How Escorting Become The New Side Hustle

Jennifer Savin investigates how the oldest profession in history has become a lucrative form of moonlighting for millennials…

- Jennifer Savin

As she sweeps a brush over the tray of bronze powder, Hayley*, a cosmetics counter assistant, smiles. The rows of untouched mascaras, glossy lipsticks and pearly bottles of nail varnish gleam under the department store’s white light. “Almost done… this is such a lovely shade on you,” she coos to the customer perched on the stool. The woman watches Hayley in the mirror as she expertly sculpts a pair of cheekbones onto her face. Hayley is good with her hands. In fact, just a few hours earlier, she’d gripped a pink whip in between them as she repeatedly lacerated the buttocks of the local taxi-firm owner. For this privilege, he’d paid £130 an hour – more than she’d make in a day on the beauty counter. You see, Hayley has two jobs: by day, she sells cosmetics. But by night, she is a self employed escort earning close to £50,000 a year. Hayley’s dual professions may sound unusual, but escorting – which first became a career option thousands of years ago for women who were unable to earn an income any other way (2,400 BCE is the earliest time prostitution appeared on record) – is having an unexpected resurgence. Stories of interns, office assistants, baristas and even teachers whose side hustles aren’t baking cupcakes or pedalling a Deliveroo bicycle, but selling their bodies in what they describe as ‘entrepreneurial escorting’ are increasingly common.

Research from Leeds University and National Ugly Mugs, a charity that supports sex workers, found that 45% of escorts balance sex work with a civilian job; while 37% of all Cosmopolitan readers, when polled**, said they would or had considered escorting as a means of helping to pay the bills.