Why Escorts Choose This Work to Pay Student Loans and Rent

By Nancy

Tiffany graduated from NYU with a degree in communications and sixty-eight thousand dollars in student debt. Her first job out of college paid thirty-eight thousand dollars a year before taxes. After rent for a shoebox apartment in Bushwick, her loan payments, subway fare, and groceries, she had almost nothing left. "I was living on peanut butter sandwiches and hoping I wouldn't get sick because I couldn't afford the copay," she told me over tea in her now much nicer apartment in Astoria. Six months after graduation, she created her first escort profile. Within a year, her student loans were paid off completely.

I've heard variations of this story dozens of times now. The specifics change, but the core remains the same. These are educated women, often with impressive degrees from good schools, who discovered that the American dream they were promised didn't include a living wage. They worked the conventional jobs, the entry-level positions that were supposed to lead somewhere, and found themselves drowning. Escorting wasn't their dream career. It was a life raft in an economy that felt like it was designed to keep them struggling.

What strikes me about these stories is how pragmatic these women are. They're not running away from something or acting out some kind of rebellion. They're making cold, calculated decisions about their financial survival. Tiffany could have spent the next fifteen years making minimum payments on her loans, watching interest pile up, choosing between saving for retirement and having a social life. Or she could do this work for a few years and buy herself freedom. "People want to make it complicated," she said, "but for me it was simple math. I could work forty hours a week at a regular job and barely survive, or I could work ten hours a week as an escort and actually have a life."

The rising cost of living in New York City has made this calculation even starker. I spoke with Elena, who has a master's degree in social work and was making forty-five thousand dollars a year as a therapist at a nonprofit. Her student loans from both her undergraduate and graduate degrees totaled over a hundred thousand dollars. Her rent alone was nineteen hundred dollars for a studio apartment. "I got into social work because I wanted to help people," she said with a bitter laugh. "But I couldn't even help myself. I was one emergency away from financial disaster at all times." She started escorting on weekends. Now she makes more in two nights than she used to make in a month.

What troubles me about these stories is what they reveal about our economy and our society. These women aren't choosing escorting in The Oriental Escorts because they love the work, though some find aspects of it rewarding. They're choosing it because we've created a system where educated, hardworking people can't afford basic stability through conventional employment. We've made college unaffordable, housing costs astronomical, and entry-level wages insultingly low. Then we act shocked when intelligent women look at their options and choose the path that actually pays.

The shame society places on this work makes it even harder. These women can't talk about their solution to the economic trap they were in. Tiffany can't tell her parents how she paid off her student loans so quickly. Elena can't explain to her former colleagues why she suddenly quit the nonprofit sector. They have to stay quiet about the very thing that saved them financially, which means other women in similar situations don't know this option exists, or believe the stigmatized version they see in movies rather than the reality. "I wish I could tell every woman struggling with student debt that there's another way," Tiffany said. "But I can't. Because if I tell them, I expose myself. So instead, I watch my friends stress about money and I can't say anything."

What haunts me most is thinking about what these women could have accomplished if they didn't have to make this choice. Tiffany wanted to work in publishing but couldn't afford to take the unpaid internships that lead to those jobs. Elena burned out from trying to help others while barely surviving herself. How many other talented, educated women are funneled into this work not because it's their calling, but because everything else pays poverty wages? "I don't regret doing this," Tiffany said as we finished our tea. "It gave me the financial stability I needed. But I do resent that I had to. I did everything right. I got good grades, I went to college, I got a job. And none of it was enough. That's what people don't understand. This wasn't my first choice. It was the only choice that made sense. And I shouldn't have had to choose between my dignity and my survival. But that's the world we live in now."