“The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
by a famous Asian escort, writer and philosopher Carmen
I have not written in some time as I do not have much to say. The World Cup marks the four year anniversary of my whoredom. Four years ago, I hypothesized that the World Cup was a good time to venture into the meat market. Little did I know that sport and beer are the only two things on earth that can distract a man’s mind from sex. The re-visitation of the events that inspired my wayward lifestyle has me stunned me into a state of introspection. (If you ever see me motionless, staring out at nowhere – that is me introspecting and it is my second most unproductive pastime after fucking.) I have only truly begun to discover the length and breadth of my own stupidity which apparently knows no bounds.
You could say this is a post renaissance period of disillusionment. I have learned so much but what was it in aid of really? I am the classic example of what can go wrong when you raise your children on religion and fairy tales. Totally unprepared for life, I set off with my nap sack on my back and walked straight into the jaws of the big bad wolf. I had a fair chance of success but I have always been that odd statistic. I am like the soldier that makes it across a battlefield being rained on by bullets. Survives the war and then dies of gangrene caused by a scratch from a barbed wire fence.
Even though I am a survivor, I don’t get the honour of going down in battle or dying a hero. I am just one of those arbitrary people who die in their sleep one day after the war is over. Some people would be alright with this but I always felt that I had a more meaningful destiny and coming to terms with my own irrelevance is still hard for me. It does not pay to romanticise life because when you fall and you will eventually, then you will have to rebuild yourself from scratch. You will survive but somehow the grass will always seem less green afterwards.
Somebody once told me that if there is a God, he can’t be good. I would venture one step further and say that if there is a God, he must be a psychopath. There is so much suffering in the world and all he would have to do to stop it is raise his sceptre and declare it so. Yet, he doesn’t. Like an omnipotent Hitler hell bent on the purification of our genome, he sits and watches as we fight each other to the death in the coliseum of “life”. What kind of being could invent a concept such as “competition for survival”?
Another reason I have stopped writing is that I seem to have glorified this occupation for the next generation. This industry has seen a recent influx of desperately broke and eager to please women. Unfortunately, due to my embellishment of the profession and my good girl charm, I seem to have inspired a new segment – the previously advantaged. It appears I have partially destigmatised whoring and made it look easy. My writings have in fact diluted the market and thus inspired me to shut the fuck up.
One has to be in a fairly morbid state of mind to contemplate a grotesque topic such as the value of a human life. Not unless you’re a prostitute or you’re going to court to defend it, in which case the numbers are relevant. Life comes with one ubiquitous guarantee – it is finite. So what do you do if you trade with it or are seeking compensation for a portion of it which is lost? It sounds like an awful thing to contemplate but as a great statistician once told me “it’s a lot like being a disenfranchised divorcee trying to calculate the value of her wasted years”. A vagina can’t work around the clock or even maintain normal office hours so how do you compute a woman’s/prostitutes worth? (Don’t you just love how I interchange these two words willy nilly as if we are one in the same.)
Well when we’re not being strung from trees and packed into vehicle trunks, woman can generally be found being put to good use in society as cooks, cleaners, wives, mothers, employees, oh and did I mention prostitutes. We are after all fifty percent of the species (correction fifty one percent). It has been argued that we are the entire species but I digress. For the sake of my “woman’s worth” argument I will leave that anthropological debate for another day.
The environmental protection agency values a human life at 7.4 million USD for life insurance purposes and the United Nations will pay up to 6 million USD for a life in certain hostage negotiations. Similar amounts have been achieved as compensation for damages in government related injury cases however this is nothing compared to what can be fetched in the private market. (If you detect a hint of sarcasm in my tone, this would give credence to your awesome detective skills.)
It is generally accepted that fair market value means the highest price a person would bring in an open and unrestricted market between a willing buyer and a willing seller who are knowledgeable, informed, and prudent, and who are acting independently of each other. In the private ransom market, expressed in today’s dollar terms, the following pricing for human life has already been achieved…..
