What the thinking escort is thinking
From a funny tweet, "I’m not doing onlyfans because I need to I’m doing it because I’m slutty and I like money." It got me thinking, past what I've written before... there's probably some truth to that woman's rationale... the good/psychologically sound strippers/escorts I know, or have known, get in the business because they like f**king a lot anyway and often like doing it with strangers. They're like, "I could make a million bucks doing this part time, and I'm already doing it anyway." Clients are usually older than the average guy they'd hook up with on their own, but some aren't, and some are pretty decent in bed. A sex worker is really an amateur psychologist who also f**ks... her job is to figure out what the client really wants (often not what he says at first) and deliver it. A lot of regular consultants do this too, but bring a different skillset to the table.
I have probably met more girls who are sex positive and highly sexed, and mentally unblocked about it, than the average man has, because those girls often find their way into the sex-positive community and into sex clubs and sex club culture (sometimes clients bring them as dates). For a lot of these girls, they want to f**k a lot anyway, aren't very interested in monogamy, are open to experience, and like sex adventures. If a woman likes those things anyway... she might as well get paid for them... like a guy who likes programming computers on his own time will also discover a robust market, and be pleased that he can get paid for stuff he's doing anyway.
These chicks aren't super common, and for the most part they aren't completely flaunting who they are. Very few chicks, even sex positive ones, will announce they're into sex work, or that sex work turns them on.
They can do math.... let's take a woman who works as as sex worker from age 20 - 30 and she is hot and decently good at business. She charges say $500/hour and $2000/night in a big city. She works one night a week, and for the sake of simplicity we're going to count each month as consisting of 28 days, so she gets a few extra nights off. She gets two one-hour sessions and two overnights a month, on average, so that's $1,000 and $4,000 a month, or $5,000/month, or $60,000/year. Times ten years, that's $600,000. She might also pick up some tips and some fringe benefits, but she also has to pay for fancy lingerie/clothes/etc. Some costs involved. She's not quite made a million dollars in the four times/month scenario but if she's enterprising and willing to work a bit more, she can get to that million pre-tax dollars.
Few normal men want to date sex workers (I bet you would never have believed that...). There's some sex-worker talk out there about how sex work isn't real sex and doesn't count... we can safely discount that hamstering because of course to most normal men it "counts." If she's out f**king for money, then to balance the reciprocity equation, he needs to have his piece of the open relationship... and sex clubs are a way of achieving that. So sex workers who are highly sexed to begin with, will often also seek guys who are already versed in open relationships.
The majority of sex workers probably come from stereotypical f**ked up families, desperation, poverty, etc., and they realize that sex worker is more lucrative than other kinds of work, but it takes an emotional and spiritual toll that leads a lot of women to drugs, if they're not starting from there. All professions have a culture associated with them and sex work, like music or anesthesiology, has a drug culture associated with it. So there's a lot to be said for the messed-up stereotype, but I don't think the sex work makes the woman messed up so much as she arrives at it already messed up.
Mostly I've been describing the psychology of the mentally healthier sex workers... the less mentally healthy ones are really dark, and often not very bright... bright women realize that sex work is a time-limited activity... and it's hard to do well... scamming men is especially dangerous.
Obviously this is not very relevant right now, since I bet sex work is pretty dead, because of the risk and the unemployment rate (among clients). In a bad economy, hiring sex workers is one of the first things to go... and other girls flood the market simultaneously, although I'm not sure that's happening right now. But... what's happening cannot go on forever, so it won't. I don't think it can even go on a year.
Guys have to be pretty determined to want to hire an escort. Chicks have to be pretty determined to take the risk. A lot of the kinds of chicks in their 20s who would form the bulk of the industry are living with family right now, if they can. The ones who aren't, aren't paying their bills, cause evictions have been halted in a lot of places. But we're going to have to re-start the economy sometime... within two years we should have a vaccine... some fundamentals will remain.