Revealing insights into men as I, a 41-year-old mother, attempted to establish a safe and ethical brothel for women

‘Hey u avail?? Wats (sic) the cheapest deal you can do for me please?’

My first day of running a feminist escort agency, I’m too scared to answer the phone but it buzzes as I look at it.

I can’t help but remind myself, ‘I’m not operating a brothel. I’m a mother taking care of a blended family that comprises six children.’ In the evenings, my time is spent cooking spaghetti and reading bedtime stories. Mornings are dedicated to pouring cereal and preparing lunchboxes. Despite my domestic responsibilities, my days are interrupted by messages such as these:

‘Hey do you have toys or suck without a condom thanxx’.

Is that how they talk? I wonder, when they don’t have to pretend? I feel like I have Google Translate for the way men actually think.

Setting my phone aside, I take a moment to collect myself. The calendar reads January 2017. At 41 years old, I find myself in New Zealand, managing a feminist escort service located in the northern part of the country, specifically in a quaint town called Whangarei.

Seven years back, I made the impulsive decision to relocate here with my then-spouse, Peter, and documented our country life on a small farm in a book. However, as my marriage started to crumble, I realized that I wished to remain in this place but required a stable income source.

Originally I thought I’d write another book, this time about prostitution in New Zealand – because this is the only country in the world where it’s totally legal, and that seemed interesting to me – but then…

Instead of writing about it, why not do it? Not sleep with men, but be a Madam myself?

I thought it would be fun, and a little transgressive, and a way to make money. But it would also be a kind of experiment, for my brothel would be entirely ethical, with the women at the centre of everything I did.

I would flip the male-female power dynamic, making them play by our rules. And our rules would be unbreakable.

All bookings would be by appointment only – we would have no demeaning line-ups where men took their pick from a parade of skimpily-clad women. A woman would be able to withdraw her consent at any time and we would pay her anyway.

Most radically, we would offer our workers free childcare, free clothes (and other tools of the trade) and $150 an hour (half of the $300 we would charge the men, with the house taking the other 50 per cent). These were much better pay and conditions than anything else a young woman could find in rural Whangārei.

And why shouldn’t they make money from sex? The way I saw it, society always wanted to limit young women’s options. Take what they’ve got. Make them have sex for free, and with only one man. But their sexuality does have a monetary value – a bright, shiny coin they were born with – and since every man wants it, why shouldn’t they sell it? Isn’t that supply and demand?

So I started to research, scrolling through sex worker forums while bathing the kids.

I took a trip to Auckland and visited a brothel, forcing myself to overcome a lifetime of good-girl conditioning.

I grew up in open-minded San Francisco, but my childhood world was one of pony clubs and private schooling. Up until that point, I’d thought of sex workers as ‘other’, denizens of an underworld I’d never seen, and yet here I was asking them about their working day. Instead of playing it cool, I was self-conscious and nervous.

But you know what? Those girls were just . . . girls. We chatted for an hour, and by the time I left, it seemed obvious that sex work was . . . well, work. Sometimes they loved it, and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they didn’t feel like getting dressed to come into the office.

I loaded up on free condoms from the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective in Auckland. (‘You’ll need four kinds, at least, but never ever let a client pick one out. He’ll go extra-large – guaranteed. I don’t care if it’s like this,’ said my NZPC contact, Diana, holding her fingers three centimetres apart, ‘he thinks his winky’s a masterpiece.’)

I found myself a co-Madam in bubbly, warm Karli, who owned a sex shop, and she found us premises in a motel whose landlord was prepared to turn a blind eye. When it came to a name for our new enterprise, we chose The Bach – to rhyme with ‘catch’ – which is what New Zealanders call a beach house. That was the vibe we wanted our brothel to have – somewhere clients could come to leave their worries behind.

Was I naïve? I did my homework. I spoke to plenty of women who knew the industry inside out, but when they told me ‘this will make you hate men’, I ignored them.

Instead, Karli and I turned one of the eight motel units into an office and creche and a second – Room 6 – into our very first ‘service room’, furnishing it with cute little cushions in teal and bright lemon yellow. We put strings of twinkling lights in glass vases, and set up the bathroom with fresh orchids and mouthwash.

I set up The Bach – my Beach House – then jumped into the water with a splash and a giggle, thinking I’d go for a swim. Little did I know I’d be paddling the surface of the ocean, above an unknowable, dismal abyss.

In the early days, our biggest problem wasn’t the grisly texts. It was finding women to work for us. When we tried to reach local women via Facebook ads, we kept getting thrown off the site, not because the job was in prostitution, but because the hourly rate we were promising was so high and we were flagged as an online scam.

