Sex work as social work

From a Slate article based on extensive interviews with New York's sex workers:

What high-end clients pay for may surprise you. For example, according to my ongoing interviews of several hundred sex workers, approximately 40 percent of trades in New York's sex economy fail to include a physical act beyond light petting or kissing. No intercourse, no oral stimulation, etc. That's one helluva conversation. But it's what many clients want. Flush with cash, these elite men routinely turn their prostitute into a second partner or spouse. Over the course of a year, they will sometimes persuade the woman to take on a new identity, replete with a fake name, a fake job, a fake life history, and so on.

There's an organic resonance here with the nonprofit identity as a means of trying to transcend necessity. Other relationships involve constant give-and-take, negative assessments, webs of responsibility, even the need to perform sexually. The relationship with the sex worker may overt exchange at the front end, but beyond this moment of overt commodification is a sense of freedom. Maintaining this is difficult, inasmuch as it calls for a total disconnect with reality, as evidenced by this telling comment on a Gothamist thread:

Wasn't it originally reported that "Kristen" was a 24 year old cabaret chanteuse from Montreal? Now we find out she's just another 22 year old aspiring singer from the Jersey Shore. So much for the fantasy.

On the way to work this morning, I read an article in the Post noting that Spitzer had asked his security detail for a classical music CD for the evening of the assignation. This in itself would appear to be a way to offset the features of exchange proceeding the encounter with "Kristen," aka Ashley Alexandra Dupre, nee Ashley Youmans. Ashley herself is someone who has adopted an array of alternate identities, much as we all do. The contrast in the photos below really struck me; each is quintessentially human, yet in different ways:

Again, this is not an endorsement of any of the acts mentioned--just observations.