Gigolo: Inside the Secret World of the Super Rich. Author:Clifford Thurlow, Ben Foster with. Product Details World of Books Ltd was founded in 2005, recycling books sold to us through charities either directly or indirectly. With his dark hair, blue eyes and robust appendage the ladies dub Big Ben, the shy, self-effacing care worker is offered a position as a masseur at a luxury spa and is drawn into a world of private jets, Parisian sex clubs, state secrets, lines of cocaine and orgies in country houses with a Who’s Who of celebrities, actresses, top models, MPs and the international super rich. It also grossed me out he never used condoms and how many women he had oral sex with. This book does not skimp on details of his exploits. I guess my nurse brain was constantly cycling herpes, chlamydia, HIV! And nobody asked him if he was clean. Ewe. Just ewe. Ben Foster works double shifts for the minimum wage at a care home for boys with learning disabilities. With a young wife and three children under the age of five, he is ground down by poverty and debt.

But as Ben finally learns, “We are here at the same time. It is not the same as being here together.” All too soon, his life with “The Committee” ends, the number of sexual encounters stops at 2,000, and the economic crisis of 2008 teaches Ben even more. Ben does seem to grow from his experiences. He thinks about class differences, and the perils of being limited by one’s “station in life” or labeling oneself as “people like us” vs. the rich. As his fortune rises, and he provides more for his family, even his sweet, unassuming wife begins to change and see a future for herself. Ben weighs it all and concludes that it’s ok to try to improve yourself. Money is something we all need, so he massaged and sold his body -well parts of his body- to an upper-class of superficial elites plus thousands more, went home and lied to his family about how a masseuse got so highly paid, and excuses of being on-call 24/7.Since his early 20s, Mr Perkins has been working as a gigolo - a role that sees him sleep with women for money. Ben started out as a poor married man with three kids, working for minimal pay as a working in a home for special needs kids. He moonlighted as a masseuse for extra cash and he was at the right place, right client, at the right time when his massage side job took a huge turn for the better- working for the rich and famous of the world. Only the rich and famous often have higher expectations than just a massage.

There are other points where it's hard to accept the story at surface value: that Ben has sex with around 2000 women in two years, including periods where he's servicing up to five women a day (he's in his thirties, and has what he describes as a physically tiring job as a masseur, as well as a family life - come on!); that his wife never really queries his sudden influx of designer suits, new cars, weekends away, even newly shaved genitals (and saying that they only have vanilla sex in the dark really doesn't explain the latter).

Customer reviews

The author paints a vivid picture of the world the rich and famous live in and the stark contrast with Ben’s world is powerful. I thought: 'this is great, this is where I would like to take the therapies, this is where I would like to go'. They replaced me for a younger model, from what I gather. Everything was under their rule," Mr Perkins said.

I don’t read soft porn, especially from a man’s point of view. There is plenty of flesh and genitals in this book- horrifying and interesting, all at the same time. I personally thought this would be my life for the rest of it, this was it. But in their mind they wanted to have a bit of fun and I was their piece of meat." Fact or fiction? Whichever, this is an unputdownable read as nice, married, father-of-three Ben Foster inadvertently falls into the life of a male 'escort' and sex worker.All the same, even if this is a fictionalised version of some underlying truth, I couldn't stop reading this book. It is explicit about the sex so beware if that offends you, and is a rivetting story of the rise and fall of a very modern male sex worker. I started this book thinking it was a book based on a true story. As it progressed I became more sure that that was the case, and in the end I belive it all is fiction. It might be a book based on true events, and in a business hard for most of us to understand who is to say that extraordinary things do not happen? So by total chance, one day Ben meets his clients’ mum and the “committee: a circle of her rich and bored friends.