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She got divorced (the couple had no children) and moved back to Texas, in part to help care for a sick relative. Working once again as a computer programmer, she remarried but this marriage also failed.

Her career wasn’t going much better. She was smart, capable, technically sophisticated, and she also happened to be physically attractive, a curvaceous and friendly blonde whose attributes were always well appreciated in her corporate setting. But she just didn’t like working all that hard. So she became an entrepreneur, launching a one-woman business that enabled her to work just ten or fifteen hours a week and earn five times her old salary. Her name is Allie, and she is a prostitute.

She fell into the profession by accident, or at least on a lark. Her family was devout Southern Baptist, and Allie had grown up “very straitlaced,” she says. As an adult, she was the same. “You know, yard-of-the-month in the suburbs, no more than two beers a night and never before seven.” But as a young divorcée, she started visiting online dating sites—she liked men, and she liked sex—and just for fun listed “escort” on her profile. “I mean, it was so instantaneous,” she recalls. “I just thought I’d put it up and see what happens.”

Her computer was instantly flooded with replies. “I started hitting minimize, minimize, minimize, just so I could keep up!”

She arranged to meet a man at two o’clock on a weekday afternoon at a hotel, in the southwest corner of its parking lot. He’d be driving a black Mercedes. Allie had no idea what to charge. She was thinking about $50.

He was a dentist—physically unintimidating, married, and perfectly kind. Once inside the room, Allie undressed nervously. She can no longer recall the particulars of the sex (“it’s all a big blur by this point,” she says) but does remember that “it was nothing really kinky or anything.”

When they were done, the man put some money on the dresser. “You’ve never done this before, have you?” he asked.

Allie tried to fib, but it was useless.

“Okay,” he said, “this is what you need to do.” He began to lecture her. She had to be more careful; she shouldn’t be willing to meet a stranger in a parking lot; she needed to know something in advance about her clients.

“He was the perfect first date,” Allie says. “To this day, I remain grateful.”

Once he left the room, Allie counted the cash on the dresser: $200. “I’d been giving it away for years, and so the fact that someone was going to give me even a penny—well, that was shocking.”

She was immediately tempted to take up prostitution full-time, but she was worried her family and friends would find out. So she eased into it, booking mainly out-of-town liaisons. She curtailed her programming hours but even so found the job stultifying. That’s when she decided to move to Chicago.

Yes, it was a big city, which Allie found intimidating, but unlike New York or Los Angeles, it was civil enough to make a southern girl feel at home. She built a website (those computer skills came in handy) and, through intensive trial and error, determined which erotic-services sites would help her attract the right kind of client and which ones would waste her ad dollars. (The winners were Eros.com and BigDoggie.net.)

Running a one-woman operation held several advantages, the main one being that she didn’t have to share her revenues with anyone. In the old days, Allie probably would have worked for someone like the Everleigh sisters, who paid their girls handsomely but took enough off the top to make themselves truly rich. The Internet let Allie be her own madam and accumulate the riches for herself. Much has been said of the Internet’s awesome ability to “disintermediate”—to cut out the agent or middleman—in industries like travel, real estate, insurance, and the sale of stocks and bonds. But it is hard to think of a market more naturally suited to disintermediation than high-end prostitution.

The downside was that Allie had no one but herself to screen potential clients and ensure they wouldn’t beat her up or rip her