Amber was our first – a friend of Karli’s who was just back from a spell in Australia and had been in the business before.

‘I started off selling my virginity online,’ she said when she came to see us.

‘And that worked?’ I asked her, incredulous.

‘Yep,’ she smiled. ‘All seven times! Then the guys started recognising me, so I moved away. But I got my kids taken off me, back in Perth.’

Aha. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What happened?’

‘I’ll be straight up with you. It was drugs.’ She pulled a cigarette from her handbag, then lit it and took a long drag. ‘But I’m getting my life sorted now. I want to save up, get a place, get my kids back.’

‘What sort of drugs was it?’ I asked.

‘P,’ she said, the name for methamphetamine, or crystal meth, in New Zealand. ‘But I haven’t done it in ages, I swear!’

She sounded sincere. And she’s getting her life back together, I thought. We can help her. I believe in this work and that she has a right to do it.

With Amber onboard, we were up and running.

Haley came next, a former cam girl who did sensual massage, but not ‘full service’. Then knockout Grace, with legs up to her ears; Queen Bee, with a swirling Māori chin tattoo; Ruby, who was plus-size with a mane of flirty, corkscrew curls. Then Sabra, in her early 20s, a single mum paying her way through nursing school.

And Piper, just 19, barely five feet tall, also a single mum to a three year old, who’d been kicked out of school when she got pregnant and said she could make in one hour at The Bach what she could earn in ten at any other local job. With her big brown eyes and rosebud mouth, Piper was immediately popular.

(‘Men love me ‘cause I’m little and cute,’ she once told me. ‘I do the sweet and innocent thing, and they eat it up. Ha! What idiots.’)

With all of these girls, in a couple of months we were making $700 one night, $870 the next, and Karli and I were swiftly learning the most important rule was never to give an inch to a client. In one area in particular, they were nothing if not persistent…

Is it $140 for a 30min massage? How about a discount?

No, our prices are fixed and we’re worth every penny.

What’re the chances of seeing Piper for $100? Zero.

I can get $200 GFE [Girlfriend Experience] for an hour with an extra thrown in. Can you match or beat that?’

Karli scoffed. ‘You don’t go to the supermarket and ask for a discount. You don’t service your car on tick. But they think because we’re women, we’re timid and weak.’

We were not. And yet I couldn’t ignore the fact some of the girls had deep emotional wounds.

When Amber went AWOL just a few months after she started at The Bach, it was clear she had started to use drugs again. Grace swiftly followed – she too, it turned out, was a former drug user who’d relapsed.

For the first time, I wobbled. Were we giving them a way out by helping them earn money, or forcing them back into lives of addiction? Did we do this? I asked myself. Did we get them back onto drugs?

With Peter gone, my new boyfriend Patrice moved in, and so did the children from his first marriage. Together we had half a dozen kids at home, including my children by Peter – six-year-old Miranda and eight-year-old Silas. But life at The Bach was so busy, I was finding it hard to carve out time with them.

One evening, I came home to find her in tears, cross with me because I was never there.

I sat down on the bed beside her.

‘You know I have a business, right?’

‘Yes, Mama, and it’s called The Bach, but what is it? That girl Aimee at school says it’s a sex club where people do sexing, and—’

‘Hey.’ I put my arm around her. ‘I don’t know what Aimee heard from her parents, but The Bach is an escort agency.’

‘Well, what’s that?’ Miranda sniffled.

‘It’s a place where ladies do dress-up, and they make lots of money, and they give men kisses and cuddles.’

‘It is?’ Miranda wiped at her eyes. ‘That’s not so bad.’

‘No.’ I gave her a hug. ‘No, it’s not.’

And as the money came in and this business I had begun from scratch began to feed not just the girls’ families but my own, I would sip a glass of wine at night and search my heart for shame or regret and find none. It just wasn’t there.

Until Piper got assaulted.

It happened six months after we opened, on one of my nights off. I was at home when Karli phoned, out of breath, like she couldn’t take in enough air.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘What happened?’

‘Ah . . . it’s really bad. This guy texted and he wanted the youngest and the thinnest, so of course I said Piper. He’s real cute and young, and he wanted the Porn Star Experience . . . but then he got rough, and she asked to stop – but he wouldn’t! He just . . . ’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘He – held her down, even when she said no, then he finished and jumped in the shower. That’s when she called me. I tried to get up there right away, but I had four kids in the creche, and it took me a minute, and—’

‘He can’t do that,’ I said. ‘Call the cops.’

