“Hi I saw your ad and would love to meet you later today, I live in Blackheath in SE London, have my own place, I can pay your travel over if interested? Please get back x”

“Hi darling, sent you a message earlier, forgot to give you my mobile no: xxxxxxxxxxxxx Prepared to give you more than £200 per hour if interested? xx Btw I am an ok looking guy!”

“ok sounds great when is a good time? we can meet at the nearest tube station to you i dont have a phone btw we’ll have to coordinate over email but would love to meet asap, emily”

“Hi Emily, thanks for getting back, I am based in Blackheath and would love to meet you about 7 tonight if that’s not too late? I am not near a tube station but could meet u at Blackheath railway station or arrange taxi? Pls get back”

“i can meet you at blackheath. 7 tonight is fine”

“Ok I will meet you at the railway station at 7, how will I know you? And can you confirm that you are not part an agency, i’m not interested in that. Sorry to ask  ”

“i’ll be wearing the big sunglasses as in the photo and i’ll have a black plaid shirt on and a black skirt w/ black tights and black heels. how can i confirm it? here’s a link to my facebook page if that makes me seem more real. will you pay me at the station and then we’ll go back to your place? how much do you want to pay if not 200 pounds?”

“Thank you for your honesty, I will give you the £200 at the station, then extra £100 at my place. Could I also buy you a drink when you get to Blackheath?”

“okay it sounds fine.  a drink sounds great too. thanks for not giving me a hard time. looking forward to seeing you x”

i stared at the computer screen.

i am i really going to do this?  i guess i don’t have any choice.
i have about 12 pounds to last me for 10 more days in london.

what did i do to my debit card?  the last time i remember having it was when i was buying a ticket to portsmouth at waterloo…

how could you be so irresponsible, marie?

but, i’m fixing the problem now.

there’s nothing else i can do, having not told any of my family or friends that i was going to england.

anyway, i want to make my own money, now that i’m 20.

_____

i looked up how to get to blackheath railway station.  i felt annoyed that i couldn’t just ride the tube.  i had to go to london bridge, and then take a train from there.

it was 2 PM.  i got off the computer and went and tried to nap in my hostel room.

starting from 4 i changed my clothes, brushed my teeth, straightened my hair, put perfume on, and tried to hide my huge dark circles with concealer.  it was a lost cause.  i figured i would just keep my sunglasses on until i was back at his place, when it would be too late for him to change his mind.  i wondered if i was cheating him, by getting 300 pounds to have sex with him.  i wondered why he would offer to pay more than i asked.  i thought it was a bit suspicious, but i figured since we were meeting in public and he was paying me upfront it’d be okay.

_____

i left the hostel at 4:30.

as i was walking to the tube station i heard whistling from across the street and turned to look.  it was some australian boys about my age from my hostel, waving at me.  i ignored them.

i rode the tube to london bridge station thinking about how i had met my friend there a few days ago, and how now i was going back under such different circumstances.

on the tube there were three school girls absolutely plastered in make-up talking at length about their diets and other girls at school.  they all had incredibly grating  voices, even more so than most english women.

“i was good yesterday, but this morning i had toast.  oh but then for lunch i had cherries.”

“cherries are good, but the toast …”

“the other day i ate sooo much i had …”

“did you see she dyed her hair ginger and black? yeah, like that’s attractive.”

“she’s sooo fat, it’s hilarious!”

they all started giggling at length and it was so grating and i was so hungover

i couldn’t take it and switched compartments at the next stop.

as i was getting off the train one of them said, “that girl looked really weird.”

how can people like that actually exist?

i wondered what the guy would be like.  i wished i had asked him to send me a picture.  he had seemed like the nicest and was the most serious (i had annoyed with and ignored the guys who asked me to send them tons of pictures and write paragraphs about “what i was into.”)

i was worried i wouldn’t be able to talk to him or that things would be really awkward, but i decided i’d buy beer at a convenience store and chug it before i met him, so i’d be tipsy and less nervous.

_____

the train to blackheath was annoying.  i had a headache from being hungover, and it was absolutely packed with loud italian tourists who kept yelling and laughing almost right in my ear.  i held my head in my hands.  “i can’t stand these fucking people,” i whispered.

but then i looked at an adorable little black boy and smiled at him.  then i felt a bit sad.

my train arrived at bleackheath station at about 6 pm.  i walked to a convenience store and bought two stella artois.  there wasn’t really anywhere i could sit and drink it discretely, so i guzzled one can in front of a trash can, and figured i would save the other can for a bit.

a lot of people gave me looks.  blackheath was really pretty and really rich looking.  everyone was pretty and well dressed.  i felt uncomfortable.

i wondered where to wait for the guy.  i decided just to lean against a wall near the exit of the train station.

two teenagers came up to me, one a very cute girl.

