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| Why would this man visit a prostitute? Jamie Theakston might objectively be called a handsome man. His glamorous ex-girlfriends - pop star Natalie Appleton and Joely Richardson, the actress - enforce the perception that, whether you fancy him or not, he's a desirable fella. The revelation in the Sunday People this weekend that Theakston visited a brothel ("bondage dungeon" / "vice club" / "sex den," in subsequent reports), was therefore received with equal amounts of glee and bemusement. A lot of people would have bound and gagged Theakston for free, especially those who have seen him on the BBC's A Question of Pop or the equally dismal Holiday, You Call the Shots. So why did the 31-year-old TV presenter go to a place where they charge £200 to do it? Ana Lopez, head of the International Union of Sex Workers, has seen it all before. "Look, all types of men pay for sex services whether they're attractive or not. It doesn't make a difference. A relationship that you pay for ensures that afterwards you don't have any emotional involvement. Many attractive married men pay for sex, because it doesn't feel so much like cheating on their wives. It's a purely commercial transaction." In a statement, he quite rightly pointed out: "I'm a single guy, I haven't broken the law." After that small measure of defiance, however, he lost his nerve, and like Hugh Grant in the wake of his brush with a prostitute, tried to pass off his indiscretion as a moment of pre-Christmas madness, one that had nothing to do with his regular pro clivities nor conflicted with his role as a children's TV host. It was, he says, his first time. "Rubbish," says Diamond, a 24-year-old sex worker from north London. "I think all men are greedy. Their eyes are bigger than their bellies. The attractive ones are Jack the Lads who think they can handle threesomes or bondage or whatever - something they're only going to get if they pay for it. You get them into the bedroom though and they turn into little boys. Most of them can't handle it. Aw, poor Jamie. He should have come to me. I'd have kept quiet." Impatience, says Diamond, is the chief characteristic of the attractive client, that and a dislike for ambiguity. "They'd rather come along and see me and know what they're getting, than go for a night out, pay for dinner and get nothing at the end of it." "If you meet a lady in a coffee shop, you wine her and dine her and at the end of it you still have no idea if - let's put it crudely - she's going to come up with the goods," says Kim. She is 28 and occasionally depressed by the mentality of her clients. "It's a horrible way to put it, but that's the grim reality." Dara is 25 and comes from South America. She has worked in the sex industry around the world and, of all her clients, finds British men the most pitiful. "My god! So many clients just want to talk with me all night, talk and talk. They really want someone to listen to them. I've never met such lonely people as the English. Maybe it's their upbringing - being told always to hide their feelings and control themselves, never to talk too much. They will always say, 'Oh, you're so sweet, so lovely.' I hear that all the time. I say to them, 'Save it for your mother.'" Some of Dara's clients are, she says, "really gorgeous" and she's had a few celebrities, too. Generally, she says, the famous men wanted to talk as little as possible, fearing perhaps that one day they'll read their remarks in a Sunday newspaper. She doesn't know quite what to make of them. "I suppose it's for the adventure. Having sex with someone you don't know can be thrilling if you've exhausted everything else." "There is a certain amount of danger in using a prostitute and men love that," says Kim. "Also, there is the feeling of not having to get a girlfriend: you don't have to go into a bar or nightclub and chat up a girl. You see a lady's pictures, you make the booking and it's instant. You know what you're going to get. It's not laziness, it's lack of time. Most of my clients are successful, high-powered people. They thrive on excitement. They don't have time to go through the whole courtship thing." Diamond has had a few celebrity clients - a famous comedian who she says was lovely, very sweet. "Before him, I'd always thought that a celebrity would be the last person to come along and see girls like us. Being in the limelight, you'd think he'd be worried about being betrayed to the press. I know a lot of girls who are quite vicious and write stories about famous clients. Some of my friends have MPs on their books. They never get them to sign anything. Most just seem to do it on trust." "It's the thrill, the excitement," says Kim. "The celebrities have everything. They have loads of money. Nothing surprises them anymore. They want the thrill attached to the risk of getting caught." "It's because they're men and they're made that way," says Chantalle, 27, bitterly. "Most of them, when they start to develop affection for me, they disappear," says Dara. "They get afraid of becoming attached and disappear. They don't want a relationship. Businessmen with families, celebrities, young, old whatever. I remember one of them saying to me, 'I am very busy, I have an important job and lots of worries. I want to see someone who gives the impression of caring for me, but doesn't occupy my mind when I'm not with her.' That's all." Report by: Emma Brockes Guardian 28th January 2002 |
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