John Paul Getty 15.9 M (USD)
Patty Hearst 29.3 M (USD)
U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Oliver North, 5 M (USD) (It doesn’t pay to be a government employee)
On the flip side, slaves are still being traded in Northern Africa at approximately 130,000 USD, if that.
Counting has never been a strength of mine but based on the law of averages I have come to the conclusion that the intrinsic value of typical female life in South Africa is approximately ZAR 79 601 367.90. As some women are also prostitutes this number would apply to them too. The equation for calculating the statistical value of life is V ≡ pu(w) + (1-p)u(w). However, this number is specific to the individual and cannot be used as a generalisation. For the sake of argument I will have to stick with the intrinsic value which in my case is a slightly higher amount but then, oh well I am a whore so it would only be natural to put my highest price forward.
Based on the intrinsic value of a female life and the average annual income of a prostitute the Gross Rent Multiplier (GRM) sits at approximately 8. (I admit this number is also a bit of a thumb suck but in a world of hypotheticals if nobody gets down and does the sucking this theory is dead in the water.) This would also mean that if an escort is not factoring her healthcare expenses and retirement then she is probably under charging by thirty three percent. In order to bring the price up that would require a unanimous, across the board price increase but this will never happen because team work has never been a hookers strong suite, nor is self-confidence.
The average working girl is not educated and hardly literate and therefore open to manipulation by buyers who are not educated either but because they hold the dosh are in a stronger negotiating position. I have watched many times the ebbs and flows in forums and co-ordinated destruction of escorts who are perceived to be stepping outside of the bounds of the acceptable average. It’s not that they have a problem with her, but that she cannot be allowed to set a precedent that others might follow because that would move the market. A price movement in a third world market would be a bad thing for first world punters because that would mean not only that you have to pay for it, but pay at full market value. Punters still like the idea of a bargain and it kind of makes them feel like the act was half voluntary or rather 66.6 percent voluntary.
Ultimately they are taking advantage of a woman in a bad situation and in theory they should at least be prepared to pay full value but no, apparently this is not the case. Pussy has ruled the planet since the dawn of humanity but unfortunately a small group of South African escorts didn’t get the memo and are selling themselves short. Quality of life is so low that most of them are out of it or on drugs and therefore in a worse negotiating position due to the urgency of needing the cash. Ergo the more you need the cash, the further your price will fall.
The world is filled with different people with different values all at different levels of consciousness. We are all designed to believe we are clever but there is always someone out there to whom we are a cockroach. It is therefore necessary to live on the defensive and constantly be on the lookout for people who may intentionally or unintentionally step on us. To fill a human beings mind with fairy tales and religion is to set them up for failure and disappointment.
I lost my moral high ground a long time ago but I never knew what hate was. It has tainted my character but there is also beauty in imperfection. I have travelled full circle and come to the conclusion that my life has no value but the ideal that I held when I set out the front door with my knapsack was priceless. It is an ideal worth defending. That girl was a girl worth dying for. A pragmatic person would cut their losses and walk away but I am an emotional person and still a bit of a romantic. I would gladly sink another decade into avenging her heart and defending her honour.
It seems that the battle for my life has come down to a battle of numbers, I’m sure it’s a battle that will continue in the background for many years to come but ….. Now that I have grasped the meaninglessness and futility of my existence I’m going to focus on having the lightness and fun I never had in my twenties. The second half of my life is going to have to pay double dividends to compensate for the first half and I do not have a single day left to live in the past or for people who are not real.
I am giving up on romanticism and am now a reborn hooker. I am going to live out the rest of my days shagging and having fun. I had hoped for true love and have not entirely given up but I need to distract myself from this entire heart ache and the best way to forget a man is underneath another one. They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush but a bird in the hand is worth nothing if it is a compromise. I would rather keep my birdies in the bush. It is safer for them and for my heart and one day when the war is over, my birdies will return to me. One can only live in hope.
I will be taking a break from this blog to focus on things that I’m good at like mindless fucking and late night partying. I apologise in advance to the few that read it. It has not achieved the ends that I had hoped and I find that every time I speak, my words are manipulated and/or contorted only to be later used against me by the powers that be. If or when I return to my blog will be determined by the big exchequer in the sky.