Catherine De Noire works the night shift. Her workday starts at 7 p.m., so she sleeps for most of the day before clocking in. If it’s a quiet evening on the job, De Noire can devote some time to studying; she’s a PhD candidate with a focus on organizational psychology.
The pay is okay, not too far off from any other managerial position. She’s one of about 60 regular, full-time employees. The others work in standard departments common to most companies: there’s an HR department, an accounting division, a marketing unit, customer service and maintenance. They all operate within the same building, however, with De Noire’s off-hours schedule, she often goes months without seeing her colleagues.
She works closely with independent contractors, but while she oversees their business, she’s not really their boss, not in a conventional sense. They determine their own schedules and their own salaries, and they have the right to refuse service to any customers.
De Noire has seen others, especially men, fail in roles like hers because they try to lead with too much authority. De Noire, 31, has always understood that she can’t be overly controlling — and that’s what she believes makes her a solid manager of a legal brothel.
“Our sex workers, they are not ours. They don’t work exclusively for us,” De Noire tells PEOPLE. “You can’t just be like, ‘You need to do this, this and this for this amount of money.'”
De Noire was just 22 years old when she stumbled upon the opportunity to work at a brothel based in Western Europe. (She prefers to withhold specific details about the location for reasons of safety.)
Nearly one decade ago, De Noire was in her second year of undergrad studying psychology. She originally intended to specialize in neuropsychology with an interest in cognitive impairments like dementia. One night, her research led her to an article titled “Psychologist in a Whorehouse: They Call Me Pimp, but I Protect Women.”
Brigitte Vervloet
Catherine De Noire.
The academic essay was written by a brothel manager with a traditional education in psychology. De Noire read it in full, and she was immediately taken by the author’s nuanced perspective.
“He talked about how they treat the business as a regular business, how the women are treated with respect. He also talked about sexuality and how our society views sexuality, and it was just so interesting,” she summarizes. “I finished the article, and that night I decided I want to do this job.”
She found out where the author worked, and she contacted the business to learn about any potential employment opportunities.
“I just wrote in an email like, ‘Hey, I discovered this article, it’s amazing. I don’t have any experience with sex work, with this industry, but I’m just very willing to learn. I find it very amazing. Just give me a chance,'” De Noire recalls to PEOPLE exclusively. “I sent this, forgot about it and then a few days later, they texted me. They saw the email.”
She went through three rounds of interviews before the brothel offered De Noire a role, despite her lack of experience.
“I needed to learn basically everything from scratch,” she says. “A lot of the managers that I saw over those eight, nine years, they were fully developed managers. They came from different industries like hospitality or traveling management, and since they already knew how to be a manager, they didn’t fit into this industry.”
She continues, “In this industry, you can’t manage people with the force.”
De Noire also stands out from other Western European brothel managers as a woman. For the most part, she says, the administrative side of the legal sex work industry is dominated by men. Like the article that inspired her career, De Noire is distinctly different from the stereotypical “pimp,” she says, though notes that she’s not personally encountered managers who fit into that category.
When she first started working in the brothel, some of her family hesitated to entirely support De Noire’s new career. Her mother worried that she’d fallen into an industry described by stereotypes.
“She was like, ‘So are you going to be a pimp or what?’ So I needed to explain [to] her a few times,” she says. On the other hand, her father — a nuclear physicist by trade — backed De Noire’s new endeavor.
“He even came to see me in the work to see how it looks, that I’m not some sort of shady pimp keeping the girls somewhere in the basement. And so he was super supportive from the beginning.”
De Noire maintains that her “number one priority” is indeed to protect the women she oversees, whose ages range between 21 — the legal minimum — and around 60 years old. De Noire says she doesn’t often host sex workers on the younger side, but when she does, she makes sure to explain the process from start to finish, even if the women claim to have prior experience in the industry.
“I still like to tell them everything about the boundaries, about the safety, that it’s completely okay to refuse the customer, how to protect yourself. Even though they know, I still like to repeat this, so I make sure that they are super safe,” she says.
