What Men Are Really Buying When They Pay For My Time
prompt engineering: high-end escort in the Mediterranean during golden hour, with themes of power, intimacy, and authenticity. Pre-Raphaelite style. Her posture will reflect serenity, and her expression soft but intimate.
In the south of France, there's a particular golden hour when the light hits the Mediterranean just so. I watch wealthy men shed their personas then – the aggressive investor, the visionary founder, the calculating CEO – and become, briefly, just humans staring at water. This transformation is what they're actually paying for, though few would admit it.
I am, by most metrics, one of the most expensive escorts in the world. This isn't hyperbole but market reality, a fact that says less about me and more about what true scarcity looks like in a world where almost everything can be purchased. I offer the rarest commodity in elite circles: authentic connection uncorrupted by agenda.
When I was 24, I made a calculation that struck me as eminently reasonable. Youth granted me temporary access to rarefied spaces – board rooms, private jets, Davos after-parties – where I could observe how power actually functioned. I could spend decades clawing my way toward those rooms through traditional channels, or I could simply walk in now, absorbing everything, while offering something even the wealthiest couldn't otherwise obtain.
I'm not referring to physical intimacy, which is merely the accepted premise. What these men truly seek, and what commands my extraordinary rates, is the ability to exhale completely in another's presence. To be seen clearly without consequence.
My clients exist within labyrinths of performance. They perform capability for boards, stoicism for employees, omniscience for the public. Improvement is seen as the only necessary good, the expected outcome beyond the present moment. I don't need them to be better, smarter, more emotionally available, or strategically brilliant. I don't need them at all, really; our introduction exists as a contract with ill-defined parameters, which paradoxically creates space for something genuine to emerge.
"Everyone wants something from me," a client whose name you'd recognize once said, "except you. You've already gotten what you want." Transaction itself creates a strange equality. There is this tribe in Africa where one of the customs is that if someone gives you a gift, you either give them a larger or smaller gift. No equal gifts, an equal gift signifies that you want your transaction to be done. One should always feel a little indebted to or still desiring of the other. There is something strangely present about transaction, transparent desires.
I'm often asked what we talk about during our time together. The content matters less than you'd think. I've developed a particular talent for total presence – not the performative listening of executive coaches or the strategic engagement of networkers, but closer to what meditation describes as "being nowhere else." The gradual erosion of attention that happens when relationships become functional rather than curious.
The age difference often remarked upon, they tend to be 10-30 years my senior, serves a purpose beyond the obvious. These men have already reached heights I cannot feasibly attain. In turn, I offer perspective from outside their increasingly homogeneous circles, where most people share similar backgrounds, education, and worldviews.
What remains unspoken in discussions about high-end companionship is how fundamentally it revolves around asymmetry. Not just the obvious imbalances of age and wealth, but deeper asymmetries of need and visibility.
Rather than pretending these asymmetries don't exist, we acknowledge them, creating a foundation more honest than many conventional relationships. The economic transaction doesn't corrupt authenticity; it enables it by removing pretense.
Does this arrangement exact costs? Absolutely. Privacy becomes both professional necessity and personal prison. Genuine romantic connections must overcome initial suspicion about motives. Explaining my work to family remains impossible. And sometimes, in quiet moments, I wonder what I might have built had I directed my intelligence toward conventional ambitions rather than navigating the psyches of powerful men.
But when I see women my age – brilliant, accomplished friends – endlessly negotiating for basic recognition in careers and relationships, I question who made the wiser trade. They build someone else's company 80 hours weekly and constantly justify their worth. Meanwhile, I work a fraction of those hours, earn multiples of their income, and never owe myself to anyone.
This is not female empowerment as conventionally imagined. But perhaps conventional imagination has failed us. The longer I inhabit elite spaces, the more I recognize how thoroughly women have been sold myths about how power functions. We're told that grueling corporate ascent represents liberation, while strategically leveraging our advantages is somehow shameful.
In my profession, I'm granted rare glimpses behind power's curtain. What I've observed is that truly powerful people rarely adhere to the narratives they promote for others. They understand which rules are flexible and which constraints can be navigated. They recognize various forms of capital – beauty, youth, intelligence, status – and deploy them strategically without sentimentality.
I don't suggest that most women follow my exact path. But I do wonder what might happen if we approached relationship formation with clear-eyed assessment of what we actually want from life, rather than what we're told we should want. If we recognized that all relationships involve exchange – of time, attention, care, opportunity, and negotiated terms that truly served our interests.
My clients have taught me that authenticity isn't about disavowing transaction. It's about acknowledging it honestly, then creating space for something genuine to flourish within its boundaries.