I am a full-service sex worker offering the “girlfriend experience,” a type of service that offers the emotional intimacy and mutual care that comes with having a girlfriend. I sell my time by the hour, which always includes sex, but also massaging, cuddling, and talking over dinner and in hotel rooms. I seek to form a genuine connection with all of my clients, who are mostly ordinary men across the United States.

“I see my work as largely therapeutic” reads the opening lines of my profile. I stand by my conviction that sex workers are the unsung heroes of the male loneliness epidemic. We provide something akin to love to men who need it. Currently I’m on tour, travelling state-to-state in my car. Life on the road can be socially isolating. Like four in ten men and women throughout America, I feel lonely sometimes.

The men who seek my services feel lonely, too. Others are single, socially isolated, or between jobs, with limited funds and depleting self-esteem, making dating a risky investment with no guarantees of sex or love. It’s a loneliness that, at its core, comes from the expectation to meet a vision of masculinity that expects men to be providers.

This is an ideal that is increasingly hard to attain. 76% of American adults say men face pressure to support their family financially, yet fewer men are participating in the workforce, from 83% in 1960 to 68% in 2025. Wage growth for men with a bachelor’s degree or higher has weakened, and employment rates for working-class men have declined alongside marriage and family formation rates.

Even employed and married men are lonely. My married clients describe seeking sex workers as a space in their lives free of responsibility. One called it “self-care.” Others say sex workers help ease the emotional burden wives often carry in their marriages. 

Conor, a single art director from Texas has, despite a successful career in the film industry, struggled since the writers’ strike. He’s seen around 80 providers, and describes himself as lonely because he doesn’t have “job security or a career.” He describes sex work as a way to “fulfil the provider role without having to provide for a family,” joking, “I don’t have any kids, but I’ve put a few girls through college.”

I’ve seen Conor several times. I’ve provided him feedback on how to better approach women IRL, with advice ranging from growing his beard back to skipping the niche horror film t-shirts on first-dates. But the real benefit is the genuine friendship we now share.

Conor is lonely, but he isn’t an incel. His loneliness comes from comparing his life now to what it was. But other men, who never had the same opportunities, or who are perhaps younger and more steeped in digital spaces, may not have chosen to see a real-life sex worker. Instead, they might have gone deeper online.

James Baldwin’s January 1985 Playboy essay, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood” describes how the masculine ideal demands that men prove their manhood by dominating others. 

For those unable to attain the masculine ideal, it’s the failure itself that becomes “admired and lusted after.” It emerges in the figures of the incel, gooner, and pay-pig that currently dominate the cultural imagination. Though distinct, they share the humiliation of failed masculinity that’s become eroticized. Baldwin writes, “Humiliation is the central danger of one’s life. And since one cannot risk love without risking humiliation, love becomes impossible.”

Incels, gooners, and pay-pigs are the “freaks” of the day, but they are not cultural outliers. They are embodiments of the shame felt by ordinary men in their failure to attain the ideal. They are, as Baldwin wrote, “human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” 

Tom, a divorced client from New Mexico, explains, “We as men are promised so much – work, love — and you get to a point in life where you don’t have those things. You don’t have anything to offer and you feel insecure.” For Tom, it’s a way to “feel young again” and make connections that he wouldn’t otherwise make as a single dad and business owner.

Conor says seeing sex workers helps him approach women. “Sometimes you’ve just got to get that out of your system before approaching real-life women. You’re not so desperate with women in real life because you’re not thinking about sex all the time.”

He also describes it as a tool for self reflection. “It benefits every man to see themselves through the eyes of a hot babe, who can share how the average woman sees him.” As a sex worker, too, I benefit from seeing myself through the eyes of men. Being told I’m pretty and funny is nice for one’s self-esteem.

Though talk of the male loneliness epidemic fills discussions amongst well-meaning liberals and MAGA-adjacent men alike, data shows both women and men feel equally lonely. But while this reality affects women as much as men, it’s less psychologically devastating to me as a woman. I am a sex worker because of the same economic reality that men face — I’m unable to find salaried employment despite thousands of applications and two Ivy League degrees — but my failure does not threaten my sense of myself as a woman.

The loneliness I feel is temporarily mitigated by the company of my clients. My desire for the occasional wining and dining are routinely met in a functional way by the rotation of dates that fill my calendar, to the extent that I feel little need for the presence of a man in a more sustained way. I sometimes wonder whether my work sacrifices a future desire I may one day have.

I sometimes wonder whether or not I truly leave my clients better off. When the date is done, it’s rare that I stay in touch with most of the men I’ve seen. Conor is an exception, but when I ask him what the main benefit of having me around is, he takes longer than is comfortable for either of us to answer. He laughs before saying “I think you are funny…but you did make me want a real girlfriend more than ever. What if I had spent the thousands I’m spending now on going out and dating?” 

It’s a tension both clients and providers struggle with, helping men feel supported enough to go out into the world and date, while also reckoning with the reality that dating is hard, offers no guarantees, and may, in some respects, be more expensive than a sex worker. And though sex work can ease loneliness, it doesn’t change the structural conditions that cause it in the first place.

Clients aren’t always truthful, even to themselves. Most of my married clients are astoundingly good at compartmentalization to an almost sociopathic precision. They tell me that seeing sex workers makes them better fathers and husbands. They block out the guilt of lying to their partners, dividing their lives in ways that can’t be healthy at the deeper levels of their psyche, I imagine. And if they can lie so easily to their wives, they can probably lie to me, too. 

They lie, as Conor puts it, “to make it not a sad-cry session, to have sex and feel good for a few minutes, before walking back out into the real world and their broken lives. If men lie to their therapists, why wouldn’t they lie to you?” Honesty could force them to confront truths about their lives or their loneliness that they come to me, in part, to avoid.

This absence of honesty is amplified by technology, the same force of alienation that drives loneliness in the first place. Intimacy is increasingly disembodied, with chatbots like Replika offering emotional connection, and with the highest-paid OnlyFans earners employing silent sex worker–ghostwriters to manage their DMs. For the first time, sex workers are alienated from the means of their own production, with the bulk of the profits falling into the hands of tech companies. 

Even if sex work can’t change the structural drivers of loneliness, it can temporarily ease it — at least more than sexting an AI chatbot. But the best girlfriend experience, the kind with therapeutic potential, would require a level of honesty that some men aren’t willing to commit to. It would also require changes that not even a sex worker can implement alone.