It may sound counterintuitive, but in the interest of everyone’s well-being, De Noire’s club doesn’t require independent contractors to regularly get tested for sexually transmitted infections. Like with schedules and compensation, the sex workers are responsible for their own health.
“I know that 100% of the girls are going for the regular checkups, but we are not in a place where I would just come in and be like, ‘Hey, everybody needs to show me the card,'” De Noire tells PEOPLE.
The policy becomes logical when considering the incubation periods of STDs and how those timelines differ between illnesses.
“Some of the countries here in Europe, specifically Austria, have the mandatory STD testing … They test the girls every three months, I believe, or eight weeks,” De Noire comments. As a result, the client can often have a false sense of security when visiting the brothel.
The PhD student’s commitment to safety goes even further than that. The brothel has a number of procedures to ensure the security of her fellow full-time employees, the sex workers and their paying clients. Panic buttons are one example that comes to mind as De Noire describes her due diligence.
“Every room has at least one panic button. They are hidden, so the customers can’t really see them, but the sex workers are always instructed where to find them, how to press them,” she explains. “Our employees are trained to be in a room within eight seconds from the time when the panic button is pressed.”
If a customer becomes a problem, De Noire and her staff are trained in ways to calm them down. “We never — almost never — use a physical force unless it’s super needed,” she adds.
She has had to call the police due to customer obstinance, but it wasn’t “anything extreme,” she claims. On one occasion, De Noire faced a man who refused to leave after his service was over.
“He was just sitting there naked, and he was like, ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ and it was like 3:00 a.m.,” she recalls. “We discussed everything with him, the typical talk like, ‘Hey, maybe you want to go home because now it’s too late, and she doesn’t want to continue with the service anymore.’ He was like, ‘No, I’m not going anywhere.'”
The brothel employees declined to use physical force in dealing with the man. Instead, they called the authorities, who eventually arrived to “drag him away,” says De Noire.
“When [sex work] is illegal … it becomes very, very dangerous. That’s why I’m really happy to work in a place where it’s legal, and if we can’t handle the situation, which is almost never, we are pretty accommodating to all kinds of situations,” she says. “But if there is something very extreme, we can always call the police. And this is what makes it 100% much safer than if I would be working in [an] illegal environment.”
But regardless of the law, De Noire is aware of the biases the world often projects onto brothels like hers. She can argue with numerous misconceptions about the job, but some of the biggest ones revolve around the women who offer services.
“A lot of the people think that sex work is the last resort, that you don’t have any other option, which is definitely not true,” she says. “Those women that I’ve met over those years, they definitely have different options. Some of them have university degrees. They know six languages — you can do anything with six languages.”
In many cases, these women turn to sex work because financially, it makes the most sense for their lifestyles. De Noire says “the best earning girls” at her brothel can make around $50,000 per month. It’s usually a temporary, rational choice, she adds, and some women only plan to partake in the work for a few years in order to set up the rest of their lives.
De Noire underscores the fact that the women who work at the brothel “are normal people,” and they socialize with the staff like in any other work environment.
“Sometimes we even hang out outside of the building. With some of them, I just keep it very professional. We just talk about work stuff if they need to, and that’s it,” she shares. “Sometimes we even hang out when I’m free and they are free, [and] they want to drink a coffee or go to grab a wine.”
De Noire’s workplace doesn’t take any cut of their contractors’ earnings. The sex workers pay rent for their stays at the brothel per night and keep the money they charge customers. Some women opt to work during the day, but management doesn’t control their schedules. De Noire and her colleagues don’t even request or suggest that the women come in at a certain time.
“It’s completely up to them how long they want to work. Some of the women are just coming in for six hours, and then they are done. Some of them want to work 11 hours. They really treat this as a full-time job,” she explains.
Over the years, De Noire has witnessed some of the less empowering parts of the industry. Some women are tied to partners who match the stereotype known as “Romeo pimps.” She explains how these dynamics typically start when a man urges his partner to become involved in sex work in order to solve his financial troubles.
