If you're wondering why the Presidents Club didn't hire prostitutes and lap dancers to serve their clientele, let me shine some light on that for you.
The sort of men who go to an event like that think they are a cut above your average sort of punter.
What they can afford is pretty much limitless - the best girls, the most expensive escorts - but that’s not what they want.
They want the thrill of paying nice girls to behave like sex workers. And by nice, they mean amateurs.
(I do not categorise sex workers as not nice, just to be clear on that.)
The people at that dinner wanted the sort of girls who might be trusting, not streetwise. The sort of girls who speak nicely and who are impressed by their accomplishments. Girls you can manipulate and intimidate and badger and coax.
The thrill is not in what you can do to these girls, but what you can persuade them to do. How you can turn a no into a yes. How you can buy their morality and their autonomy.
If you think this is far-fetched, I can think of four examples from my own life when I was 21-25 where men I didn’t know attempted to do something similar to me, in very different circumstances.
The older I get, the more surreal and offensive it seems. But having been the prey, I recognise the predators and I know what attracts them.
I was 'paid' on one occasion, when I was nineteen, after a middle-aged man I didn't know stuck his tongue in my mouth forcefully, to impress his friends. He bought me a drink. Nowadays I would pour it all over him. (I didn't drink it.)
Anyway, don't get fooled into believing the girls should have known what to expect, or that they were paid so it doesn't matter, or that it's all being overstated.
It's the urban equivalent of taking wealthy men to game reserves and letting them shoot 'wild' animals that have no chance to run away.
This has been another instalment of What It's Actually Like To Be A Woman In A Relatively Civilised Society.
