What the word means

A courtesan is a woman who had sexual relationships with wealthy or powerful men in exchange for money, property or position, but as an ongoing arrangement rather than a transaction, and with an expectation that she was cultured, educated and worth talking to.

That last part is the whole distinction. A courtesan was paid for her company in the fullest sense, and the sex was one part of an arrangement that also involved conversation, wit, music, politics and being seen with.

Where it came from

From the Italian cortigiana, the feminine of cortigiano, courtier. Literally, a woman of the court.

The word entered English in the sixteenth century, already carrying the sense it has now. The joke buried in the etymology is that a male courtier attended the court and a female one attended the courtiers, and everybody understood the difference perfectly well.

Renaissance Venice made it a recognised position. The cortigiana onesta, the honest courtesan, was educated, often published, and moved in circles closed to almost every other woman of the period. Veronica Franco, who died in 1591, was a Venetian courtesan and a poet whose work is still in print.

London had its own

The English version peaked in the Regency and Victorian periods and it was thoroughly public.

Harriette Wilson published her memoirs in 1825 and offered her former lovers the chance to be left out for a fee. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have answered “publish and be damned”, which may or may not be exactly what he said, but the book appeared and it sold enormously.

Catherine Walters, universally known as Skittles, was the last of the great Victorian courtesans. She rode in Hyde Park at a fixed hour and crowds gathered on Rotten Row to watch her do it. She was, in the most literal sense, famous for being seen.

That world sat in the same square mile the market still occupies. Mayfair and the streets around Hyde Park were where it happened, which is a longer continuity than most people realise. What happened to London’s visible sex trade covers the rest of that history.

What it means on a listing today

Almost always one thing: an expensive booking, presented as more than an hour.

Used honestly it points at longer bookings, dinner dates, travel and social occasions, with someone who can genuinely carry an evening in company. Used as branding, which is more often, it means the rate is high and the photographs are good.

Neither is dishonest exactly. It is simply a positioning word rather than a service, and it belongs in the same family as elite, exclusive and VIP: read it as a price signal and judge the listing on everything else. What high class actually buys takes that argument through properly.

The listings where the word would fit are the high class ones and the longer social bookings, which is where you will mostly see it.

Courtesan, escort, mistress

• Escort: the current, neutral, working term. A booking of a defined length at a stated rate. What an escort actually is.
• Courtesan: historically an ongoing arrangement with one wealthy patron, not a series of bookings. Today, mostly a register rather than a role.
• Mistress: two entirely separate meanings, and context decides. Historically the courtesan side of it; on a listing today it means domination, which is a different thing altogether.

Should you use it

About yourself, if it fits, by all means. About someone else, only if she uses it about herself.

Some escorts describe themselves as courtesans deliberately, and mean it as a statement about how they work rather than a claim about their rates. Others find it affected. There is no way to know which from outside, and the safe word is the one on her own profile.

Read how a booking actually works if the vocabulary is what has been holding you up, because none of it is as formal as the language suggests.

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Massage parlours

A parlour is premises with several people working from it, a receptionist, and a rota. You turn up, you see who is available, you choose.

What it gets you: immediacy. No call, no arranging, no waiting. It is the only one of the three that works as a decision made twenty minutes beforehand.

What it costs you: choice and certainty. You see who is on shift, not who you picked, and photographs on parlour websites are frequently not of the people working. Prices look lower until the extras are itemised at the door, which is where the actual price appears.

There is also the legal wrinkle covered in the piece on UK law: premises where more than one person sells sex meet the definition of a brothel, which is why parlours in London advertise as saunas and massage shops and why their advertising is careful to the point of uselessness.

Agencies

An agency represents a number of escorts, takes the booking, and handles the arranging. The person you speak to is not the person you meet.

What it gets you: screening on both sides, a phone number that is answered by someone whose job is answering it, and a replacement if your first choice is unavailable. Profiles are maintained, photographs are checked, and rates are fixed and published rather than negotiated. If something goes wrong there is somebody to hold responsible, which is not true of the other two.

