Riding Crop Optional
Working girls take their care management to the next level
Being a model is hard. I know you're thinking: what's hard about sitting in a make-up chair for half the day, pouting for an hour, and then hanging out with James Blunt and a quarter-ounce of cocaine? Well it's not that part, young 'un, it's what comes later. When you're 30 or so and almost completely defeated by industry people who've been saying for years that you're too fat, you're too thin, you're not tall enough, you're not "classical" enough, they finally come through with an irrefutable one: you're too old. And your CV doesn't say any different, because you've been doing this since you were 15 and it's all you got, and now it's gone...
The same goes for footballers (you only hear and chafe about the very best -- what about the rest, the second and third stringers?), actors -- after a while, what are they going to do? But, as bad as these career prospects are, the one I envy the least is a prostitute. Jesus, American prostitutes are ignored, assaulted in the dark, and hunted by police from day one! Now it gets worse?
That's why it's hard to get indignant when a retraining project comes along and suggests that the people to take on the dirty job of nursing elderly and convalescent patients are prostitutes. Doesn't that put you in a weird place if you're just a regular young girl who decided to be a nurse because, I don't know, she wanted to help people? Also, there's just an unpalatable Wallersteinian outsourcing flavor to the whole thing. But that's just me being a fussy gaylord -- this is a good development. Prostitutes looking to end their run need jobs, and this is a position they can definitely handle, that is notoriously hard to fill. They might take a pay cut, but it's a relatively graceful road to retirement.