Basic Trope: A character consorts with a sex worker for non-sex related purposes.
- Straight: Bob hires Alice, a prostitute, but much to her surprise he just wants to talk to her rather than have sex with her.
- Exaggerated: Bob hires prostitutes on a regular basis just to chat with them.
- Downplayed:
- Bob hires Alice and, while they do remove their clothes, Bob immediately starts talking and it's only when time is almost up that he asks Alice for a quickie.
- Bob hires Alice for topless cuddling or similar.
- Bob converses with Alice over strip poker.
- Bob asks Alice on tips on how to have sex.
- Bob asks Alice for a massage.
- Bob has Alice serve as a nude model for his art class.
- Justified:
- Bob hires prostitutes to try and persuade them to quit being prostitutes.
- Bob is a lonely man who is discomforted by sex but still yearns to make a connection with someone.
- Bob is a writer/artist who wants a stranger to look over his works and give him anonymous feedback on them.
- For whatever reason, Bob needs to briefly pass himself off as a married man, and he needs someone to pose as his wife.
- Alice is the key to unlocking a mystery that Bob is pursuing, but the only way he can make contact with her to find out what she knows is to hire her services.
- Alice is a High-Class Call Girl, and Bob is a boss of a company - that she can have fulfilling conversation with him that others can't is exactly why he asked her to join him.
- Alice is a spy or Dirty Harriet policewoman working undercover as a prostitute. Bob is the contact she relays information/orders through.
- Bob was going to have sex with Alice, but learns or suspects that she has an STD.
- Alice reminds Bob of his late mother/sister/daughter too much for him to have sex with her.
- Alice gets extremely uncomfortable with the sex for some reason and Bob doesn’t want to push her, so they just talk.
- One of Bob's relatives or friends hired Alice as a birthday present, he's not actually interested in her but doesn't want their money to go to waste, so he uses up her time blabbing about stuff.
- Bob is gay or asexual and wants to vent his problems to Alice.
- Bob is a journalist doing interviews with prostitutes. Alice still charges her standard fee for her time.
- Inverted:
- Bob hires Alice to have sex with him, but all Alice wants to do is talk.
- Bob hires a therapist to have sex with him.
- Bob is in a sexual relationship with Alice, who works as a prostitute; their relationship, however, is not business related.
- Subverted: Bob claims that he just wants to talk to Alice, but he just says that to make himself feel better; he ends up paying for sex with her after all.
- Doubly Subverted: Bob only has sex with Alice because, after paying to converse with her, they have ended up falling in love with each other.
- Parodied:
- Bob hires prostitutes to do ridiculously trivial things, like mowing his lawn, because he's too lazy to do them himself.
- Alternatively Bob hires prostitutes to tell sermons but enjoys it WAY too much, really creeping out the prostitute.
- Alice has this happen so often that despite it meaning less work for her money and the ability to get paid for more of her time (no clean up time) that she winds up sexually frustrated.
- After getting Alice to strip for him, Bob pushes her out naked into the street, throws her payment at her and locks her out.
- Bob pays Alice to streak around the city.
- Zig Zagged: Bob hires prostitutes for the usual reason, but ends up suffering from a Groin Attack. He still hires them to talk. Then he recovers and returns to his usual ways. Near the end of the series he becomes less of an Antihero and ends up taking up just talking.
- Averted:
- Bob hires prostitutes to have sex with them, and Alice is no exception.
- Alternatively, Bob does not hire any prostitutes, for any reason whatsoever.
- Enforced: "We can't have our hero have sex with a prostitute; the Moral Guardians would eat us for dinner! Since the scene calls for him to be in a brothel, he'll have to have a completely above-board reason to be there."
- Lampshaded:
- "You just wanna talk, huh? That means you've got the 'I'm going to hell unless I stop doing what I do.' speech prepared, right?"
- "I'll pay you just to talk. I only wanted some company."
- Invoked: Bob makes it known among the red light district that he's not interested in sex, but he's looking for conversation.
- Exploited: Alice charges Bob extra just for conversation.
- Knowing a surprising amount of clients talk to prostitutes either instead of or in addition to having sex with them, Alice, who is either The Vamp or a Heroic Seductress, takes up a job as a prostitute to gather intel on her enemies.
- An organization dealing with highly stressful situations (an army, or an alien monitoring agency) explicitly hire escorts knowing their troops will talk to them, so that they can have a way to know which ones have early onset PTSD or other similar issues so they know whom to refer to their therapists.
- Defied: Alice makes it clear from the start of the interaction that she's not interested in 'time-wasters'.
- Discussed: Alice and one of her co-workers discuss how it seems that all their johns want to do these days is just talk to them.
- Conversed: "Seriously? He's laying down all that cash just to chat?"
- Implied:
- Alice comes back from a "date" with Bob and tells her co-workers how much he likes to talk with no indication that they had sex.
- Bob is seen talking to a bored, salaciously dressed woman and paying her before she leaves.
- Deconstructed:
- Bob paying prostitutes to sermonize about their lives to them is merely indicative of his self-righteous hypocrisy; he's not really interested in improving these women's lives or the hardships they go through, but just gets off on the thrill of superiority he feels about trying to 'rescue them from sin'.
- Bob's actions are indicative of his insecurity and hangups about sex.
- Bob's unusual behavior ends up attracting the attention of Alice's "manager", who starts to suspect he might be an undercover cop, a bounty hunter or even a Serial Killer. Eventually, he gets too paranoid and decides to get rid of Bob for trying to mess with his business.
- Reconstructed:
- When she learns that Bob 'just wants to talk', Alice wearily expects Bob to start giving her a lecture about how 'unclean', 'sinful' and 'impure' she is, but it turns out Bob actually wants to talk about something completely different.
- Because Bob doesn't demand or expect her to do anything she feels uncomfortable with besides talking, Alice regards him as her favorite customer or even as a friend.
- Alice's "manager" realizes what Bob is after and doesn't care what he does as long as he pays for it.
- Bob is a memoir writer who specifically interviews prostitutes under promise of anonymity to gather a picture of the account of what life is like for a prostitute.
- Played For Laughs:
- Bob and Alice, both of whom are aware of how awkward this is, have a teeth-grindingly uncomfortable conversation together.
- After a moment's awkwardness, Bob and Alice end up having a really pleasant conversation. They even start playing video games together, have lots of fun, and it turns out that they actually have a surprising amount in common, ending up becoming really good friends.
- Bob only hired Alice because he wanted a healer to help him get past That One Boss.
- Played For Drama:
- Bob is Alice’s old classmate and half-hires and half-blackmails her into attending their reunion posing as his girlfriend, threatening to reveal her profession if she doesn’t comply.
- Bob is a Dirty Cop who extorts money from Alice in exchange for looking the other way on her prostitution.
- Played For Horror:
- Bob is a Serial Killer who targets prostitutes and his 'just wanting conversation' act is part of the mind games he plays with his prey before he kills them.
- Bob called Alice over to an apartment where he just murdered someone, planning to frame her.
- Bob committed a murder and calls on Alice to help him get rid of the body, threatening to frame her if she refuses.
- Bob hires Alice to accompany him to their school reunion. She learns that he and their classmates want to kill her.
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