What it costs you: a margin, and a layer between you and the person. Agency rates carry the cost of the operation, so the same hour is usually £50 to £100 more than the same person would charge alone. You are also relying on the agency actually doing the screening it claims to. What London escorts actually cost breaks the rest of the spread down by area, and most of it turns out to be postcode rather than person.

The recommended listings and high class listings are where agency bookings concentrate, for the straightforward reason that maintaining a profile properly costs money.

Independents

Someone working alone, advertising herself, answering her own phone.

What it gets you: the lowest price for the same hour, because nobody is taking a cut. You also speak to the person you are booking, which settles more in one call than any amount of profile reading. Regulars get flexibility no agency can offer.

What it costs you: reliability and recourse. Phones go unanswered, bookings get cancelled at short notice, and if it goes wrong there is nobody above her to complain to. Verifying that photographs are current is entirely on you.

Which to pick

• You want certainty above all: agency. You pay for it and you get it.
• You want the lowest price and you are experienced: independent.
• You want it in the next half hour: parlour, with your expectations adjusted.
• It is your first booking: agency, without much hesitation. The margin buys a soft landing, and this is the one situation where that is worth paying for.

What actually separates good from bad

Not the model. Across all three, the same three things predict a decent evening: photographs that are consistent and current, a rate stated plainly before you ask, and a trail of independent reviews.

The absence of the third is the one that should slow you down. Anyone can build a website. Nobody can manufacture two years of unconnected people writing about the same person, which is why the review pages are worth more than any amount of copy.

A note on where they cluster

Agency incall flats concentrate around Baker Street, Great Portland Street and Warren Street, largely because the flats are the right size and the transport is good. Parlours sit further out where premises are cheaper. Independents are everywhere and concentrated nowhere.

Browse every London escort, or the newest listings if you want to see who has just started advertising.

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PSE is a style of booking, offered by escorts who are not performers and never have been. It is covered in full in the PSE guide. Pornstar escort means an actual adult performer who also takes private bookings. This piece is about the second.

How common it is

Less common than the advertising suggests, and more common than you would guess.

Performing pays less than it did. Tube sites removed most of the money from the middle of the industry, and a great deal of the income moved to subscriptions, appearances and private bookings. Escorting is part of that shift for a number of performers, usually handled quietly and through a small number of agencies rather than advertised widely.

What it costs

Considerably more. Expect a multiple of the standard rate rather than a premium on it, often two to four times the market for the same hour, and frequently a longer minimum.

You are paying for scarcity and recognisability rather than for anything about the hour itself. Whether that is worth it is entirely a matter of what you want from the booking, and it is worth being honest with yourself about the answer before you spend the money.

Telling real from claimed

This is where the market gets murky, because the claim is easy to make and hard to check.

• A named identity. A genuine listing names the performer. Pornstar experience with no name attached is a description of a style, not a person.
• Verification that connects the two. A performer taking bookings will usually confirm it from an account you can already verify, rather than only on the listing.
• Realistic photographs. Studio stills alone prove nothing at all, since anyone can use them. Recent, ordinary photographs alongside them are the useful signal.
• Restricted availability. Performers travel and shoot. Someone available every day at short notice is unlikely to be filming for a living.

The scam here is old and simple: studio images on a listing, a different person at the door. Verification is the whole defence.

What the booking is like

Mostly, ordinary. That is the part people are least prepared for.

Screening tends to be stricter, more is agreed in advance, and boundaries are usually stated more precisely than elsewhere in the market, because the person on the other side has a public identity to protect. Discretion runs in both directions and is taken seriously.

What is on camera is a performance, and expecting the hour to reproduce it is the surest way to be disappointed by something that was fine.

The alternative worth considering

If what appeals is the intensity rather than the name, a PSE booking gets you the same style at the ordinary market rate, from someone who does it every week rather than occasionally.

Most people who think they want the first actually want the second. Green Park and the surrounding Mayfair fringe carry most of the higher end of this market if you do want the first.

