When I got there they did say that I was a little bit old, I was thirty, but I was thinking that it was better because they were all like princesses and very young and I told them that I was going to try and if it didn’t work then it wasn’t an activity for me. The same day, it was incredible and a little bit terrible, I came and introduced myself and there was a client and the owner of the agency told me that I was going to start right now, I was not prepared but I said ok and I did my best.
Here we call it the service it’s like giving a service to a person because we give a service and we are paid for that. In prostitution, I know that it’s difficult to understand, but you use your body but you don’t sell it, if I go to the doctor or a lawyer I use his services I pay for it then I come back home.
An actress is another profession where they use their bodies because it’s part of their activity and for me prostitution is exactly the same I don’t see the difference between a footballer and a prostitute but if we speak of a footballer such as Beckham they are like wow he is the best guy in the world but if you speak of a prostitute every say ‘oh what a terrible job’.
But why? It’s because we have sacralised the genitals because people think that the genitals are sacred it also comes from our sense of guilt because of our education and religion. When I speak of prostitution I don’t speak about trafficking I think it’s terrible and we have to fight against that I’m talking about free prostitution.
- You say that you were curious about prostitution did you not think that it was a dangerous line of work to be experimenting with?
Yes it was and I knew that it could be dangerous, but I soon realised that I was more curious about me than about prostitution as prostitution was just the activity but the body that was in the prostitution was mine. So yes it was dangerous but it was a way for me to know myself and a way to know my limits and I wanted to experiment with that.
It’s not an easy line of work but if you go to your office you can have an accident and you can have a very terrible chief editor who can practice sexual harassment, all these activities have advantages and disadvantages, so I wanted to show that prostitution is one of the activities that you can choose plus it’s not so dangerous in the escort agencies as we are very very well protected.
We do not go to a hotel if the client doesn’t have the name that he has given in the hotel reception and if we were to go to a private house the owner of the agency asks the telephone communication company if the telephone number corresponds to the name given to us and if someone was to call using a mobile phone and wanted a girl to meet him at a friends house the owner would say no. So they controlled us a lot.
- How did your opinions of prostitution change in that time?
I think that it’s a very interesting activity to get a better understanding of the human activity I was fed up with men and very angry with men, and I know that going into prostitution is contradictory, but it helped me a lot to fallen in love with men again. But also to know my own limits and to know that people are very vulnerable, it was positive it was not negative.
- And why did you then choose to write about your experiences?
Because I was not scared anymore I understood that when I was working as a prostitute that I had no limits and that the limits were put in place by society it creates some norms and marginalises those who want to go beyond the norms. I decided to do it like an act of freedom and I thought that it could be good to give another images of sexuality, female sexuality in general, and prostitution.
- You have left prostitution behind now so what are you up to?
Oh my god I don’t know if we have time to talk about everything that I’m doing at the moment (laughs). I’m a sex therapist, in 2006 I graduated in sexology, I was very fascinated by sexuality so I decided to study again.
I work for different media such as radio and different TV programmes as well as writing in different magazines, one of which is a very big one in Turkey, and give conferences at universities and private institutes. I’m still writing, I have published four books, I’m going to Amsterdam and then to Belgium next week to promote my book so I’m travelling a lot.
Insatiable: Diary of a Sex Addict is released on DVD 29 June.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw