When paying for sex, the price isn’t just one flat rate for one orgasm. There are a ton of different items on the sex worker menu that drastically change both the experience and the sticker price.

Two of the most popular services for sexual gratification are the Girlfriend Experience (GFE) and the Porn Star Experience (PSE) — almost opposite performances that can make a sex worker seem like two entirely different people.

“It’s a question of: ‘do they want to bang you or make love to you?’” says Kourtney Chase, a sex worker at the Love Ranch brothel just outside Las Vegas.

“In general, the girlfriend experience is the more sensual experience. These are men who are divorced or otherwise missing that kind of intimacy in their relationship, and they want the type of thing they’d do with their wife or girlfriend at home,” Chase tells Rooster.

“The Porn Star Experience is a more hardcore, high-energy experience with a girl that’s perceived as naughty or nasty. It’s recreating the scenes as close as possible to what you’d see in porn. At the Love Ranch, some girls even let the guys record them so they have a souvenir to take home.”

Chase works in Nevada, at one of the few specks on the U.S. map where prostitution is legal. This makes the customers’ experience — girlfriend, porn star, or any other — radically different from what they’d get working with online escorts, who need to fly under the radar of law enforcement.

One of the major benefits of the brothel is safety. No worries about getting tossed in the back of a squad car and put on the sex offender registry, doomed to have the neighborhood children afraid to trick-or-treat at your house. No threats to your health, because to get a license to solicit sex, the women need to have no history of drugs and no sexually transmitted diseases. To keep their license, they’re STD tested every single week.

In the underground sex trade, condoms are often up for debate. Men will specifically request the Girlfriend Experience or Porn Star Experience under the assumption that blow jobs without condoms and coming in her mouth are part of the package. In a brothel, that shit is not happening.

“There can’t be any exchange of fluids, so you can’t do anything without condoms or dental dams,” Chase says. “It’s illegal, so don’t even ask.”

Beyond safety, there’s also the potential to pick out a real porn star. Love Ranch prides itself on its award-winning adult actresses, one of which tells Chase she believes the Porn Star Experience shouldn’t be offered by anyone other than authentic porn performers.

No pimps, no drugs, no upsells or rip-offs. But all of the brothel’s perks come at a cost. Men can expect to pay about 3 times more for a legal sex worker than illegal escort on the internet.

The Porn Star Experience is also much more expensive than the Girlfriend Experience, generally because it involves much more extreme sex acts. Brothel workers go the whole 9 yards to bring clients’ fantasies to life, engaging in dirty talk, loud moaning, adventurous positions, hair pulling, spanking, gagging, anal play, toys and kinky outfits.

However, good luck getting a sex worker to even offer the Porn Star Experience if you haven’t established trust with her — women often won’t offer the Porn Star Experience to brand new clients.

As anybody with a girlfriend will tell you, porn sex is often very different from girlfriend sex. Porn is simply unrealistic, created in an industry dominated by men, for men. Porn sex often focuses on the domination and degradation of a filthy slut — something most girlfriends won't put up with.

Paying for sex is about living out fantasies. Porn star or boyfriend — who do you want to be?