Final interview with Ella and Ivy

Today I had my final interview with the girls. I wanted to use it to cover the girls perspective of a few of the things that Dirk had said in order to get a more balanced view on the points. These are my thoughts on our discussion.

1. The girls really hate ukpunting, and say from their point of view it’s the worst thing about the industry. By the sounds of it a lot of girls feel the same, as it takes away their control of the situation. I have read a lot on the site, and wasn’t surprised to hear how much it upsets the girls. They feel that it takes away the privacy that they ask back from the punters, and feel that it is handled with zero discretion towards them. Whereas the job itself makes them feel empowered (as discussed in our previous interview), the forum boards hand that power back to the punters, leaving the girls feel under pressure to perform acts that they do not feel comfortable doing for fear of losing custom. It seems to put a crazy amount of pressure on the girls to be perfect, and Ella and Ivy explained how much of an impact reading such negative personal comments can be. They compared it to celebrity culture, and I imagine that within the escorting industry this is very much the case. Neither of the girls knew about the site before they started, and told me that they would have seriously reconsidered getting involved had they known what it was like. They also stressed how important getting good reviews is for business, and how it becomes a necessary evil to pay attention to what they say. I was really upset to hear that the girls were pressured by the forum into offering OWO when they had made the decision not to. I can understand the girls decision to do so, but I think its absolutely awful that they felt in a position where they didn’t have a choice. If the industry wants to shake the image it has of treating women badly, I think it needs to address how the words of the men online affect how the women feel. Ella and Ivy are both just young, normal girls, and I can’t imagine how tough it must be reading that sort of thing about yourself. Out of all the things the girls have told me this disturbed me the most.

2. The girls didn’t have such strong opinions about agencies as Dirk did. However, they did make a distinction between the agency they started out with and the one they are currently represented by. I was genuinely really shocked to hear that the men running their old agency asked Ella for sex at her interview! This is disgusting behaviour, and again, if the industry hopes to be taken seriously as a business this sort of thing has to be stopped. I think they had very valid points about having nowhere to go if you are being treated unfairly – where would they go? In any other job you could complain about your boss treating you this way, however there is nobody that they could speak to about an agency. The girls seem to encounter so much mistreatment from the guys in the industry that just wouldn’t be allowed in any other line of work; I’m not sure how they deal with this. I was also shocked to hear that they were given little to no information about how to do the job by their agent when they first started. It makes me wonder what they are paying the agent for. 30% seems like a lot of money for very little in return. The girls feel that many of these problems could be avoided by regulating the industry rather than criminalising it, and I completely agree. By making it illegal all that is done is push the activity into the hands of people that do not need to explain their actions, because there is nobody keeping an eye on them. After hearing all this I genuinely cannot understand how the laws can claim to be in the best interests of the girls. Escorting itself isn’t illegal, yet the laws make it so difficult to regulate that it just gets ignored, and the girls left without anyone to go to when things go wrong. The laws also contribute to the stigma that people involved in the industry experience, again making it so they do not feel they have anywhere to go.

This was my final interview with the girls, and I’m so pleased with everything we have covered. I think I have more than enough information to create my script, and the level of detail the girls went into in the discussions was amazing. I really appreciate how open they have been, as well how switched on they are to what they are doing.