The Johns Behind the Pros

Like JJ, johns can come from all walks of life.

People can knock prostitutes all they want, but at the end of the day, the world wouldn't have hos if there weren't a line of men ready and willing to pay for them. It honestly baffles me why anyone would want to pay indiscriminate amounts of money to get down to business with a stranger who has sex with multiple random people for a living. First of all, I can just imagine the act being so incredibly uncomfortable and non-intimate. Secondly, there are just too many people in this world willing to give it out for free, so why pay for it?

But hey, that's not my place to judge or question. After all, I personally have a friend who is willing to pay for sex, and if there is any one person in the world who should be the least likely to ever have to resort to doing such a thing, it would be him.

This particular person is my boyfriend's close friend from high school; they were both on the same basketball team for two years. While my boyfriend ended up taking a different route in the form of firefighting, this person - let's call him JJ - ended up being drafted into the NBA. He went from being a normal, almost typical, L.A. athlete from a working class home to being a multimillionaire within a matter of moments. He had so much money he literally didn't know what to do with it. One time, we all went to Cheesecake Factory together, and he bought enough food for us to take home leftovers for lunch and dinner for an entire week.

I'm drifting from the topic, but my end point is that he became so wealthy he began to fear being trapped by women. He felt that every female was out to get his money, whether that was through charming him into lavishing expensive gifts on them or through seducing him into being careless enough to have unprotected sex. That was how his interest in prostitutes all began.

The most recent time it happened, I heard through my boyfriend that a well-known hip hop video model had struck up a conversation with JJ over Twitter. Within a week, he had flown her and a couple of her girlfriends out to one of his games and paid for their hotel accommodations and anything else they needed during their stay. The entire trip cost him upwards of $20,000, and the entire time they were there, she repaid him with sexual favors. It was an unconventional method of prostitution, but it was an exchange of money for sex nonetheless. The $20,000 was no biggie for JJ, especially since to him, it was the price he felt he needed to pay to spend a weekend with someone without constantly having to worry about the most minor things, like if she had tampered with the condom or if she would go and tell the whole world about his weekend with her.

You would think that johns are people who either can't get women or who are bored of their mundane married lives, but JJ is neither of the two. He is completely single, and every time he goes to parties or clubs, women would be trying to get his attention and go home with him instead of vice versa. He's good-looking, tall, athletic, and super rich - nothing like what we imagine the typical john to be. As with prostitutes, much of what we know about johns comes from what is shown in the media. However, in the case of JJ, we are reminded that we should never judge a book by its cover. Just how johns can be of all kinds of different family backgrounds, racial compositions, and socioeconomic statuses, prostitutes are the exact same way. Like I mentioned, the world of prostitution goes far beyond the crack whore and drive-up john you may have occasionally seen on the outskirts of your town.