The post Pornstar Escorts in London: When the Performer Is the Escort appeared first on divas-escort.com.

Duo: two escorts, one client

You book two women. The commonest version of a multi-person booking by a distance, and the one most listings mean when they say threesome.

The important detail is that the two of them work together already. A pair with an established partnership behaves entirely differently from two individuals booked for the same hour, and it is the difference between a booking and an awkward arrangement.

Every profile here that offers it names her regular partners. Duo listings, or the duo page which shows who works with whom.

Couples: two clients, one escort

The reverse. You and your partner book one escort together. A different proposition again, and one where the conversation beforehand matters more than in any other booking on this page.

What makes these work is agreeing between yourselves first what you are actually booking, then telling her plainly on the call. What makes them go wrong is one half of a couple having a different idea from the other and nobody discovering it until she arrives.

Couples listings.

Bi duo: what the two of them do together

A duo where the two escorts are involved with each other rather than only with you. Listed separately because it is agreed separately: plenty of duos are not bi duos, and assuming otherwise is the most common misread here.

If that is what you are picturing, book it by name. Bi duo listings.

MMF: another man in the room

Two men and one woman. Least commonly offered of the four and the one requiring the most explicit agreement in advance, for reasons that need no elaboration.

MMF listings.

What they cost

A duo is roughly the two hourly rates added together, sometimes with a small reduction. In London that is £500 to £700 for the hour at mid-market rates.

Couples bookings usually carry a premium of £50 to £100 over the standard rate rather than doubling, because it is still one person for one hour.

Nobody discounts a duo heavily and you should be wary if someone does, because two people are giving up an hour each.

Practical notes

• Book longer. An hour split between three people is not an hour each. Ninety minutes is the sensible floor and two hours is better.
• Incall is easier. Two escorts travelling to a hotel doubles the outcall surcharge and complicates the arriving.
• Say what you want in plain words. This is the category where vagueness on the phone produces the largest gap between what you imagined and what happens.

These bookings cluster around the larger central incall flats, which in practice means places like Fulham, Goodge Street and Euston Square where the rooms are big enough.

If it is the massage you want

Then it is a different booking again. Four hands massage is two people massaging one, and the technique rather than the arithmetic is the point of it.

The post Couples, Threesomes and Duos: Which Booking Is Which appeared first on divas-escort.com.

What it is

A soapy massage is body to body, performed with soap and water rather than oil or gel, usually on an inflatable mattress or in a walk-in shower area. She soaps you both thoroughly and uses her whole body to slide against you.

The washing is genuinely part of it rather than a preamble, which is the thing that most distinguishes it from the other body to body styles.

Bangkok against London

Worth being clear about, because expectations built from what people have read do not survive contact with the London version.

In Bangkok a soapy massage happens in a purpose-built establishment: a large tiled room, an air mattress, a proper bath. In London it happens in a flat with a decent bathroom. Same technique, considerably less theatre.

Anyone advertising a London soapy massage in the Bangkok format is advertising something that essentially does not exist here.

Soapy, nuru and b2b

Three versions of the same idea, distinguished by what is between you:

• Soapy: soap and water. Wet, warm, and it doubles as getting clean.
• Nuru: nori gel on a mat. The most slippery and the most specific.
• B2B: oil, on a table. The most widely available.

Soapy sits closest to nuru in feel and closest to b2b in availability, which is a reasonable summary of why people book it.

What it costs

Usually £40 to £70 as an extra, similar to b2b and well below nuru, since it needs soap and a bathroom rather than gel and a mat.

It is almost always incall for the obvious reason. A hotel bathroom is rarely the right shape and hotels take a dim view of the water.

Practical notes

• It gets everywhere. Ask whether her place is set up for it rather than assuming a normal bathroom will do.
• Say if you dislike being cold. The transition out of warm water is the part people complain about, and it is easily managed if mentioned.
• Do not book it in thirty minutes. The washing takes as long as it takes.

Where it is offered

Thinly, and mostly by escorts who already offer nuru, since those are the flats set up for water and mess. Queensway and the surrounding incall belt carry most of it.

