Mary (not her real name) is a 22-year-old student, writer, and sex worker. She has no problem calling herself a hooker, or prostitute, or what her clients prefer: an escort.

“When I jokingly call myself a ‘prostitute’—or not even jokingly, seriously, with a client—he’d be like, ‘don’t say that! That’s not what you are! You’re an escort!’”

Mary and I met in a creative writing class in university. We talked about being writers, about being women, about being women and writers—the two, for us both, inseparable. It’s now been about a year since we met. We’re sitting in her apartment. By a lone student’s city-dwelling standards, it is enormous: double-storied, triple bedroomed, with a rooftop deck. It’s airy and cool, and the glossy hardwood floors are littered with empty wine bottles and confetti.

“I had a party,” she says. She’d offered to host one for her literature class, a course she still has to finish an essay for. She’s stressed out, because she’s only got until 6 p.m. on Sunday to finish it. “You’d be surprised,” she says, ”Sunday nights get busy.”

She had started out wanting to strip. It makes sense: She has the body, a performer’s aplomb, a healthy ego, a desire to please. As a teenager, she had posted nude pictures of herself on 4chan as a, perhaps, misguided attempt to garner virtual high-fives; it worked. It was last April when she went to her first strip club, Jilly’s.

“It’s, like, the bottom of the barrel in Toronto,” she describes.

She was stoned and drunk, with a friend. Jilly’s is at best an eyesore, at worst a crime scene; a porno porta-potty comes to mind. But Mary’s take on this shithole is near revering. Temple is the word she uses.

“No, seriously,” she says. “To me, watching a woman masterfully work the pole—a woman who is considered, by society, as the lowest form of woman; the woman who doesn’t have any other options—how do you explain the fact that she can get up to the top of the pole and hang upside down and stay there and spin? That takes dedication. That takes work. That takes strength. How can anybody say that this woman is a low kind of woman?”

By the way: For all her unbelievable joy and enthusiasm about the job, Mary has never, ever seen a single episode of Showtime’s prostitution-glamorization vehicle, Secret Diary of a Call Girl. She’s never seen Buñuel’s Belle de Jour; never read Tracy Quan’s columns on Salon. She’s never read a fictional account of being a prostitute; never had an interest, she explains. At least, not before going to Jilly’s, and it was easy enough to Google for a firsthand account of a real stripper. She began her education through the considerably more grounded chronicles of women like Kat (of Tits & Sass) and Holly O’Hare.

“Through them, I realized there was a way to do this without being degrading.” It was simple. Perhaps frightfully so, for some people.

Shoes were bought, a white pair with neon yellow straps that wouldn’t look all that out of place at a Preen show. With a barista’s salary, and a timely birthday present, she bought pole-dancing lessons and her own pole to practice with. I vaguely recall her playing me a song, something mellow and reggae-y, when I asked her back in November what kind of song she’d strip to.

This all happened in a period of eight months, and at the end of it, she met a series of people who all asked the same question: Why didn’t she just become an escort?

“Now, stripping seems almost… comical,” she says. “Clownish. It was the kind of thing I could tell people; joke about it. Telling people you want to be a prostitute is a totally different ballgame. There is such a difference between teasing people and actually… doing it.”

But she doesn’t strike me as ashamed. She never did; I wouldn’t have asked her for this favor otherwise.

“Well, not anymore,” she admits.

She told me a few weeks ago that she’d told her parents; her boyfriend already knew, and is fine with it. Her mom reacted as expected: worried and confused.

“She called me one night at 4 a.m.,” she says. “She’d felt like a failure as a parent, and I had to remind her: Mom, I’ve got dreams. How could you have forgotten so easily? It was like she’d erased it from her memory because she thought it was my end-all. Like, ‘hooking is something you can do with a grade-six education; why did she spend all her money on a post-secondary education if this is what I was going to end up doing?’” Her dad, in contrast, handled it well. She wasn’t surprised.

After Googling toronto high class escort agency—much like a john—she’d decided to call the agency with the spiffiest website.

“This madam had a fucking Twitter feed. She would say things like, just hired three new girls!” Mary never heard back, though, so she called another agency. “We had an interview the next week, and I started the day after.” There were, seemingly, few requirements: All she had done was show up, and she was hired without having to answer any questions.

A bullet dodged, then?

“Oh, yeah. I love my manager. Um, madam. Pimp?” She throws her hands up in the air in confusion.

