An escort is a person who acts as a paid companion , that is, someone a client pays to go with him or her to meetings, parties, outings to another city, etc. The hiring may or may not include sex.
The interest of hiring an escort is that it is someone with a great sexual attractiveness, but also intellectual: they are often people with a high educational level, so they are an exquisite company. The client of this service seeks to experience the feeling of superiority that comes with being accompanied by a person with a high level of studies and an excellent presence.
The intellectual attractiveness and the exquisite company, both in public and in private, is what differentiates escorts from people who are engaged in prostitution; the latter tend to only exchange sex (sometimes also affection and understanding). The differentiating element of the so-called escorts is that the company service is much more complex and refined, ‘of high standing’.
Although there are more female escorts than men, this phenomenon has crossed gender boundaries and there are many male, transgender or non-binary gender escorts .
For example, Japan was one of the pioneer countries in the rise of male escorts. The documentary The Great Happiness Space : Tale of an Osaka Love Thief , shot and directed by Jake Clennell in 2006, reflected the rise of this phenomenon in Japan. Many young Japanese women began to go to glamorous places and pay hundreds of dollars to have a good time with a boy who pleases them, in the masculine and modern version of the traditional geisha.
Some facts about prostitution
There is a lot of controversy around people who are dedicated to being escorts, especially when there is sex involved, in exchange for money. But it is not just a moral concern.
There is a growing social concern for the people who engage in this activity, since it is related to human trafficking, that is, slavery. According to the UN, 15% of people practicing prostitution in Europe are victims of trafficking , an important figure that must be fought to guarantee human rights. In this regard, the situation could be even more serious since, according to the report Trafficking in persons to Europe for the purpose of sexual exploitation, only 1 in 20 cases of sexual slavery are known (most of them women, girls and boys).
But that also means that there would be 85% of people who would practice prostitution under voluntary conditions; However, sociologists recommend analyzing the socioeconomic context , given that many women are sometimes ‘pushed’ to resort to this activity as an emergency resource.
Escorts, as they are defined, would not fall into this category, since they are usually people with high incomes, who establish the conditions of their sexual exchanges with ease. But calculating the percentage of escorts or ‘luxury prostitutes’ is also complicated, given that there are no reliable statistics, insofar as it is a practice that is relegated to the private sphere (there is no registry of people who engage in this activity ).
In Spain, prostitution (and also luxury prostitution or escorts) is an unregulated activity: there is no legal framework, it is neither prohibited nor legalized. As a consequence, the limbo in which the people who exercise it are situated, and those who resort to it, can both favor its flourishing and their lack of protection.
There are currents of thought, especially from the sectors of feminism from the nineties onwards, that are in favor of prohibiting prostitution, abolitionist positions, with the aim of protecting those people who carry out the activity for a reason of social exclusion. However, other more liberal currents think that legalizing prostitution would precisely create a legal framework in which to exercise this protection, allowing those who decide to do it voluntarily, treating people as adults, without exercising a legal guardianship over their morals.