Browse the nuru listings and the erotic massage listings, and ask directly, because soapy is offered far more often than it is advertised.

The short version

Body to body with soap and water, incall, cheaper than nuru, and nothing like the Bangkok version whatever a listing suggests. Thai massage in London covers the other import that arrived here with its meaning altered.

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This is general information rather than legal advice. If you need advice about your own position, get it from a solicitor.

The transaction itself is legal

In England, Wales and Scotland, an adult paying another adult for sexual services is not a criminal offence. Neither is selling. There is no licence, no register, and nothing to declare.

That is the part people get wrong most often, usually because they have absorbed American assumptions from American television. The UK has never criminalised the exchange.

Almost everything around it is not

Parliament criminalised the surroundings instead, which is why the trade looks the way it does. The main offences:

• Soliciting in a public place. An offence for the seller, persistently, in a street or public place.
• Kerb crawling. An offence for the buyer, soliciting from or near a vehicle in public.
• Brothel keeping. Premises where more than one person sells sex count as a brothel, and keeping or managing one is an offence. This is why two people sharing a flat for safety are technically committing an offence that one person working alone is not, a point sex worker organisations have been making for decades.
• Controlling for gain, and causing or inciting for gain. Offences under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 aimed at pimping and coercion.
• Advertising in phone boxes. Genuinely its own offence, under the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001.

Put together, these make the private indoor booking the only arrangement that is fully lawful for everyone involved. That is not an accident and it explains why London has no red light district.

The offence with no defence

Section 53A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, added in 2009, is the one to actually know about.

It is an offence to pay for the sexual services of someone who has been subjected to force, threats, coercion or deception by a third party. It is a strict liability offence, which means it does not matter whether you knew, and it does not matter whether you could reasonably have known. There is no defence of ignorance. It carries a fine and a criminal record.

The practical consequence is that the checks you make are not a courtesy. Book from listings where the person is identifiable, reachable directly, and reviewed by other people. If anything about a booking suggests someone is not there by choice, do not proceed, and report it to the police or to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. The reviews on this site exist partly for this reason: a trail of independent accounts is evidence of an ordinary working arrangement.

Northern Ireland is different

Since June 2015, paying for sexual services is a criminal offence in Northern Ireland under section 15 of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Act 2015. Selling is not. This is the Nordic model, and Northern Ireland was the first part of the UK to adopt it.

If you are in Belfast, the answer to the question in the title is no.

Scotland sits between

Buying and selling are both legal in Scotland, but public soliciting and kerb crawling are criminalised under the Prostitution (Public Places) (Scotland) Act 2007. In practice the position resembles England and Wales.

Age, and the thing that is never ambiguous

Eighteen, without exception, and paying for sexual services from anyone under eighteen is a serious offence regardless of what you were told or shown. Every listing on this site is over eighteen and verified as such.

What this means for an ordinary booking

An adult booking an adult, indoors, arranged privately, paid in cash, is lawful in England, Wales and Scotland. Nothing about it needs to be hidden and nothing about it is a grey area.

Keep it that way by keeping it private: arrange by phone or through a listing, not in the street or from a car. How booking works covers the practical side, first time booking covers the nerves, and what an escort is covers the terminology.

The post Is Paying for an Escort Legal in the UK? appeared first on divas-escort.com.

What the process actually is

There is no interview in any normal sense. What happens at a working agency is closer to this.

1. You make contact, usually by email or message, with a couple of recent photographs.
2. A conversation, by phone or in person, about what you do and do not offer, your availability, and where you can work from.
3. Photographs, which the better agencies arrange and pay for, because the listing lives or dies on them.
4. A profile goes up, and you decide what appears on it.
5. Bookings start arriving, and you accept or decline each one.

That is the whole thing. It usually takes a week or two, most of which is waiting on photographs.

What gets asked, and what should not

Reasonable: your availability, the areas you can work, whether you can host, what you offer, and proof that you are over eighteen. Every legitimate agency in the country checks age, and any that does not is a reason to leave rather than a convenience.