That motherf***r, I thought. We were trying to provide a safe place.

But it wasn’t safe, was it?

I failed.

Not long after, the police picked the man up and put him in a cell. ‘When they nabbed him,’ Karli told me later, ‘he was crouching in the bushes, and he came out whingeing about how he paid for it. You know what the lady cop said? “You didn’t pay to force a woman, mate.”’

I felt sick. All those people who think we’re dirty, who say sex work is all about violence and harm. Are they right?

Piper’s violation made me question it all. If she had stopped working at that point, I might have shut everything down. I couldn’t feed my family with money we earned from her trauma.

But after a week, she insisted on coming back to The Bach.

‘It’s my right to earn money,’ she said on the phone. ‘And do what I want with my body. Screw that guy, he’s got no say.’

I hired a self-defence instructor, and I installed wireless alarms by the beds. We employed a proper childminder so that Karli and I wouldn’t be distracted by children if anything similar ever happened again.

Running The Bach didn’t make me hate men, but I was constantly wary of their needs and their lies. We had hundreds, and eventually thousands, of clients at The Bach, some rude and disgusting, but many simply sad and lonely. The ones who were overtly awful were easy to vet – we told them to behave, and if they didn’t, we banned them.

The trickier clients were the crafty ones, like the man who assaulted Piper, who knew how to hide their hatred for women. They’d start out polite, sometimes deferential – until we set a hard limit, or we told them ‘no’. Then they’d let loose with what they really thought: we were ‘uppity bitches’, ‘fat cows’, ‘filthy whores’. And that was emotionally exhausting.

As time went on, I did wonder how feminist my business could be. Was I helping women to earn in my brothel, or was I pressuring them into degrading themselves? Over the three years that I ran The Bach, many girls came and went. Some left as soon as they’d paid their way through school; some – like Sadie who worked in corporate law and could easily pay all her bills – just liked to make money and were saving for a big-ticket holiday or car.

But for many there was no route out. Their lives had been derailed by single parenthood, and the limited options in their little town. ‘This is how they end up at The Bach,’ I’d tell Patrice. ‘They’re almost all single mothers. They got pregnant too early with some guy who left them. Then they have to do sex work just to survive.’

I still believe that consenting adults should have the right to do sex work. Would free university or jobs training be better options? Maybe, but no one is offering that. And it’s not up to anyone else to decide.

Often people ask me – with a kind of relish – but what about your daughter? ‘How would you feel if she sold her body for money?’

And I tell them that sex workers don’t sell their bodies. They consent to sell sexual services, and they sell their time. And once we get past that part, my answer is simple: ‘If that’s what Miranda wants to do when she’s an adult, and she can consent, then she should have the right to do sex work. Everyone should. I just hope she can find a safe place to do it.’

After all, I had demeaning jobs in my twenties. Didn’t you? For chopping onions, folding T-shirts, and scrubbing other people’s toilets, I rarely made more than $8 an hour.

During those three years of The Bach, one man – the one who attacked Piper – refused to stop having rough sex when he was repeatedly told ‘No.’ That experience was horrible, and I won’t try to deny it. In September 2018, he was finally put on trial for sexual violation, but was found innocent. Depressingly, the detective thought the fact the jury was majority male had something to do with that verdict.

But I’d ask you not to use it as some kind of proof that sex work is inherently violent. Consider: during that same span of time, three of our women were raped in their private lives. One was a Tinder date; one was a flatmate; one was some scumbag who slipped the girl drugs. None of those men knew their victims were sex workers – not one. They were safer coming to work than they were in their own homes and their own private lives.

Three years after those first texts came through and I eventually plucked up the courage to answer them, the lease on the motel came up and I decided to sell the business. I was bored, and I’d seen what rural life could do to teens who made the wrong decisions. I wanted my kids to have the opportunities they’d only get in the city.

Then the pandemic arrived – and The Bach couldn’t re-open again anyway. It still hasn’t.

Now there’s a successful TV adaptation of my story – called Madam, starring Rachel Griffiths from Muriel’s Wedding – or at least a fictionalized version of what happened. It’s won awards and people love it – but it can’t possibly capture all the complexity of the smart, kind and brave women I worked with.

Will I open an agency again? No, but I hope more women will, and take on the values that I tried to hold. Be consent-based. Respect the rights and the dignity of workers and clients. Approach sexuality with more compassion and less shame. And when smart, independent women choose to make money from sex, don’t tell them what they can and can’t do. Just get out of the way.

Adapted from Madam by Antonia Murphy (Gallery UK, £20), out now. © Antonia Murphy 2024. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 18/11/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.