Since the boom of finance-driven salaries catapulted the “working rich” to the top of the income ladder in the 1990s, there has emerged an inverse relationship between leisure and earnings, such that elites now have less leisure time than their poorer, less-educated counterparts.

The term “girl” came into popular usage in England in the 1880s to describe working-class unmarried women who occupied an emerging social space between childhood and adulthood. Not quite a child, she was childlike in that she had yet to become a wife or mother, the type of modern urbanite who engaged in “frivolous” pursuits like consumption,

Promoters try to shape girls’ feelings through relational work: strategies by which they try to redefine their economic transactions as part of a personal connection.

In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity.

Everything in this economy revolves around girls: How good the club is. How good the promoter is. How much money he can make. How much wealth and power the clients are perceived to have. And how much money they will spend.

Hypergamy, or “marrying up,” might look like a way in which women can use their erotic capital, but most of the research on assortative mating shows that homogamy is actually more common, and, since the 1980s, men are increasingly marrying women with similar education and income.

With shopgirls, department stores could harness what historian Peter Bailey termed, in his history of Victorian sexual culture, parasexuality. Writing about bar maidens, Bailey conceptualized parasexuality as feminine sexuality that is “deployed but not fully released.”

A promoter seeks girls for whom all three motivations align: if she needs subsidized meals, if she is loyal to his friendship, and if she genuinely enjoys whatever fun can be shared in during the night, she will likely become a regular presence at his table.

After authentic models, the next best thing is a woman who looks like she could be a model, a “good civilian.”