Transcription
I spent six years as a high-class escort, having sex with powerful men for money. And while you might think that means I slept my way to their respect, you would be wrong. The men I spent time with did not just have sex with me and then asked me to leave. They took me on dinner dates. They flew me to private hotel openings. They bought me beautiful, thoughtful gifts. And they treated me with care and high regard.
Before these things happened to me, I believed that rich, powerful men decided how to treat women based on how they looked. Now, I know that's not true because I started noticing the same patterns show up again and again with men I spent time with intimately, then later with men I worked alongside in the corporate world, and then even later as a founder sitting next to businessmen almost twice my age, making decisions together.
The women who command respect from men instantly do a few specific things most women don't. And once you understand them, men start responding to you very differently. Let's start with the first one.
Number one, don't make yourself a victim. This one is uncomfortable, especially right now, and you might not like to hear it. There is a strong cultural narrative that men are the enemy, that society is purely patriarchal, that men as a group are oppressors. And I understand where that narrative comes from. There are men who are abusive, who misuse power, and who are egotistical. And there absolutely has been a history of imbalance between the sexes, which goes in both directions in different ways. But focusing on those things, fixating on it, letting it fill you up with rage and resentment, allowing yourself to become a victim to history or your circumstances does not serve you.
If you decide that men as a category are bad, you start showing up guarded, suspicious, maybe even aggressive. And men feel that. Imagine how it would feel for you walking into a room where someone has already decided that you are before you've even spoken. Would you feel generous toward them? Would you feel open with them? Probably not.
The most common thing I experienced as an escort alone in a room with a man was his desire to take care of me. Men of all kinds would go out of their way to please me first, to make sure I was comfortable, to check that I was okay. Now, they didn't need to do that. They were paying me to be there. Yet, they still wanted to. When that was a rich man, it would extend to things like ordering me the best room service and spoiling me with designer gifts. Not because they were better people, but because they had more capacity and more resources. When you have more, you just have more to give.
Now, I was really lucky growing up. I had very, very positive male relationships. I've got five amazing brothers and a dad that I'm really close to. So, I had early evidence that men could be safe. I can only imagine how difficult it would be as a woman if you grew up without that. However, I've also had some extremely negative experiences with some men. When I was 19, I had a boyfriend who basically stalked me. He tried to blackmail me with a sex tape, and I had to put a restraining order on him. I once had a regular client who I knew and who I felt I trusted that scammed me out of over $2,000 by reversing a charge after I provided a sexual service. I've been cheated on and lied to by men in my personal life. So, this is not coming from naivity.
After those experiences though, I had a choice to make. I could let the actions of a small number of men define my perception of all men and permanently damage my relationship with them, which in reality just means the worst men win twice. once in the moment and again by shaping how you see the world. Or I could take control of the narrative. Acknowledge that some people are terrible, men and women, and choose a perspective that actually serves me, which is this. I am not a victim and I judge individuals based on their own actions, not on what someone else did before them. That is a choice.
Now, if you didn't grow up with positive male role models or your experiences with men have been mostly negative, of course, this is harder because you don't have many positive reference points to draw from. So what can you do? You can borrow evidence. You can actively look for examples of the kind of men you want to experience. So that might mean asking your girlfriends, observing real positive relationships, even looking online. You can also think about men who have shaped history. Think about men like Nelson Mandela or the Buddha or the Dalai Lama. Then use that as your evidence to reshape your beliefs. The brain has a confirmation bias and when you start believing differently, your experiences will be different. And then those new experiences will further fuel your positive beliefs. And this becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Repeatedly, the women I work with who hold men in high esteem have correspondingly better and more respectful experiences with men. But that cannot happen if you engage with them as a victim of all negative male behavior ever.
Number two is develop real communication skills. So at 18, I worked in a brothel. On any given day, I might come into contact with 5, 10, sometimes 15 men. All different kinds of guys. Yeah. So, rich men, poor men, married, single, young, old, everyone. All types of men go to brothels, just so you know. Then at 25, I was in the corporate world, and I dealt almost exclusively with doctors, lawyers, accountants, and private equity guys who were often double my age. Now, even though I was in a very different setting, wearing clothes and doing different things, the primary skill set I used to move forward in both scenarios with both types of men were communication skills. Funnily enough, I found myself leveraging the very same communication skills I learned in a brothel in the corporate world.
So, what are communication skills? Because it's kind of vague, right? Well, it's really just about being adept at reading people, listening properly, and responding in a way that moves an interaction forward constructively based on what forward means in any given particular context. So, when I was in a brothel, I would have to try and win the business of a client by being picked amongst 20 other women. As a high-class escort, I needed to put wealthy men instantly at ease. And when doing business with doctors, I had to build trust and get their attention very quickly so I could get enough time with them to pitch buying their business, which is what I was doing at the time. Persuasion, comfortability, trust building. These are all things communication skills help you to do. And the great thing about it is these are learnable skills. Anyone can develop them. I was forced to develop them in a brothel because if I couldn't communicate persuasively, I wouldn't make any money to pay my bills. Then when I was 25 and transitioned to the corporate world, my business mentor at the time, Dan Pena, told me that the most successful people he worked with were master communicators and that they all went to this thing called Toast Masters, which is an almost entirely free organization you can join to teach you public speaking and communication skills. I did it for 18 months. Now, these days, there are oodles of self-help courses you can take, books you can read, and podcasts you can listen to about becoming a better communicator. All you have to do is do one of them. I personally recommend Toast Masters because it's real world experience which is how you get the best at anything. But doing something, doing any of them is better than doing nothing. Communication is not about being charming. It's not about having witty lines. It's actually mostly about listening and creating mutual understanding. When a man feels understood by you, not flattered, not manipulated, but actually understood, respect follows naturally.
Number three is confidence. Actual confidence, not faked confidence. All of us women have heard how important it is to be confident around men if we want to be respected because otherwise they're going to sense our weakness and exploit it and manipulate it and we're going to be taken advantage of for all eternity ever. Look, let's put men aside for just a moment and then we'll put them back in shortly. Confidence is important in many situations and context in life. So, before we obsess about getting confident around men specifically, ironic, I know, because it's the topic of this video, let's talk about why we should care about getting confident at all.
If you are going for a job interview with a woman, I know because I interview women all the time to work in my company and I'm a woman. I can tell you being confident will serve you and it will make it more likely that you'll get the job, which is good for you. The reason is when you encounter someone who is confident, you subconsciously assume they have value to give because otherwise they would have nothing to be confident about. Whether you like to admit it or not, most exchanges in life operate off the basis of a value exchange. So, when you hang out with a girlfriend, you're exchanging companionship or maybe emotional support. When you go to a hairdresser, you exchange money for a skill set. When a man spends time with you, an exchange is occurring relative to the situation. The more value you have to offer, the more there is for the other person to gain, and so they will try harder to offer you value so that they can get your value in an ethical scenario with a good person, which I believe most people are. What is happening here is a mutual exchange of benefit. So being confident is not just about ensuring men don't walk all over you. It is about getting more out of all your interactions in life.
The mistake most people make with confidence once they conclude that being confident is in fact valuable is they just try to learn how to be confident as opposed to understanding that confidence does not need to be faked or forced because it is a byproduct of competence. Now competence means you're good at something. Okay? So to be competent means to be good. You'll naturally feel confident when you are good at something. Think about an area of life you already feel confident in. It might be your knowledge of the best skin products and makeup. Or maybe it's restaurants. You might be really confident in recommending and suggesting good restaurants. Is that because you learned confidence and have now applied it to that subject matter? No. It's because you probably are very knowledgeable about skin care and makeup and you probably genuinely know the best restaurants for every taste and mood. And why are you good at those things? Because you would have spent countless hours learning about those specific topics. You have genuinely become a master at them. You are competent in those particular areas. Therefore, confidence naturally ensues.
So, the trick, the hack, if you will, to being confident about anything is just to get good at the thing. And how do you get good at the thing? Well, you do it more times. Repetition and inputs. You spend more time doing the thing you want to be competent at and confident about. That is it. The problem with most people is they want to shortcut their way to confidence about everything as opposed to accepting the reality they must in fact work hard and earn confidence in a particular thing by putting in the time to get good at it.
