MEN HAVE AN EASIER time respecting prostitutes than women who hate prostitutes care to admit. There’s a line in a Lorrie Moore story: “Her father is of that Victorian sensibility that deep down respects prostitutes more than it does women in general.” Men can think more highly of the former than the latter because unlike a civilian woman, a prostitute is direct and therefore honorable, ballsy—forthright, like a man. That’s how they see it, anyway. She’s forgone weaponized emotions and commitment-focused schemes in favor of an explicit exchange. By acknowledging sex as transactional, she divorces it from perpetual obligation. Isn’t there a cliché about husbands who cheat with unpaid mistresses to disastrous effect before they wise up and turn to pros? If not, there should be. The mistress is a lover who must be wooed and tended to. Her demands are mood-influenced, unpredictable, insatiable. She wants the man to forfeit too much for her: his home, his marriage, his good name. She can easily become his enemy and undoer. But the prostitute is not a burden. She only wants cash. She says so up front, then leaves. In her apathetic constancy, the whore is man’s “accomplice,” says writer Virginie Despentes, who worked as one.

Prostitutes are more public than civilian women, too: public like men because we negotiate with men and because we’ve refused to play what men see as other women’s games, using sex to engineer family and parasitic security. Despentes says that when men dream of being women, they imagine themselves as whores, not as housewives, because they can’t fathom giving up their freedom. The whore can roam the streets, stay out at night, sleep late, sleep around, while the wife is burping the baby and washing dishes. Many of my clients liked to imagine being in the position they imagined I was in. I know because they said so, amid their rote leading questions: Didn’t I love doing this? Wasn’t this an inconceivable delight? This would be their dream job, they said, if they were women. But because they were men, it was not.