Not reasonable: keeping your documents, a joining fee, an exclusivity contract, or pressure to offer more than you said you would. None of those is standard, whatever you are told.

Reading an advert

A few things separate a real listing from a lead farm.

• A named agency with a working website. If the advert does not say who it is, there is a reason.
• A stated commission. Vagueness about money at the advert stage does not improve later.
• No earnings promise. Anyone advertising a guaranteed weekly figure is describing a diary nobody has.
• An address or a landline. Not conclusive, but a mobile number and nothing else is worth a second thought.

What agencies are actually short of

Useful if you are weighing up whether it is worth applying. Demand does not spread evenly.

Availability is the real currency. Someone reliable on weekday afternoons is worth more to an agency than someone glamorous who only answers on Saturdays, because weekday afternoons are when the phone rings and nobody is free. The same is true of anyone who can travel for outcall, which is consistently harder to staff than incall.

Beyond that it is breadth rather than any particular look. A roster works when it covers a range, so the gap is usually whatever is currently thin.

Before you answer anything

Read the practical guide to starting out first, particularly the legal section, because it is short and it matters.

If you want to talk to us, the terms are written down on the casting page rather than saved for a phone call.

The post Escort Jobs in London: How Agencies Actually Hire appeared first on divas-escort.com.

What it does not mean

It is not a rating, not a standard anyone awards, and not a claim anybody has to justify. There is no body checking it. A site describing all of its listings as high class has told you what it charges and nothing else.

What it actually correlates with

Having looked across a lot of listings, the £400 plus bracket does differ from the £250 bracket, but not in the ways the advertising implies. What genuinely tends to come with it:

• The address. Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Park Lane rents come out of the hourly rate. Much of the premium is postcode.
• Photographs. Professionally shot, and more importantly consistent with each other and current.
• Time. Longer minimum bookings, less sense of the clock, more willingness to do dinner first.
• The arranging. A phone answered properly, a booking confirmed, a replacement offered when plans change.

Notice what is absent from that list. None of it is about her, and none of it predicts whether the hour will be any good.

Browse the high class listings.

When the premium is worth paying

Genuinely worth it for a first booking, where the smoother arranging buys you a soft landing and is the thing most likely to go wrong otherwise. Worth it for a dinner date or anything in public, where presentation and conversation are most of the booking. Worth it when discretion around a hotel matters.

Less obviously worth it for a straightforward hour, where you are largely paying rent on a flat you will be in for sixty minutes.

The words that travel with it

Elite, exclusive, VIP, luxury and upmarket all mean the same as high class, which is to say they all mean expensive. Treat them as a price signal and read the profile for everything else.

One that is different: recommended reflects repeat bookings and reviews rather than rate. That is a far better predictor of an hour going well, and it is the filter to use if you only use one.

Where the bracket sits geographically

Almost entirely in a narrow band of central postcodes, with Regent’s Park and Holland Park at the edges of it. Step outside that band and the same hour costs noticeably less, which is the whole argument of what London escorts actually cost.

The short version

High class is a price bracket wearing the clothes of a quality rating. It buys a better address, better photographs and better arranging, and it buys none of the things people assume it buys. Pay it when the arranging or the setting matters, and read the reviews either way.

The post What High Class Actually Buys You appeared first on divas-escort.com.

Before you contact anyone

Settle three things, roughly. Not a script, just a direction.

• One thing you are curious about. Being ordered about. Restraint. Being humiliated verbally. Anything.
• One thing you definitely do not want. Marks. Anything involving your face. Anything you would have to explain later.
• How long. Two hours for a professional session. One if you are trying it as an extra with an escort who offers it.

Three sentences. That is the whole preparation and it changes the entire booking.

The first contact

Say it is your first time. It is the single most useful sentence you can offer, it is heard constantly, and it changes how the session is built rather than lowering anyone opinion of you.

Then give your three things. A professional will ask a few more questions, propose something, and tell you what it costs. If instead you get pushed toward something you did not ask for, that is your answer about her.

