Interview: Rebecca Dakin

After nine years as a globe-trotting escort, Nottingham resident Rebecca Dakin has knocked it on the head and written The Girlfriend Experience, an eye-opening  autobiography about her former career. Now she’s on a special date with LeftLion and sets the record straight about her old job, while we sit there and wonder if it was a good idea to show up in that old Notts County shirt...

What made you want to become an escort?
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I left college, and I needed to earn some money fast as I was in quite a lot of debt and still living at my Mum and Dad’s. There aren’t many businesses that you can set up and run on your own with no outlay; I only spent £7 setting an advert up online. My first job made me £700 and it was a buzz; it didn’t feel like a big deal at all.

Did you realise what you were letting yourself in for?
Well, I’d been very promiscuous in my youth and didn’t really have an issue with having sex with people I didn’t know. When I looked into it further and started working, I realised it could actually be like a real date, and that people would spend quite a lot of money to take me to some really nice restaurants. I thought getting paid to eat would be pretty good.

What did your Mam and Dad think?
They were very disappointed and exasperated, but they didn’t try to talk me out of it. They just accepted that I wasn’t going to be normal like the other three children, and thought “she’ll have a go and will come back with her tail between her legs in a couple of months”. It’s not a taboo subject - my Mum’s a foodie like me, so I’d tell her about the restaurants and the hotels I went to.

How did you feel when people asked you about your job? Did you lie or sugar-coat it?
Most of the time I just told the truth, but I found it really uncomfortable. The minute you say ‘escort’, some people just think ‘prostitute’, and then I had to try and explain that there was a little more to it than that.

What’s the difference between what you did and the average one-night stand?
Well, obviously I was getting paid, but I spent quite a lot of time getting to know the person via email and phone conversations to check we were compatible, so I knew a little bit before I arranged to meet them. I always told somebody where I was going to be, who I was with and when to expect me back.

Wasn’t it a dangerous job at times?
No, because I always made sure I had my wits about me - unlike certain girls that go out and get really drunk at a weekend, wander off from their friends and sleep with a random guy. But I consider myself incredibly lucky to be unscathed after nine years of escorting; lots of other girls lose it and end up hating men and turning to drugs and alcohol. It’s not something I’d recommend for younger girls.

So what is The Girlfriend Experience?
For me, it means a hired girlfriend. It’s a bit more of an intimate encounter and doesn’t seem so much of a commercial transaction. It’s like a blind date, where I was genuinely
interested in the person I was spending the evening with.

You must have dealt with a lot of married men. Didn’t you worry about being involved in the shagging-up of a relationship?
It wasn’t all married men; probably about fifty/fifty. And no, I never felt guilty - there had to be problems in the first place for the guy to be calling me. If he was going to cheat and look elsewhere, he was going to do it no matter what. In some ways, I’ve held a lot of marriages together that would otherwise be lost through affairs; I wasn’t ringing them up all the time asking why they hadn’t called.

Most books and films on escorting are either unbelievably positive or relentlessly grim. What’s your reality?
I had some amazing experiences; I’ve travelled the world and been to hotels and restaurants that I could only ever dream of. I had a great time and met a lot of interesting people, but it’s not the same for everyone; I can only speak from my own experiences.

Did you exchange gory details with your friends?
Oh yeah! I’m a woman - we do all the nitty-gritty. A lot of my friends admire and respect me for having the balls to do what I did, they find my work stories a bit more interesting than theirs...

So why write a book?
I’d read Belle de Jour and I wasn’t impressed. It fuelled misconceptions about escorts and that it was just about men wanting sex. That wasn’t how things were for me and I wanted to set the record straight. There are many different levels of escorting; you can just have sex with men, or you can have longer dates that offer more of the companionship side of things.

Why didn’t you write it under a pseudonym?
Because I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done. And because I’ve finished doing it. I’ve closed down that chapter of my life. I found writing it very therapeutic; I tried to understand the dynamics of my family and the reasons why I went into such a job.

What kind of feedback are you getting from your former clients?
It’s been really good, actually. One said he read it with apprehension, intrigue and much fondness. The danger now is that people think they know me really well having read it. Clients I’d seen for a long time suddenly feel like they’re on a different level with me - a more personal level. On the other hand, one client has just written to me saying how disappointed he was that I hadn’t written about him…

Ever fallen for any of them?
I never fell in love with any of them. There was this one guy who was single, and we quite liked each other and met up three or four times, but it just didn’t work out. I’ve had a few guys that have fallen for me and I’ve had to stop seeing them; it’s quite a fine line. I never kept in touch with people between dates - the only contact was to arrange a date.

How above board were you? Did you pay taxes, for example?
Of course I did. I was registered as a self-employed escort, so the Inland Revenue knew exactly what I was doing for a living. It was like any other self-employed business; when I
wasn’t going out on dates, I was spending time looking for work, updating my website, and so on. I could go a couple of months without having a job - I’d get enquiries, but there wasn’t anybody that I wanted to see.

And what was the scabbiest place you were taken to?
I like Pizza Hut, don’t get me wrong - but I got taken to the one in Stratford in London and there was piss all over the floor of the toilets and it was disgusting. For a dinner date that was... yeah... not great.

The Girlfriend Experience is available in bookshops now, from John Blake Publishing.