“do you get served?” she asked.

“what?”

“do you get served?” she asked again, more slowly.

“i don’t understand what you’re asking me, sorry.”

they walked away.

i realized she meant that she wanted me to buy her alcohol.  i sighed realizing i would probably never get the chance to get  a cute 15 year old english girl drunk again.

i saw a kind looking business man waiting in front of the station across the sidewalk from me, smoking.

i went up to him.  “um, can i get a cigarette off of you, please?”

“what?”

“may i have a cigarette, please?”

“um, sure.” he said and gave me one.

“thanks.”

i needed to smoke because it was 6:30 now and the whole thing was starting to seem more real to me.

i tried to comfort myself with these thoughts: i won’t get hurt because it doesn’t really make sense to think that will happen.  most men want to have sex with cute 20 year old girls.  very few are sociopath serial killers.  caroline had sex with tons of guys from craigslist and nothing bad ever happened to her.  and england isn’t nearly as violent…

and then i started to think: and anyway, i kind of don’t care if i get murdered.  i guess that’s an immature thing to think and if something actually happened i’d be terrified, but right now thinking about it, i don’t care. i guess it’d be bad if I got murdered and then they told my parents the situation but…

i was mostly anxious about him not finding me attractive or not showing up and me being out of money, or not having anything to say and it being really awkward.

i looked at myself in the reflective window of the train station.

“don’t worry, you look beautiful,” some old man said as he walked past me.

i leaned back up against the wall, checking the clock constantly.  i looked at every guy who walked towards the station, wondering if it was him.  i was again mad at myself for not asking for a picture or at least a description.  but i also figured it was probably for the best so i couldn’t back out due to his unattractiveness.

then finally at about 5 minutes past 7, a bald middle aged man in a banker’s shirt and khakis came up to me.

“hello, it’s great to see you, emily.  i was worried you wouldn’t turn up!”

“hello, nice to meet you.”  i said politely, and shook his hand.

“i have to go to the cash machine, but i’ll be back in about five minutes okay?”

“okay.”

i wondered if he was really going to the atm or if he thought i was unattractive and was running away.

but, no, he came back quickly.

he seem very excited.

he lead me to a pub.

“i was trying to imagine what black plaid would look like, but then i saw your sunglasses and realized that it must have been you…”

In a semi-viral youtube video “Pretty Ricky – Late Night Special,” (2007) a group of African-American males in Montgomery, Alabama “dry hump” an ottoman in succession, before convening to dance and vaguely dry hump walls and other objects in the vicinity.

The performance is to demonstrate the adroit ways they can maneuver their lower backs for the missionary position, the poor ottoman acting as supine recipient of such techniques. A visit to the account holder’s youtube page yields interesting information: that their dry humping proclivities are not merely aesthetic or born of boredom, but of commerce and solicitation:

Too all LADIES we are do parties, house calls watever…we travel everywhere…jus hit us up wit a message wit yo number, city and state (Song Request Optional)…and we will set sum up…the prices are different dependin on wat u want…our manager will work wit u…[sic.]

In short, inexplicably, it seems either they have been paid, or seek payment, for performances of this type—proving once again that the American dollar goes a long way to procure those who would go a long way to have the dollar procured to them. The “escort,” “sensual massage,” and “exotic dance” industry are usually euphemisms veiling the culmination of such enterprises, namely, the sexual satiation of the client.

Prostitution and war are the world’s oldest industries. Of the former, Picasso offers “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907), or (trans.) “The Young Ladies of Avignon,” a painting of five prostitutes in a brothel in Spain attributed by many as the inception of modern painting for its self-consciously formal/spatial transgressions. A still life at the bottom is said to have phallic symbolic capacities, which, knowing Picasso, is very reasonable. They formidably stand, arms raised and legs spread, showing off their goods. Two of the women’s faces are rendered like tribal African masks, of which the painter had a notable collection.

From African to African-American we, and they, have traveled far. Montgomery, Alabama was the hot-seat of the black civil rights movement, where Rosa Parks was arrested and Martin Luther King, Jr. began his early career. Based by the Mississippi river, it shares the mud and blood of a most difficult history, though it seems, five decades later, that we’ve come a cute distance—that short of being called “niggers” in the comment section, they are simply called “fags” (scare quotes because, well, I’m scared). Of course, this does not justify the use of the latter, but may serve to illustrate how our hatred has migrated elsewhere. The important thing is there’s always someone to fear and hate. Someone to kill.

