many of us were familiar with, girls in hot pants, net stockings and high heels leaning in cars on "The Corner."

Bad girls

talking about the sad girls

sad girls

talking about the bad girls, yeah

Friday night and the strip is hot

sun's gone down and they're about to trot

spirit's high and they look hot

do you wanna get down

now don't you ask yourself, who they are?

like everybody else, they wanna be a star

Now you and me, we are both the same

but you call yourself by different names

now you mama won't like it when she finds out

her girl is out at night

We pretty much figured, as the words in the song impart, hookers are "bad" girls who get some kind of cheap thrill out of dressing up, strutting up and down the street, and getting a lot of attention, filling an emotional void that they can't satisfy legally. The girls want to be important just like the rest of us, but they picked a bad avenue to achieve celebrity, and over time, they become damaged goods.

Today we recognize that many of these young girls are runaways and drug users who ply their trade out of necessity and desperation, becoming the pawns of pimps and johns, men who use these girls to serve their sexual needs and to make money off of their overused bodies. The girls end up on the very short end of the stick, abused emotionally and physically, losing their lives to the streets and sometimes simply losing their lives.

We also have become more familiar with human trafficking, where girls, many underage, and young naive women mostly from impoverished backgrounds, are lured to the United States with promises of legitimate jobs. When they arrive, either illegally across the border - or legally, but their procurers confiscate their passports - they can't return home or get regular employment. They are imprisoned in houses of sexual slavery, never able to earn enough money to buy their freedom, incapable of paying off "money owed" for their travel expenses. They can't go to the authorities because they have no legal status or because they are locked up in brothels and can't escape.

Most middle class families don't worry that their daughters will get caught up in a sex ring or end up working the streets. Their girls come from decent homes, are well educated, and would never get involved in prostitution.

This is a false belief. Many girls with much going for them get lured into the sex trade or walk into it with eyes wide open. How does this happen and why?

Every parent should understand what draws girls into selling themselves and the lifestyle that comes with it. They must be willing to see the signs that their child is prostituting herself. Before they send their daughters out into the world alone, they need to sit down with them to ensure these girls understand that any benefits of the "bad girl" life are dwarfed by its dangers.

Your "good" girls aren't heading to the streets. They are heading to dance halls, massage parlors, bottle girl set-ups, escort services, and overseas to be "hostesses" in places like Japan. The first thing for parents to be clear on is all of these are fronts for prostitution, all of them. There is no such thing as a girl who works for an escort service to merely go out to dinner with a client, or just sitting in a club selling drinks to the customers without the men getting more than just a few martinis and some female company. These activities are just a prelude to prostitution, and if a girl doesn't get with the program she will be let go quickly. No man goes to a massage parlor for a massage; he goes for sex, and after she completes the foreplay known as "Swedish Fingertip Massage" (a girl with no massage training simply lightly runs her fingers up and down his body), the girl will perform some sort of sex act or be fired. The bottle girls that Rachel Uchitel brings to the nightclub table where Tiger Woods and his ilk are sitting has to make those customers happy or be shown the door. Dance hall girls get a salary to dance with men, but if they don't make a "date" with those men after hours, they are terminated.

Most of this kind of prostitution operates without pimps running the girls, but rather managers of the businesses provide job opportunities and oversight. Girls usually are not subjected to threats or violence to keep them working; if they don't want the job, a new girl will show up quickly to take her place. The fact is, there are a lot of middle-class, attractive girls who are not averse to making some pretty good money and getting a kick out of their "alternative" lifestyle. To some girls, making a hundred dollars or more an hour for sex beats working a boring job for 40 or more hours to earn just enough to survive. Higher levels of prostitution offer quick bucks and more lavish living. Some high-class hookers also get the excitement of hanging out with rich men or celebrities, partying, and traveling in style. In her new bestselling book, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, ex-call girl and Brunei royalty party girl, Jillian Lauren, beautifully explains her entrance into prostitution and why she preferred the life of high class hooking over her previous suburban life. She loved the excitement, the power, and the money. Many others enter the profession for the same reasons.

Some girls, like Lauren, play the game until it's no longer fulfilling, the money doesn't make up for the soul-destroying life, and they get out. Other girls get old in the business and lose their ability to function in normal life any more. This is not a happy ending.

Other girls, like Jessie Foster, go missing. Jessie was lured from her Canadian hometown by a male "friend" who showed her an exciting time, partying, clubbing, and enjoying the high life in various locations around the country. Eventually, she ended up in Las Vegas with her Jamaican boyfriend, Peter Todd, (shown left with Jessie) a pimp, who claims he was the last person to see Jessie on April 3, 2006. We will never know whether Jessie entered willingly into prostitution or was forced into the life by men she didn't realize were pimps until it was too late. But she ended up under the control of a violent psychopath who is likely responsible for her disappearance. Four years have passed, and no one has seen or heard of Jessie Foster since. What started as a young woman's dream of big-city excitement ended up a nightmare.

These "soft" prostitution venues attract young girls who would never put themselves out on the street. Sex in this country has been reduced to an amusement or sport; it's not much of a leap to get money for something one gives away for free in repeated hookups with relative stranger. Being paid for sex doesn't seem all that terrible or immoral.

We all need to stop pretending those adult services offered on Craigslist, in the yellow pages, and on the Internet are anything but prostitution; that businessmen with big wallets and a gaggle of girls is anything but a front for the sex trade. We need to save our young women from "The Life" that is really not much of a life at all.