The Education of a Very Young Madam
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Full of juicy details about what really goes on behind the bedroom door, The Education of a Very Young Madam is a provocative exposé of the newest developments in the world's oldest profession.
A stripper at age fifteen, involved with majorleague gang members before she was twenty, and a madam raking in over $20,000 a day only a few years later, Ma-Ling Lee has a tale to tell about life.
The Education of a Very Young Madam is the compulsively readable, fast-paced story of how Ma-Ling Lee went from living in a comfortable Connecticut suburb to founding a lucrative but illegal "escort service."
Korean born and adopted by an American family, Ma-Ling began her career in the sex business at the age of thirteen. "Taken in" by strippers, pimps, and prostitutes, she soon became an expert at negotiating the hard-and-fast ways of life on the streets.
Ma-Ling's natural knack for marketing and managing a business led her to open her first brothel at the age of sixteen. After the police shut her down, she knew it was time to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the anonymity of the Internet. She bought her first Internet mailing list, set up an offshore server, and targeted a huge middleclass clientele.
And business thrived.
In her own frank and candid voice, Ma-Ling describes the difficulties -- and the economic advantages -- of running an illegal business. From clients' outrageous and often hilarious fetishes to the hardships of living off the grid to the heartbreak of watching friends get destroyed by drug addiction, Ma-Ling refuses to shy away from the truth of what the prostitution business has become. The madam explains how technology has not only revolutionized the sex industry but also regulated business by ensuring quality, safety, and efficiency.
The business has never been better.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a businesslike, astute and self-empowering look at the sex business, New Jersey brothel owner Lee shares her hard-won secrets of success. A Korean orphan, born "in the mid-1970s," Lee was adopted at age six (to the tune of $100,000, she later learned) by a wealthy Connecticut couple who soon divorced. Living with an unstable mother, Lee first ran away from home at age 13, living on and off at a state group home in Maine and ending her formal education at eighth grade. By 15, she was working at strip clubs, quickly learning the "pimp and ho game," and drifting to Boston with a series of sugar daddies, some abusive and dealing drugs. With the backing of a smooth operator named Andre, for whom she worked as his "personal money manager" (she learned how $10,000 worth of $20 bills fit perfectly into a sandwich bag), she started up her first brothel on West 21st Street in Manhattan to great success, before the cops closed it after four months. But Lee was a natural entrepreneur and creative startups in Baltimore, Montreal and northern New Jersey led to lucrative ventures. She presents her career in remarkably transparent, direct terms, not above hiring thugs or criticizing harshly her own workers for allowing men to control them.