In De Noire’s experience, he will often pitch the idea as a common interest: “You will save us together, and you will work for [our] future together,” she says, summarizing the ways some men will try to persuade their significant others.
She’s seen how a woman will agree and then become accustomed to the arrangement. They get used to the role. “She basically stays in the sex work and he takes the cut,” adds De Noire. It becomes tricky to navigate these situations because technically the women are doing the job voluntarily.
De Noire rarely encounters women connected to “Romeo pimps,” but when a sex worker does mention having a boyfriend who “deals with all the money,” the protective manager tries to encourage healthy skepticism.
“I’m like, ‘Yeah, just make sure that the money [is] still yours. It’s in your bank account, not his,'” De Noire explains of her standard advice. She’ll offer wisdom even when women will claim to have complete faith in their boyfriends and insist that they’re not selfishly stashing away any earnings: “He might not, but just I think that he will at some point,” she’ll tell them.
It can be frustrating for De Noire to watch harmful dynamics play out and know her concern may not be received as intended, “Like I’m the bad one who doesn’t support their love,” she explains, though she will reassure them it’s not a matter of support — it’s a matter of caution.
“I’ve met girls [who] were working for 11 years, and after those 11 years, they had businesses, like restaurants. They had flats. They had houses. They had cars. But it wasn’t written on their names, it was written in boyfriend’s names,” De Noire tells PEOPLE. “Then when the boyfriend left, they were left with nothing — seriously nothing. And it’s not that that’s unusual. Sometimes this happens.”
She’s told some of these stories on social media, where she has over 400,000 followers between Instagram and TikTok. The student will explain the realities of her job, often sharing day-in-the-life videos, like her post explaining what New Year’s Eve and Christmas Day look like at the brothel where she works.
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In other posts, she addresses commonly asked questions, such as “What are the most common fake names customers use?” — the answer: John, Mark, Steve, James, Michael, David, Thomas and Liam. Sometimes De Noire will discuss some of the unlikely situations she’s encountered on the job. In one video, she described experiences that “still haunt” her.
One customer “sold his house” and “gave all the money to a [sex] worker that he had fallen in love with.” The woman disappeared, and the man was left homeless. In another scenario, a customer “cosplayed as a dog and chewed on another customer’s shoes.”
De Noire tells PEOPLE that her presence on social media started from a place of “boredom” after so many years on the job. Several people approached her and said she should write a book, but her PhD commitment was eating up most of her writing time.
“I felt a little bit burned out because I’ve been in this position for almost nine years now,” she says. “I decided to set up social media because I just wanted to talk about the industry.”
She also set up an OnlyFans account, but not to post explicit photos or sexual content, as most creators on the adult entertainment app do. De Noire says she has zero experience as an actual sex worker. OnlyFans offers yet another creative outlet for her since Instagram often censors what she’d most like to share about the job.
“I can fully talk there about the industry on [OnlyFans],” she explains. “If you would see it, it looks like very, very long written essays about the industry … All of it is just behind the paywall, and that’s where I share.”
She sticks with Instagram because it “gives me a chance to connect with more people from the industry, which I think is nice.”
When her social media accounts started gaining viral attention, she and the brothel’s owner discussed how De Noire should proceed in sharing details without foregoing privacy. They agreed it would be better to withhold the name and location of the brothel so that De Noire could talk about sex workers and about herself without anyone being recognized.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable if there would be customers coming in and they would be like, ‘Oh, you are the girl from Instagram,'” she says. “The women that work with us know about Instagram. Some of them are already following me and often giving me feedback.”
Her goal is to debunk misconceptions and explain the safe reality of her work. And after spending so long in the industry, she’s shaken any fear of judgment, liberating her to share whatever she deems fitting online. She’s not afraid to own her position as a brothel manager.
“I never conceal it. I never tell people, ‘Oh, I just work in a bank or something,'” says De Noire. “I’m very open about what I do. And if people don’t like it, it’s not really my problem anymore.”
Read the original article on People
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