Financially, the sex industry in Toronto is fairly self-regulated. There’s little variation of pricing between agencies. The first couple agencies that pop up on Google charge between $240 and $270 an hour. That’s not a lot, you might think. What about the Ashley Duprés and Sophie Andertons of the world? What about the filthy lucre that’s supposed to justify the  appeal of this ‘whoring’ business? If not money, what else does it take for somebody to do something like this?

I ask her what was the most extravagant thing she’d bought herself with her earnings.

“Gold medal ping-pong game at the London Olympics, baby.”

She insists she’s good with her money, and I believe her. Her earnings are split into fours: one for bills, one for her travels, one for long-term savings, the last for instant gratification.

I ask her how much she earns.

“About a grand a week.”

Her clients pay $260 an hour. From that, the agency takes 40 pecent for advertising, photographers’ fees, gas if they’re an out-call agency, rent and utilities if they only do in-calls.

“Have you ever thought about going independent?” I ask, when what I really meant was, don’t you think you deserve more?

She says no. She’s grateful for the security and relative stability of business that an agency provides her, and doesn’t have the time to run a business.

“Because that’s what you are when you’re an independent escort,” she says. “You are selling yourself as a product. There needs to be advertising, management—it’s too much of a hassle.”

She speaks of “career hoes”. Those are the women whose faces are in the pictures, unobstructed and clear. Once, she dared give out her number to a client who seemed safe enough; he was a guidance counselor. He was fine, and handed over the envelope gamely—likely a decent fraction of his yearly salary—but treated her “inappropriately.” Intimacy: What’s too much when it’s perfectly okay, even preferred, to provide too little? She shudders, reliving the memory. “It was weird. The day after, I saw him at a psych conference.”

If you consider Mary’s resume, escorting doesn’t seem too far of a stretch. She had been a waitress, an actress, a barista. “They were all the same thing—jobs that rely on a woman teasing men—just socially accepted. And aren’t we all whores, to an extent? We’re selling energy, talent, time for cash. With this?” She gesticulates towards Meyer-esque breasts. “I’m just getting straight to the point.”

At the height of her sex-work daydreaming, she had been working at a restaurant that had introduced its employees to a new uniform. It was a t-shirt that said this is a delicious body. She had refused, politely, with an eloquently worded e-mail. And was then promptly and unceremoniously fired.

“I thought that was wrong on so many levels,” she says. “I’m fine with sexualization. Obviously. But that message on the t-shirt was not something I consented to. I did not want people ordering food by looking at my tits and thinking, oh yeah, I really like where this is going.”

I ask her how much she was earning as a server. She says minimum wage. She hated it—hated the smallness of that amount, the smallness of the validation, the smallness of her importance.

“Every table was a battle,” she recalls. “You don’t want to build yourself around how much you make. That’s incredibly dangerous. But you get old, and for various reasons you can’t work, and then what? You fall. Your entire world falls apart. Fuck that. That’s not what I want.”

There’s fear in her voice—a fear that she does acknowledge and battle, and a fear that I’m sure we all can sympathize with every time rent is due, a pet gets sick, or the gas tank empties.

“I would like to live comfortably,” she says. “I would like to make money doing something I like, doing something I’m good at. And I’ve found it. I’ve never been better at any other job.”

I click around Mary’s agency’s website. The pictures are lit extremely carefully. There are pinks and browns, highlights and shadows; there are hollows and excesses, the obviously fake, the surprisingly real. There’s a site out there where one can buy a steak and have it delivered overnight in a cooler. The same magic applies here. With the faces blurred and the body parts contorted to maximize appeal, they look like fabulous pieces of meat. In their bizarre focus on the mammalian they have ended up looking like aliens.

“Tell me about the worst client you’ve ever had.”

She was never quite sure of what he did for a living; he did not make much conversation. He was affluent—that was for sure. He lived in a condo with a doorman who she mistakenly gave her real name.

“I think he was one of my first clients, actually,” she says. “I wasn’t used to my fake name yet.”

He had a routine. She would knock on the door, and he would holler at her to come in from the bathroom. She would enter, a CD of thumping bass music playing in the background, and head into his bedroom. The money would be in an envelope by the bedpost, and she would count it. Then she lubed up and lounged on the bed, posed, waiting.

He would enter in a white bathrobe. A small Korean man, with impeccable English, she recalls. The lights would be dimmed, but he would always tell her to turn them off. A little white dog in the corner watched. And then the routine changed.

“He would fold me up in a box, almost,” she says. Her legs in the air, straight back, like she was in the middle of a backwards roll. “It was hell on my hips. Then he wanted to switch positions, which never happens. He wanted me from behind. I was in pain. He was my fifth client of the night. I told him that I was hurting, and he went fucking ballistic. It became vicious. He wanted to hurt me.”

