They Love Men for Money
I’ve never paid for it. Whether that’s a moral position or just a cash-flow one, I’ve never been entirely sure—there was always enough for cinema tickets, drinks, gifts, all the indirect costs of wanting company, but to reach straight into my bank account for the act itself, no pretense of anything else: that hasn’t happened. No pimps, no red-light districts, no hourly hotels. Not very rock star.
Still, the women on Oranienburger Straße had become part of the background over the years, the way any recurring feature of your city eventually does. What still surprised me were the faces—often genuinely pretty, sometimes young, always carrying a specific exhaustion that had nothing to do with the hour. A few evenings before the new year I was walking that stretch with a good friend and her little sister Alina, eight years old, fresh out of a pizzeria and full of questions. From both sides of the street those tired eyes watched us—women who had taken more cocks in a single night than most encounter in a year. Short and long, straight and bent. The full inventory.
Alina noticed them. Of course she did. She asked what all the pretty girls in the white boots were doing standing outside in the cold. I answered in the gentlest register I could find: those were hookers, and yes, they were freezing. "What’s a hooker?" Her voice carried further than she intended. A few of the women looked over; one shot me a look I couldn’t quite place. "They love men for money," I said.
That sentence has been turning over in my head ever since. They love men for money.
It sounds almost innocent until you actually hold it, and then it becomes one of the saddest things I’ve said out loud. Sad for both sides. For the women who ended up here, making their bodies available by the hour for cash. And for the men spending their monthly salary on it—whatever ratio of loneliness and dysfunction and sheer pragmatism brings someone to a cold Berlin curb at midnight. Are any of them actually Charlie Harper, drifting through consequence-free sex with cheerful detachment? I doubt it. Charlie Harper is a television character designed to make that fantasy look sustainable.
Nobody dreamed of this at thirteen. Nobody sat in a school assembly imagining themselves standing in heels on a November night while some doughy sixty-year-old with a wife at home and God knows what bacterial situation developing elsewhere on his body evaluates the going rate. The oldest profession gets a lot of rhetorical dignity—agency, empowerment, the whole vocabulary—but I’ve walked past those women enough times to recognize exhaustion when it’s doing its best to look like something else. I don’t know what to do with that. I’m not sure you’re supposed to do anything with it. You just carry it home and it keeps coming back.