Escorting is a form of sex work in which a client pays for a companion’s time, during which sex may or may not occur. Across three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, guests Maggie McNeill and Cathy Reisenwitz treat escorting as a category that sits uneasily between legal and illegal activity, and as an illustration of how broadly written criminal statutes leave conduct to the interpretation of police and prosecutors.
Escorting as paid time
Cathy Reisenwitz, in two episodes, places escorting among the categories of sex work that are not straightforwardly illegal. She lists pornography, OnlyFans creation, stripping and phone sex operation as legal, and identifies full-service sex work — a straightforward exchange of sex for money — as the main illegal category, noting that it is not legal in most parts of the United States and most parts of the world. Escorting, by contrast, is legal in many places, and she defines it as paying someone for their time, during which sex may or may not happen “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022). She groups sugar babying alongside it as legal, describing it as paying someone to go on a date or be in a relationship, where sex generally occurs but does not have to The War on Sex (2022).
Reisenwitz also describes sex work generally as highly regulated: strip clubs face restrictions on location and on how naked performers may be, some jurisdictions bar alcohol at full-nude clubs, and phone sex operators are regulated in what they may say, with obscenity charges a risk for talking about certain acts “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
The gray line between time and sex
The distinction between paying for time and paying for sex is, in Reisenwitz’s account, the point at which escorting becomes legally murky. She says she has read some of the statutes but does not remember the language, and has been continually surprised at how broadly legislation is written; often it is up to the interpretation of police and prosecutors what constitutes sexual contact. Her example is a naked massage with no genital contact, where whether it counts as sex work is unclear, though she says arrests and charges for sex work generally involve genital contact The War on Sex (2022).
Bob Zadek frames the same problem from the criminal-law side, arguing that statutes must be specific or a person cannot tell whether he is breaking the law, and concluding that in the margins people can commit a crime without realizing it. Reisenwitz agrees that a person paying directly for a service he considers sexual probably knows it, but says that with sugar babying or escorting the line is messy around whether one is paying for the time or for the sex, and that this is harder to prove The War on Sex (2022).
Escorting and dating
Maggie McNeill, a former sex worker, describes escorting from the inside as sometimes not a lot different from dating. She says clients took her to the symphony and to dinner, that even a short call or a typical one-hour appointment involves a lot of conversation, and that the only real differences from normal dating are that it is a lot shorter and that the man knows what he is getting rather than wondering whether he will America, The Most Sexually Hypocritical Nation on Earth (2014). In the same episode she recounts that she began escorting after tiring of stripping and went to work for an agency, and that she had earlier engaged in what the literature sometimes calls casual prostitution while at UNO, when she lacked money to make ends meet.
McNeill returns to the time-versus-sex question years later in a different context, that of Sugar Daddy websites. Asked how such sites are not prostitution as defined in criminal statutes, she says she and others are not entirely sure, and that the main rationalization appears to be that the women are not charging by the hour and that the arrangement is not short-term. She notes that as an escort she herself made long-term arrangements lasting months, including one of about 16 months, and concludes that there is no sharp line: escorting occupies one region of what she calls the wall of sex work and sugaring another, and they smudge into one another Of Sex Work and Censorship (2020).
Regulation, enforcement and the case against criminalization
Zadek’s summary at the end of the 2020 episode states his reasons for devoting a show to the subject: that the law invites arbitrary enforcement, is clearly racial, criminalizes totally private behavior with no victim, and imposes through criminal law morality on the most private of decisions Of Sex Work and Censorship (2020). Reisenwitz’s stated focus is decriminalizing full-service sex work, on the ground that the harms of criminalization are great and the case for decriminalization compelling “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
On the origins of the law, Reisenwitz says that some of the first laws against prostitution were passed in the early 1900s in the United States, coinciding with two trends: an influx of immigrants, and many young women moving from rural areas to urban areas without their families. She describes the resulting moral panic over loose women from overseas corrupting native-born men and naive country girls being pulled into sex work The War on Sex (2022). Zadek’s framing is that for most of recorded history the world’s morality did not criminalize the sexual activity that 21st-century America criminalizes, and that the underlying morality behind such laws is nearly new to the Western Hemisphere.
Across episodes: the same question, restated
The same question — where the line falls between escorting and illegal prostitution — is raised in the 2014 episode with Maggie McNeill and again in the 2020 episode with her, and in the two 2022 episodes with Cathy Reisenwitz. What changes is the framing rather than the answer: in 2014 McNeill describes escorting experientially, as work resembling dating; by 2020 she is answering a question about Sugar Daddy websites and says the distinction rests on hourly charging and short-term arrangements, which she says do not hold; in 2022 Reisenwitz supplies the categorical version, that escorting is payment for time during which sex may or may not happen. The excerpts show no resolution of the line, only its repeated restatement by different guests.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state which jurisdictions make escorting legal, nor do they name any statute, ordinance or case. They do not give the text of any definition of prostitution, and Reisenwitz says she does not remember the statutory language she has read. No figures on the size of the escorting market, on arrest rates, or on the outcomes of decriminalization are provided. The excerpts also break off mid-sentence at several points, including Zadek’s follow-up question in the 2014 episode and the openings of the history segments in the 2022 episodes.