At the beginning of the video, our dry humping friends introduce themselves as Relentless, X2C, Pipelaya, Pressure, and Satisfaktion. (They are not perverted, just sic.) Modern painting may have escaped them, as well as proper suitor behavior, though I have firm confidence in their unequivocal heterosexuality. One can clearly see luscious breasts on that ottoman, or, case in point, ottowoman.

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The chief qualification of an advice columnist has always been experience, no more and no less. An early advice columnist, or agony aunt, wrote in a 1789 issue of The New Lady’s Magazine that her qualifications were founded in “having been deeply engaged in numberless scenes,vareigated and opposite, serious and comic, cheerful and afflicting.” Pauline Phillips, the original Dear Abby, had a happy marriage and no professional writing experience to recommend her to the job, while her twin sister Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers in print) had worked only on a gossip column for the Morningside College’s Collegian Reporter. Dr. Laura’s doctorate is in physiology, not psychology. In short, the job of professional advice-giver has never required accreditation.

In “A Magazine of Her Own?” Margaret Beetham describes the early advice columnist as “a female figure who was mature but not ‘old’, and who treated her correspondents’ problems with the attention due to equals.” The agony aunt’s authority was as firm as it was delicate—like the female relation for whom she was named, the columnist offered moral guidance from a familiar but removed perspective. Readers could trust her. She gave them the straight dope.

Which words bring us to Ashley Dupre, Eliot Spitzer’s former ladypal and author of “Ask Ashley”, an advice column published in the New York Post. The column launched on December 13th with a debut set of correspondence and a promo video of Dupre wearing a skirt suit and glasses. “Take it from me,” she says over a pulsing hip-hop beat. “There’s nothing better than learning from someone else’s experiences.”

Courtesy of the New York Post.

Except, possibly, learning from your own. Born Ashley Youmans, Dupre grew up in an upper middle-class family on the Jersey Shore. By most accounts she led a happy-ish childhood and moved to New York at 19 hoping to develop a singing career. She did not plan on becoming an escort, nor was she aware that Client 9 was the governor of New York (Spitzer used the pseudonym “George Fox” to book hotel rooms.)

From the moment she was outed Dupre has come across as well as she possibly could in the circumstances. The Times described her as soft-spoken and good-humored; she is articulate and likable in television appearances. She also turned down $1 million to appear in Hustler magazine. These are all demonstrable virtues. The question of who Dupre is and how she wound up a prostitute does not, in the end, seem difficult to answer: She was a resourceful babe who wanted money and was capable of making cruddy decisions. This describes a lot of people.

The outrage at Dupre’s reinvention seems to stem from disgust at the fact that a former escort is being granted any kind of public forum beyond MySpace blogs. (Let us not forget that Spitzer kicked off his post-governor career by signing on to write a column for Slate.)   And when we talk about an advice column we are talking about the persona of its author, and in Dupre’s case, the persona is weirdly likable.  The tone of her advice is positive and sensible, she occasionally dishes out tough love (“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Katie, but he’s not going to choose you”) and her decrees—size doesn’t matter, wine is romantic, don’t fix what isn’t broken—are as sound as they are trite, as is appropriate to the format.  Specificity — the idea of doling out real help to flailing individuals—is only the nominal concern of an advice column; the imperative has always been to maintain alevel of universality that allows every reader to take home something from each question (and its response). In their insistent vagueness, advice columns are not unlike horoscopes.

The content of Dupre’s advice is less important than its provenance. One is banal, the other fascinating. When Brian N., 39, asks Dupre to name a no-fail gift he can purchase for his wife,she responds that there is no such thing. “Women are really not as complicated as men think. If we love you, it doesn’t take much.” To Meredith, 40, who worries that her daughter may be getting into trouble, Dupre advises good communication. To a guy whose girlfriend thinks he’s cheating, Dupre notes that “Trust is earned.” If her advice is solid, it’s also boring. But Dupre herself is not.

Are there haters? There are always haters. “There is NOTHING in life this a$$ can teach me,”wrote commenter didn’tneedtoseethat on Perez Hilton, while mteach23 asked “Who in the world would give this slut the opportunity to write for the NY post? are you guys seriously??” Both pundits miss the point. There’s nothing anyone can teach anyone in the context of an advice column. The appeal of Dupre lies in the implied scope and salacity of her wisdom. Readers will see in her suggestions mostly what they want to see, along with a pinch of what stings. This has always been the agony aunt formula. “Esteem alone will not make a happy marriage,” advised a”Letter of Advice to a Lady” in a November 1770 issue of The Ladies Magazine. “Passion must also be kept alive…”

As Dupre reframes it for the twenty-first century, “Sometimes it’s good to be a bad girl.”