So much for the Emperor’s VIP Club’s high class goods. With her three diamond rating, ”Kristen” aka ”Ashley Youmans” aka “Ashley Alexandra Dupre” does not appear ”highly educated,” “accomplished,” “sophisticated,” or of “good family,” as the online website claimed about it’s high priced merchandise. Indeed, she is a pretty 22 year old woman with a nice body from a broken and perhaps abusive family in New Jersey. She didn’t know her father. She dropped out of high school in 10th grade, ran away, and, in the course of living with various men, came to be interested in music. Now she wants to be a singer. How’d she get into high end prostitution — the “escort” business, as both she and the New York Times call it? Well, the guy she was living with walked out, (because she was upset about various children he had fathered), and she couldn’t pay the rent. She considered working in a friend’s restaurant, or moving home, but…. hey, this came up.
It’s time to put to rest the enduring myth of the high class hooker, with putative elegance and extraordinary erotic skills. Mr. Spitzer and his ilk may wish to kid themselves, by spending extra, but they are really just paying for an available body. For the most part, “highly educated women from good families” — or even just moderately educated women from ordinary families –have skills that allow them to support themselves in what used to be called “honest” ways. (Unskilled women with less education also mostly choose grubby honest minimum wage labor, of course.) I think The Sopranos had a far more realistic view of who most prostitutes and strippers are than a lot of the romantic nonsense I’ve read lately.
Ms. Youmans does not want people to think she is “a monster.” Does anyone think that? I doubt it. She is a dumb kid, who appears to have had no parents to offer help or guidance in life. Her physical beauty has, perhaps, made her life worse than it might have been had she been willing to move out of the expensive apartment and work as a waitress or shopgirl. There are monsters in this story — but they are the pimps (male and female, at Emperor) and the customers.
Our society being what it is, what are the odds that some other man who smells money will get her the singing gigs she wants, knowing that crowds will pay to see the girl who helped the Governor do himself in?