Here's the second article from the Kiev Post:
Women tell their side of the sex-tourism story
A Siemens M55 cell phone rings, and a pleasant young woman excuses herself.
“Yes my name is Lola, and yes it’s my real photo,” she answers in her heavily Russian-accented English.
“I do a professional massage and then continue with erotic body massage until you’re completely relaxed. It’s $50 for an hour and 20 minutes,” the woman tells the person on the other end of the line.
She pauses before replying to the next question. “No, I don’t do sex. Sorry, I just don’t.”
For Inna Kasyanenko, 22, this is a common conversation. She owns a small massage agency in Kyiv, which, she claims, does not offer anything beyond erotic body massage. Yet most of the calls that she gets almost every 15 minutes are from foreigners looking for sex.
“People sound very surprised when I tell them we only do massage,” says Kasyanenko, who advertises her services in the Kyiv Post. “They assume it’s the same as escort.”
Kasyanenko says that recently more escort agencies have started hiding their services behind massage ads because of crackdowns from the police.
But when Kasyanenko started her business five months ago and employed five girls who held certificates earned from taking massage courses, she was cautious about not going beyond the law. The most that her girls can do, she says, is help a client relax.
“I did not want to take risks,” explains Kasyanenko. “I may make half of the amount that escort agencies do, but I am happy with it.”
Dirty money
The sex business is risky and illegal in Ukraine, but it’s also profitable, says Kasyanenko.
According to her, the average costs for escort services in Kyiv are $70 per hour, $100 for two hours, and $250 for the night. Services can range from the generally cheaper so-called “bordellos” – private apartments in the city’s center with 20-25 girls to choose from - to “freelance” girls at the city’s night clubs who usually charge twice that price.
On average, Kasyanenko guesses, an owner of an escort agency in Kyiv with five to 10 girls working for her could make up to $10,000 per month. That’s the amount that a senior analyst at an investment bank in Great Britain makes after taxes.
When a Post reporter asked about a job at the Kyiv-based GIA Model Agency, which is one of the most “well-regarded” escort services among the frequenters of the Web forum at internationalsexguide.com, she learned that a girl can make up to $120 a day by taking three one-hour calls.
Considering that an average Ukrainian teacher from the countryside makes that much in a month, the intense competition to become an escort isn’t surprising.
“Lots and lots of girls are ringing in, asking for a job, and competition is fierce,” says the woman who answers the phone at a local escort agency.
The same woman, who wished to stay anonymous, told the Post that nine out of 10 girls who work in her agency come from the provinces, seeking easy money in the capital. For most, escorting is a full-time job.
“On the other hand, turnover of the girls is very high, too,” the woman said. Girls either quit after being treated badly or get kicked out for breaking business rules.
“It’s very difficult to stay completely honest and loyal to your employer when you’re in this business,” the same woman said. Some of the “mistakes” girls make include giving out phone numbers to clients - something that is not allowed in an escort agency - or landing a steady boyfriend. The job can be tougher if the agency’s owner is a difficult person to deal with.
“I think they’re all a bit out of their minds,” said the woman about the people in charge of Kyiv’s sex industry.
DIY
Lyuba, 33, has been a prostitute for six years now. She’s unaffiliated with any agency because she didn’t want to hand over any of her hard-earned money to anybody, and didn’t want to deal with an unpredictable pimp.
“Now, at least, I can pay my bills,” Lyuba says. Her current job can bring her, if she is lucky, $100 a day. But it pays her back in loneliness, disease, and depression, she said. Neither especially pretty nor bad-looking, Lyuba has tired, cynical eyes. “I couldn’t care less for my life now; I just don’t care,” she says.
Lyuba attracts mostly foreign clients through the small ad she runs in the Kyiv Post. She says she wouldn’t dare to work with locals.
“Foreigners, as a rule, treat us more like gentlemen, and Russians and Ukrainian can even be dangerous. You never know what to expect from them,” says Lyuba.
Sometimes, if they get along well, Lyuba shows her foreign clients around the city during the day.
“You’d be surprised, but these foreign men need communication with somebody more than anything else. They sound so lonely,” she says. Her clients are mostly businessmen coming to Ukraine for work reasons.
This summer Lyuba has also gotten more calls from men she identifies as sex tourists. They were just rude, she says.
“One of these men even ordered me: ‘Speak English, please!’ when I answered the call in Russian,” recalls Lyuba, laughing. “He probably thought it was a requirement of my job to speak English.” Lyuba speaks little English, but that doesn’t interfere with her work that much.
The really annoying thing about her job, she says, is that she always has to stay within a kilometer of her house, because she never knows when a client will call.
“My mom wanted me to come home, which is in Ternopil oblast, but I didn’t go,” tells Lyuba. “What if a client called? If I miss one, I may not get the next call in a week’s time.”
In good times, Lyuba says, she gets about 10 clients a month.
For Nataliya, 19, who also works independently, sleeping with foreign men is just a way to make extra money, which, she says, she saves to be able “to move abroad some time in the future.” It’s also a way to meet people whom “I wouldn’t have a chance to meet if I were a teacher,” she says.
While Nataliya has noticed there have been “lots of sex tourists” in Kyiv recently, she says her regular clients are actually expatriates, whose photos she often sees in the pages of the Kyiv Post.
“One day, I will write a book on sex in Kyiv,” Nataliya promises.