Coming from an upper-middle class household in the north of Poland, Kiara was the child of fiercely ambitious business people. She was 21 when she finished her first university degree in media studies in Poland, and like many Polish women, her choice to move to Germany was economically motivated. As a naturally curious and erotic character, she gravitated towards sex work as a starting occupation for her in the city. Based on her stories, Kiara perceived sex work as a means to a long-term goal, namely funding future studies and ultimately taking after her parents in the business world. I’ve never met another escort who saved her earnings as diligently as Kiara, or who was nearly as organized and professional in their work lives as she was. She consistently made sure to be on time for her sessions and made an effort not to allow her mood or emotional states to influence her reliability as an erotic service provider. Whereas many escorts would probably turn down booking requests on a Sunday morning, I remember Kiara determinedly leaving a party early on a Saturday night so that she could get some rest before taking on a customer at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning. It was an unusual time to be booking sexual services, but perhaps this particular customer was a regular of hers or maybe business had been slow the previous week. She’d definitely let her parents’ driven, steadfast attitude towards doing business rub off on her through her sex work.
I first met Kiara through a friend of Caroline’s, who was also a regular at the massage parlor where we worked. A frequent patron of different erotic services from massage to stripping and escort, he proved to be a fascinating, insightful interlocutor regarding different women in the sex industry he had shared experiences with. Kiara was one of his favorite service providers, but at one point he decided to blur the usual business relationship they had with each other and invited her to a small summer party at his apartment. Caroline and I were there, as well as my boyfriend and other friends of the host. When I first met her, she was incredibly shy, sensitive and cautious towards me, unsure of how much she should reveal about herself, or how I would react to her in general. She of course wasn’t aware at the time that I also worked in the erotic business, but after I’d made that open, she relaxed and warmed up to me slowly. Meeting a regular of hers for a social event was also unusual for her, and I could tell that she wasn’t sure whether to expect that the host would eventually request a session during or after the party. The occasion turned out to be purely social, and from what I observed and heard from Kiara and Caroline’s friend, their business relationship took a turn from that point on and gradually evolved into more of friendship without sexual interaction. Over the next four years I would always meet her sporadically, mostly at her former regular’s place, whenever he hosted gatherings on a weekend afternoon or evening. At first she never talked about her profession, but the more often she met me, the more I was able to gain her trust and little by little she opened up about the various experiences she had as a sex worker.
Behind her heavily made-up visage, intensively permed hair and glamorous style, Kiara had a surprisingly chaotic, yet deeply reflective, thoughtful, and sweetly sincere side. Despite the largely superficial impression that she gave off, she frequently showed a willingness to listen and learn from others and a desire to be generous, however materially she chose to express that. Like Alina, she showed an earnest interest in a number of her clients and seemed to have a steady handful of regulars who liked to shower her with various gifts, ranging from chocolate to more expensive trinkets and intimate clothing. She placed great value on the quality and price of the gifts she received, and I often got the impression that she defined herself largely based on the monetary value of these gifts. For a while, she would always tell me about new clothing and accessories that she had seen somewhere and was thinking of buying, or getting one of her regulars to buy for her. In a lot of ways, she reminded me of the stereotypes of sex workers in the mainstream social imagination: materialistic, masked with caky make-up, somewhat naïve, and very hypnotized by money. She even liked to wear fake eyelashes when she wasn’t working and recently invested in a nose job. I think all that was a major reason why I somehow found her interesting and wanted to get to know her more. I was amazed to see an embodiment of practically every (mostly negative) stereotype of a sex worker and was genuinely curious as to whether she was even aware of these stereotypes, whether she saw herself in them, and if she perhaps purposely wanted to embody them. I had been meeting so many non-stereotypical sex workers up to that point that I practically forgot that the original stereotypes do indeed exist and obviously came from somewhere.
Kiara openly admitted that she felt like she could increase her self-esteem and self-confidence through her job, which was on par with the financial motivation for pursuing sex work. She enjoyed talking to me about certain regulars, particularly the wealthier ones with impressive backgrounds. She frequently took on extended sessions lasting up to a week with such customers, in which she accompanied him on holiday and thereby got to travel to exotic vacation spots that she eagerly showed me pictures of and described with delight. Last summer she showed me photos of her escort trip to Dubai with an Italian designer, on which she posed happily next to camels, luxury hotels, and five-star meals. She loved to travel and saw her job as a way to get to places that she otherwise wouldn’t get to or be able to afford on her own. She often claimed that a customer had fallen in love with her and stated bluntly that whether she would reciprocate his love depended on the material things that he could offer her. She was frustrated once that she felt like she had fallen in love with someone who couldn’t offer her material wealth, and couldn’t decide whether to pursue a relationship with him or begin an affair with a particularly wealthy customer whom she didn’t have feelings for, but marveled at his riches. She wanted both love and riches—an age-old cliché in human nature—and was genuinely confused as to why it was so difficult to find such a person. It seemed like she had never in her life contemplated the possibility that money cannot buy happiness or ever come across the idea that perhaps following the heart could lead to more long-term self-fulfillment. I guess before I started doing sex work I’d been overwhelmingly surrounded by reflective, philosophical types of people who would all strongly agree that making one’s happiness dependent on material wealth will ultimately lead to depression and loneliness, so observing Kiara being seduced so easily by money and seriously believing that this could be more satisfying than seeking true love was perfectly astounding to me.
Getting to know Kiara opened me up in ways I never expected, and especially confronted me with a reality of perspectives that are probably more widespread than I previously imagined—not to mention ever got in touch with—from inside my higher education bubble. Moreover, I learned to listen to and accept perspectives and approaches that I would previously have deemed absurd and even inferior. This has been invaluable in trying to understand and grasp the experiences and beliefs of different sex workers.
erotica commercia 