I ask her why didn’t she just leave.

“I thought I’d tough it out.” She shrugs. She did not say goodbye politely that night. She broke down in the elevator, sobbing. Her madam said she never had to see him again. Since that encounter, he’s been blacklisted from a bunch of other agencies. She wasn’t the first girl he had done this to. The owners do talk; some of them even get together for ‘TERB parties’—TERB standing for the Toronto Escort Review Board, a forum clients and prostitutes and agency managers all frequent.

“I had talked about him to another girl at the agency, before that happened. She said he’d treated her like shit. He, like, fisted her.” Her own fist moved in imitation—not even a swoop, but a punch, rough and hard. “I didn’t think he’d do anything like that to me. Or so I thought.”

That is unquestionably rape, I thought. I look at her. She’s moved on from the memory. Now she’s talking enthusiastically about some psychologist she saw the night before; her eyes aglow, her hand gestures frantic, the jokes and impression of his O-face forthcoming.

“What about the wives?”

“I can’t afford to think about the wives,” she replies brusquely.

When Mary talks about her clients, she describes them as “her guys.” She is almost protective, which some might see as un-businesslike. She takes ownership in the relief she provides them. One of her most faithful regulars is in a wheelchair. These men are absurdly, amazingly grateful. Her reviews read like genuine erotica; hardly the scoreboard relay I was expecting from men who prowl around a forum that literally rates women’s cocksucking skills with Pitchfork-style precision.

“Let me explain,” she continues. “I am not responsible. The sad, pimply 16-year-old serving Big Macs to obese people? That’s me. This is a game. This is a system. And I’m just a pawn; he’s just a pawn. It was his choice, paying me to do a service. I’m just trying to make money.”

She does believe in monogamy, but she’s realistic. When I ask her how she might handle her own significant other seeing an escort, she shrugs. “Well, at that point, you have to question if you should be with that person at all.”

Prostitution’s recently resurfaced as a legal hot topic in Canada. Tits & Sass has a great post on it here. Long story short: Prostitutes are one step closer to being recognized as workers, with actual needs for security, in the name of the law. But it’s not exactly a victory for Mary, or even people like Mary’s boss.

“They’re talking about licensing, which might cost up to $10,000 for the year,” she says. And my manager’s, like, what prostitute starts hooking with ten grand already in her pocket? If that’s the future of the industry, that means it’s going underground. It’s going to be more illegal, there’s going to be less protection.”

To be licensed also means to go public with your profession, which is even more of a repellent. For many, the secrecy is sexy. Or necessary. And if, in some alternate world, it was to become legal? What then?

“More girls,” she says. “And I think that’s great. That means better product.” It’s striking how little anger she feels towards the system, and I ask her how she could be so optimistic.

“I think my industry deserves a better reputation,” she says. “I see it happening for porn, and it’s remarkable. Prostitution and pornography aren’t that different; we’re essentially doing the same thing.”

Is it her dream job?

“No. But it’s a damn fine one in between,” she says. “It’s the best in between job I could ever have. It’s the pre-show—an essential part of the foundation of what is already being built. I’m a writer,” she says.

Her job gives her stories every night: the man whose paltry inheritance pays for her visits, the curator with the white thong, the cable TV star with a penchant for double-ended dildos. She’s a discoverer of strangely-shaped birthmarks. She’s inspected a thousand bookshelves. She’s answered fucked up questions, and has been a solution for fucked up problems.

She genuinely feels blessed.

“You know,” she says. “There’s this new driver. He’s a rambler, and old, and he can’t really see the street signs. He has these false teeth that jut out, like this, and oh God, it’s so grotesque. I think he’s about sixty. And he would say things like, ‘you’re a dollhouse, sweetie. You’re a dollhouse.’ And I’ll say to him, ‘I’m all the dolls, baby. I’m Barbie, Ken, and Chelsea.’”

“We were sitting on the highway last night, like three in the morning. Nobody was calling, and we were just going. I had no idea which direction we were headed. I had no idea where we were. And then he puts Roy Orbison on. Roy Orbison, man. Fucking Roy Orbison. You can’t make this up.”

And then she sings, in a beautiful impression of the deep, aged baritone of the men who make up her economy, “Only the lonely.”

Caroline Leung is an aspiring barfly living in Toronto. She still uses air quotes when she describes herself as a writer.

A very common beginning line is, “We are not like the others,” as though they are trying to sell to us, rather than the other way round. It’s a cold, calculating seduction that bewilders, like getting eye-fucked by a hot little number who’s way out of your tragically septuagenarian league. There must be an ulterior motive, we think, but we can’t help but salivate over the possibility. We race-read the thing, fist-pumping at the arguments they give us, the things we will be responsible for. We think about lofts and blazers, the definition of business-casual, the strength of our handshakes. We get lost in fantasy.

