I start out whoring for fun but not long after my eighteenth birthday graduate to whoring for profit. Which is how I meet Josh, my first and only pimp.

It’s also when I start drifting away from my straight friends until, after a couple of months, I’m earning real money doing something I’m very good at and my only friends are other whores and the pimps who live off whores.

Being with Josh helps me understand why whores need pimps. (And I don’t mean the scum who kidnap underage girls, force them into the game and hold them by violence. Instead, I’m talking about your average common-or-garden pimp who runs a stable and, as the prissy saying goes, “lives off the avails”.)

Pimps, you see, aren’t there just to find johns for whores, protect them from bad dates and take their money. It’s much more complex than that.

To oversimplify perhaps — whores need pimps because whores are women and women need to love and be loved. And it takes an exceptional straight man to love a working whore.

Most of the women in the game have low self-esteem (I was always different, of course). And unlike everyone else around — boyfriends and johns who use them and leave them — pimps are there when you need them most, always ready to sweet-talk you, flatter you, make you feel needed, wanted, desired, loved.

It’s strangely easy to believe pimp-talk. Like “honey, the other girls don’t mean a thing to me. I love you. We’ll get out of the game as soon as we have enough money and marry and have lots of lovely babies.” It’s even strangely easy to love the pimp like — at least for a while — I loved Josh.

Pimps don’t have to buy a whore’s love, like johns do. The women give it eagerly, willingly. They’re women and when you’re in the game there’s nobody but pimps to love and be loved by.

Every woman needs somebody, even if that somebody is an immoral, lying, exploitive, sometimes violent scumbag like Josh, from so very long ago.
 
 
(Samantha Jones is the nom de plume of a Canadian TV journalist who’s published her erotic memoir “My Life In The Great Sexual Window”, available at www.lulu.com and Amazon.)