'When are you coming to my town?'
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I need to have a gripe about touring.
Touring sex workers are now a well established part of the sex industry. To the point where, it’s now become expected.
Now, touring has it’s upsides. I’m a bit of a tourist - I like to see new places and have new experiences. Touring is a way I can visit new towns and cities and meet new clients that I otherwise wouldn’t. I do think it’s best to tour to places one likes, or at least are open to visiting for the first time to explore. I collect things, so it’s always nice to get a new thingamabob from a new place and to do a touristy thing or two and check out the brunch spots. That’s the leisurely part of touring.
The thing is though, I love Brisbane. This is my home, and I love my house and I have great clients here. I know my expenses week to week and even in a quiet week, I can continue on without stressing too much about overheads. They’re high, but they’re not unmanageable.
Touring, is so expensive. Whilst having to maintain those overheads back home while I’m away, I’m also having to manage an additional 1-2.5k for flights and accommodation. That’s potentially an additional 4 or 5 hours work for me just to break even on the tour itself, so I have to be pretty sure that I can be busy for a tour. And, tours just aren’t always successful. I’ve had tour days with no bookings at all. New town - new time wasters too. I usually get a couple of clients willing to prebook with a deposit before I leave but the rest will be shorter notice. And that’s okay, I don’t mind same-day usually, but it’s a gamble to hope they will come through. Leaving home with only a few hundred dollars towards expenses is still a massive risk. Sometimes it has been worth it, and other times I came home with my tail between my legs and bills still to pay.
All this for what? The opportunity to brunch in a new town is nice, but not if it potentially loses me thousands of dollars. And yet the expectation keeps rising, and the willingness to pay deposits is still rare. I receive txts every single day asking me when I’m touring to their city, but they soon disappear as soon as I actually announce a tour. The thing is, I believe some clients like the idea of someone, more than they genuinely are willing to see them. ‘Come to my town so I can maybe make up my mind at the time if I want to see you’, simply isn’t fair or good enough. To break even in sex work is a fail, and to run at a loss would be heart breaking. It’s such a risk to take, when I could simply stay in the comfort of beautiful Brisbane and see my lovely regulars. And yet, even regulars fall under the seduction of the time pressure touring girls bring. Limited time availability ‘brings all the boys to the yard’ and so often men will try to book touring girls instead of their local girls.
Which brings about a new phenomenon. Touring girls who never leave home. Recognising that touring girls can be busier than local girls, local girls are now advertising ‘tours’ in their home town, to create interest from the local men who seem to normally bypass them. And I think it’s a shame when the industry seems to only recognise touring ladies as viable. We all want tours to be successful, but I don’t think ladies should feel they now HAVE to 'tour' to make profit, to pretend to leave home to get interest. And then to really tour, to gamble regular income for a potential loss, to make enough to do more than get by.
Touring works in cycles. You save enough to risk a tour, then if it works, then that will fund your next tour and so on and so forth. Getting on and off that cycle can be really difficult for a lot of people. I’m exposed a lot to attitudes that escorts make a lot of money, when the reality is, often, we don’t. We are exposed a lot to self-gifting (showing off own purchases as gifts, own dinners as dinner dates) etc by people trying to create an illusion of their success to mask quiet patches. And everyone has their way of marketing and that’s fine, but it can create an attitude amongst clients who don’t care to pay deposits or prebook, because we’re seemingly swimming in money anyway so theirs doesn’t matter. It does. Every single booking makes a difference between loss and profit, and we aren’t running charities here. I know many ladies are in a position and market segment where they can demand deposits from ALL clients before touring, and that’s a nice privilege to have. But the vast number of us in our own niches wouldn’t be able to tour on that policy and I wish the shamey attitude of some ladies would cease and they’d recognise their own privilege. We don’t deserve to be mucked around by clients just because we didn’t take a deposit, sometimes we can’t afford to lose the booking over a technicality. Do we choose a stubborn approach or our bottom line? In my ideal world, all clients would book with deposits, and many do - but I would simply lose a lot of work on that policy, and I’m here to make profit after all. Truth is though, everybody loses without deposits - because I won’t tour at all now, if I don’t get enough of them.
So I guess I just wanted to get that off my chest. I’m increasingly grouchy at the number of demands to tour cities, only for them to fall silent when it’s announced. I won’t be touring much going forward, because of the risk, time and effort involved, when Brisbane is such a beautiful place to stay and live, and the clients are awesome.
I guess the lesson here is guys, if you’d like a lady to tour - commit. Make a decent deposit. Or fly her to you. But please, if you aren’t willing to commit, don’t bother texting her to ask her to tour to your town. Go see your local ladies instead and help them make rent.
** for more, please see my blog on my own website **