On the day

Shower, arrive on time, cash in an envelope handed over at the start. Same as any booking.

Then expect to talk first. Ten or fifteen minutes of it: limits confirmed, safe word agreed, any health matters mentioned. Anyone who skips this part is not experienced, they are careless, and that is the point to leave.

During the session, use the safe word if you need it. It is not a failure and it is not rude. It is the mechanism working exactly as designed, and no competent provider thinks anything of it.

Afterwards

Expect a wind-down. Water, sitting quietly, ordinary conversation. This is aftercare and it is a standard part of the booking rather than a kindness.

It matters more than it sounds. A session can leave people oddly flat an hour or a day later, which is common, well documented and passes. Knowing that in advance is most of dealing with it.

What goes wrong

• Booking too long. Four hours as a first session is a mistake. Two is plenty.
• Describing nothing and hoping. Covered above, and it remains the main one.
• Pushing at her limits. Ends sessions, and ends them without a refund.
• Treating the negotiation as an obstacle. It is the part that makes the rest work.
• Booking the cheapest thing available. The one category where that is a genuinely poor idea.

What it costs, briefly

£500 to £800 for a two hour professional session in London. £50 to £150 as an extra on a standard booking with an escort who offers domination. The second is a sensible way to test the water. What London escorts cost covers the wider pricing picture.

Where to look

The domination listings and submissive listings cover both directions, and every area on the site shows who works where.

Read the difference between a professional dominatrix and an escort offering domination before you choose, because that decision shapes everything else.

The post Booking a First Domination Session in London appeared first on divas-escort.com.

Why two is not simply twice one

A single masseuse works in sequence. She does your shoulders, then your back, then your legs, and your attention follows her hands because there is only one thing to follow.

Two working in mirror stops that from happening. Your attention has nowhere to settle, gives up trying, and what people report afterwards is a strange floaty disengagement that a normal massage does not produce. That effect is the product. It is not a bonus on top of a regular massage; it is a different experience that happens to use the same oil.

Synchronised against alternating

There are two ways to do it and they feel nothing alike.

• Synchronised. Both work symmetrically, mirroring each other down your left and right. This is the one that produces the disorienting effect and the one worth asking for.
• Alternating. One works your upper body while the other works your legs, swapping over. More coverage in less time, much less of the effect.

Most listings do not distinguish, so say which you want. Two people who have worked together before will do the first properly; two who have not will drift into the second within ten minutes.

Where it stops being a massage

In an adult booking it usually does not stay one, and pretending otherwise is silly. What separates a good four hands booking from a disappointing one is that the massage is genuinely a massage for a decent stretch of it rather than a two minute preamble.

Ask for ninety minutes minimum. An hour split between two people and then progressing is not enough time for the massage part to do anything at all, and the massage part is what you are paying double for.

What it costs

Roughly the two hourly rates added together, sometimes with a small reduction. In London that means £500 to £700 for the hour at mid-market rates, and more in Belgravia, Sloane Square and Chelsea.

Nobody discounts this heavily and you should be wary if someone does. Two people are giving up the same hour they would otherwise each be booked for.

How it relates to a duo

A duo booking and a four hands massage overlap but are not the same thing. Four hands describes a massage technique performed by two people. A duo describes a booking with two people that may or may not involve a massage at all.

In practice most four hands bookings in London are made as duos, because the same pairs offer both. If the massage matters, say so when you book, because the default assumption will be the other thing. The duo listings show who works together, and bi duo and MMF are separate options with their own listings.

Practical notes

• Book the pair, not two individuals. Two people who have never worked together cannot synchronise, and that is the entire technique.
• Incall is easier. Two people travelling to a hotel doubles the outcall surcharge and halves the chance of a table.
• Say nothing during it. Talking pulls your attention back to one voice and undoes exactly the effect you booked.

If you want the massage itself to be the event rather than the introduction, read which massage is which first and pick the style before you pick the pair. Couples bookings are a different arrangement again.

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