And then we think about the undoubtedly numerous others, others just like us, who are also reading this—practiced, polished, and published others. Fuck, we think. We must hurry. And we hastily apply (“To Whom It May Concern”? Don’t) and click send, like saying, “I do” at a shotgun wedding. Driven by passion, you have just signed away (an estimated) four months of your life. And you are painfully unsure of what you’ll get in return.

Welcome to the predicament of an unpaid media intern. 

The first magazine I ever applied to was a free weekly, akin to The Village Voice. I was eighteen, and knew little of a proper office environment; same ignorance applied to journalism. I had never had a job before. Despite my aspirations to badassery, I was a thoroughly allowanced and curfewed child, and never needed to earn my own money. I only knew that I liked to read and write, and that media was a shitty place to work these days, so I’d have to work my way up. This philosophy (combined with the circumstances––it was 2008 and the most cesspool-y the economy has ever been) necessitated an armor of masochism that I will cling to for the rest of my undergraduate years. The publication was a notorious staple of the city’s expats, and because I had a handy grasp of the English language, I was hired.

The newsroom did not lack in stereotypes, which delighted me to no end. The politics guy was an undeniable nerd whose exposed inches of sock did little to curb my infatuation. The fashion editor was an Asian caricature of Andre Leon Talley (so he was a caricature of a caricature). My immediate superior was the culture editor. He could be casually callous at times, and never spared a cigarette, but gruffly kind in the way that Clint Eastwood might be if he was a manny in a rom-com. The publisher’s presence was only a frightening rumour but still haunted my occasional bouts of idleness. I never went on Facebook.

What does an intern do? This question can, again, be easily answered by using a metaphor of romantic relations. The intern’s responsibilities are, in nature, equivalent to that of a fuck buddy’s––hazily bordered, undefined, saturated in passive aggression. On the days I had nothing to do, I would send my editor (who sat a mere three desks away) an email, asking if he had anything for me to do, agonizing over whether an exclamation point would be too much. I sounded just like that girl you were fucking but not dating. Same principle. After all, I was the girl who was hired to work for him, but wasn’t getting paid.

My boyfriend is a motion graphics designer. The studio he’s working at recently hired an intern to shadow him, and over dinner last night, he told me how frustrated he was with her presence. I couldn’t believe it. “Why?” I asked––maybe a little too shrilly. It didn’t make sense to me; she was there to help. “Because I don’t know what to give her,” he replied. He explained that because she was unpaid, she couldn’t be assigned to do anything of substance. Otherwise, it’d be exploitation.

When I was at that weekly, I was everyone’s little helper. I darted to and fro, the flip flop of my season-appropriate footwear punctuating each eager step. So much for “business casual.”

On my first day, I transferred contact information from post-its and memos to a spreadsheet. During my second week, I fact-checked listings, struggling to retain the honey in my voice after a long day of phone calls. I considered my tagging along with my editor for an interview with the head of the city’s pest control a real coup.

Halfway through my internship, I was assigned to collect “vox pops” (or “man on the street” interviews) for a feature on the city harbor’s reconstruction. (The Belle Jolie to my Peggy-esque circumstances, I excitedly thought.) Exploitation, what? I just wanted to contribute.

All the recorders were being used, so they gave me a digital camera (“film them,” they said, when I asked politely what I was supposed to do with it). It was July. The summer was stifling. I flitted madly from person to person, asking if they spoke English. I settled for three tourists; useless for a feature that was about how the construction affected long-term residents. The background noise––ironically, from the very construction that I was interviewing them about––drowned out every word of their answers. Pissed off, I took a cab back to the office, wondering if I could expense it.

My editor shrugged when I told him, apologies up to the eyeballs, what had happened. “Half the time we make it up,” he said. A day later, another editor was too hungover to make it to a review. I spent two hours in the Four Seasons’ newest venture, watching a crazed publicist cut my Kobe slider into bite-sized pieces. Was the vox pops gathering a thinly guised hazing ritual, and had I passed? I’m guessing yes.

There was no shortage of tasks that I was suited to do, but that didn’t mean I was always busy. There were days I’d have nothing to do, stuck in a limbo of faked studiousness and eye-crossing boredom. I wallowed. The company then had the audacity to hire another intern at the apex of my uselessness. Aghast, I became more aggressive in asking for tasks. A few days into it, the new girl, with little to do, asked me if I had a pair of headphones to spare. I handed them over. She began to stream Korean dramas on her computer.

