Salomé Balthus

Ever since I’ve launched this high-class escort service platform with a feminist touch, three to five women on average apply for a job with me every week. Because of me, they all want to become prostitutes.

When people say people like me sell love, they touch upon an interesting linguistic ‘blunder’. After all, love is not buyable, and the fact that it can’t be bought is perhaps the inner contradiction of prostitution…

One should not be deceived by ambitious power politics and an overbearing desire for pleasure; both are symptoms of the blackest depression. Instead of striving to win a kingdom of heaven through religious zeal or a place in history through heroic deeds, all that remains is the modest desire to pass their earthly existence in lust: life as “nothing but the fattest possible last meal”

The conditions under which women are always in danger of being considered as a whore, whether she wants to or not, are already in place before any decision can be made. The only choice that is left is to cower in shame and to assume a role characterised by an ever-insufficient humility – or to break with the rules. Prostitution as a result is the litmus test of feminism. Violence against women is violence against whores. Whether feminism is actually worthy of its name is ultimately decided by the question whether it is also the feminism of whores.

My new life as a lobby whore, or how an honourable gentleman kindly asked me to relinquish my civil liberties. #respectsexwork is something.

There once was a young man. By young I mean a member of my own generation. Born a few months before me. Same country, same time. The difference: I am a sex worker, he can afford sex work. The distribution of power is clear. Or not?

I don’t want to belong. I don’t want respect. I don’t want to be accepted, nor proper, nor fitting. I want the resentment, the hate of all who say of themselves they are normal.
After all most are suspicious. One is vigilant against participating in something only because everyone else is. A banal insight, really, anything but creative, the moral of every other great novel. Everyone dies for themselves alone. Nonetheless, people don’t get it into their heads that they’re alone, transcendentally lonely, solo, and can’t talk themselves out of it by saying they’re only doing what everybody does, that they’re adapting to the circumstances.

What peeves me most about the abolitionists is their hypocrisy. No, they don’t hate sex workers. They just don’t believe that they exist. Prostitutes are for them, namely, not women who work, but rather women who are wronged with violence. In us they see victims, not acting subjects. That they themselves are doing violence to us which they ascribe to the patriarchy, they do not see.No, they don’t want to criminalize us. Only our clients. They don’t want to take away our jobs. They just don’t want anybody to pay us for what we do.No, they don’t hate foreigners. They just don’t want them in their city, in their country.

The door closes behind me. I am alone in the long corridor of an elegant hotel. It’s the middle of the night; guests are sleeping behind monotonous hotel room doors. In the elevator, a quick glance in the mirror – my hair is wet, my eye make-up is smudged, but my skin is glowing, my cheeks are rosy after sex and I feel pretty. I believe I never look as good as I do after some hours of fruitful sex.