Now, let's put men back in the picture. I became confident with men after spending hundreds of hours with them. That's it. After being with almost every type of man under the sun in professional contexts, sexually and nonsexually, I felt confident with men. That confidence changed how I behaved and acted. It was obvious I was confident and so men naturally realized I had value to give that they wanted to exchange value for and it changed their behavior toward me. The same has happened with women by the way. The more value I've been able to give to women, the better they have treated me too.
So don't fixate on sex. This is not about sex as in the gender or the act itself. I spent 5 years in the corporate world and didn't have sex with anyone. I had men in private equity invest over $10 million in my business. They wouldn't have done that if they didn't respect me. They wouldn't have respected me if I wasn't confident. And I wouldn't have been confident if I didn't have value to give.
Now, there are many ways to get competent at being around men. You do not have to become a high-class escort for 6 years like I did. It certainly is one way, but it's not necessary because what I also did was I had male friends. As I've shared, I've got a lot of brothers. I've read a lot of books about men for men because I'm genuinely interested in them. There was this period in my escorting career where I really immersed myself in the world of men because it was my profession and I wanted to make a lot of money. I was chasing extreme mastery and so I went all in, which worked incredibly well. But there are different levels to this like all things. So maybe it's just that you want to get 10% more confident with men so that they treat you better. Okay. Well, how can you just take 10% more action? How about you become someone who strikes up conversation with people you don't know, men and women. If you do that every day for a month, if you set it as a challenge for yourself, I guarantee you, you will be more confident talking to men at the end of those 30 days. Or another thing you might do is join a group or start a hobby where you know men will be. You can simply get repeated exposure by being around them. But make sure when you're there, you actually go up to the men and talk to them. Don't expect them to just come up to you and talk to you because real confidence is not handed to you or performed. It is earned. Which is great because if something is attained by earning it, all you have to do is take the action and put in the work. You have total control over the outcome.
Number four is care more about what you can do for them. Wealthy men in particular have people wanting things from them constantly. Their money, their time, their advice, their stuff. My wealthiest clients would sometimes get 15 calls in an evening with everybody wanting something. Very rarely are they appreciated for just being human. And very rarely does someone care about what they need.
When I was working, I was paid for my time, but I always gave above and beyond what the transaction required. Not sexually. Well, sometimes sexually, but always in other ways, too. So, I would buy my client's gifts, which in my line of work is almost unheard of. Most escorts just want it to be the other way around. They expect the client to pay for everything. Sometimes they don't even want to pay for their own Uber to go meet the client, let alone buy him something. I would remember details, things they said they liked, like favorite outfits or a favorite drink. I went out of my way to do things that made their lives easier. Sometimes that was rescheduling at short notice or traveling further to meet them than originally planned.
Most women though who ask me about attracting men or gaining their respect will lead with, "How do I make them treat me this way? How do I command their behavior? How do I get more tips? How do I get guys to buy me expensive presents?" And these are just so the wrong questions to be asking. The women who actually succeed in getting this type of attention and treatment, they ask different questions. They say, "What do the type of men I want to be around need? What problems do they have? How can I solve these problems? What can I do to be valuable and improve their lives? And how can I be of service to them?"
Now, when I say be of service, I don't mean as a pushover or as a sex toy or as a slave. I mean as a value provider. It is an honor and a privilege to be in service to others when it is chosen. When I first started in the sex industry at 18, I just wanted money and I wanted to feel beautiful because I had never had either before. But then a few months in, when that novelty wore off, I started noticing how lonely many of the men I was spending time with were and I realized what a privilege it was to give them the gift of human intimacy. And that realization changed everything for me. The work became more meaningful and I started getting treated better and better. And this is just the natural law of reciprocity. It's the value exchange I spoke about in reference to confidence. When you do more for others because you genuinely want to, people genuinely want to do more for you. When you seek to give first, you naturally receive.
I don't mean go buy gifts for people if that's outside your means. It's just about doing what you can that is valuable for someone else which is within your capability rather than fixating what someone can do for you. What follows is that if you treat other people, if you treat men with respect first, it will be so much more likely that you will receive respect in return. The beautiful thing about that is if you want men to respect you instantly, a vast level of control already lies in your hands. Stop seeing yourself as a victim. Develop real communication skills. Build competence through repetition. And focus more on what you can give than what you can get. Respect is not demanded. It is evoked. And when you change how you show up internally, men respond differently. Not because you changed them, but because you changed yourself. That is real power. And that is all for this video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.