“What’re you doing?” I wrote in an email.

“Who cares? They aren’t paying me,” she wrote back. She had a point. I glanced at my editor. He was gnashing his usual post-lunch toothpick into his gums, but had his eyes trained on the girl. I quickly went back to “work” (i.e. listless browsing of New York archives).

A week later, she was fired. Not because she was useless, exactly––as interns, aren’t we all?––but because she didn’t have the smarts to at least pretend.

Let’s be real. People apply for unpaid internships from places of desperation. I was happy to help, no matter how irrelevant the task; I felt like I was proving myself somehow. (Productivity: What a beautiful mirage you are.) I felt like I ought to be grateful for the exposure I was getting, particularly when I knew a lot of kids couldn’t afford the time, or lack of money. I learned a lot––probably more than I would’ve if I had spent tens of thousands on journalism school. And companies like feeling useful to your education in return. The ill-fated intern rubbed her cynicism in her editors’ faces; no wonder they didn’t want anything to do with her.

One enormous argument against the unpaid internship is the classist one. Most unpaid interns tend to have privileged backgrounds, and go on to get the jobs that those who can’t afford to work for free.

Full disclosure: During my multiple tenures (!) as an unpaid intern, my mom supported me. Not without question, but she did. When I first told her I wanted to be a writer, she shrugged, but did not protest. There might’ve even a bit of encouragement, like handing your curious kid a cigarette and forcing them to smoke the whole damn thing in order to prove just how shitty it’ll make you feel. I live in Toronto. She paid my $825 monthly rent and gave me a monthly stipend of $1,100 that went towards groceries, pet insurance, utilities, and my phone bill, leaving me roughly $600 a month for personal expenses. I have a credit card, the limit paltry, but reached.

Did I feel embarrassed, or ashamed typing that? Yes. Does it make my experience as an unpaid intern less legitimate somehow? Probably. After all, part of the hardship and tragedy of unpaid internships is the unpaid part. There is no dumpster-diving, midnight-oil-burning gore in my story. Might you call me unsympathetic, ungrateful, unqualified, then compare me to Lena Dunham’s character in Girls. But I was still subjected to the same humiliation, confusion, and (all right) gratification of being a media apprentice.

I’m in utter admiration of the balls and energy that comes from the savers and double-shifters. The best moonlighting story I’d ever come across is from a friend, also an aspiring writer. She had been a waitress at a crêperie, milking tips from drunken customers who would come in for a sobering bite. She was an excellent flirt, an admitted floozy with intellect, and decided to become a mid-range call girl. (Prostitution and journalism: undoubtedly the professions with the best PR, particularly on television.) She now works only four hours a week, at the rate of $160 an hour. “Put that away,” she’d say whenever we’d have drinks together, slapping my wrist whenever I reached for my wallet, like a sugar mama.

Despite having most of my needs being taken care of, I still trolled Craigslist for paid, but meaningless, work. Money and work are both means of validation, and while I had the latter taken care of, I wanted to earn the former. I flirted with retail, copyediting, and catering, and spent my hundred-dollar paychecks frivolously––never for necessity. Everyone I knew who were on the cusp of ‘adulthood’ were doing everything they could to make ends meet. To hustle seems like the only way; people bragged about how little hours they slept a night, or how many Ritalin pills they took to get through shifts. I cowered in their coffee-breathed bravado.

A few months ago I read a blog post in New York about that Harpers’ Bazaar intern who sued Hearst for lack of compensation. A lot of people were outraged at how that poor girl got nothing out of the experience. But what’s new? She knew what she was getting into; she stuck it out for a full year. This is the prenup-less divorce between you, the loaded rich guy who deigned to marry the eye-fucker. It was never fair. If she’d remained quiet, she probably could have gotten a full-time job based on the “Hearst” on her résumé. Now, she’s likely blacklisted. For the Black Swan interns, I have an equal lack of pity. It’s like suing McDonald’s for that heart attack.

Working for free is a touchy subject. It basically all comes down to “why aren’t I good enough to be paid for what I do?” It’s important to recognize the value in your work and take ownership; success is impossible without it. But then again, so is the art of taking people’s shit. Am I condoning the fetching of coffee, photocopies or dry cleaning? If it’s for a company that’ll be useful, then go forth and fetch for a while. All those fabulous success stories always have a chapter on shit-pile swimming. And I guess this is mine.

Caroline Leung is an aspiring barfly living in Toronto. She still uses air quotes when she describes herself as a writer. Photo: Flickr/pommru