Today Gwyneth Montenegro is a public speaker and therapist, but for 12 years she was a sex worker, taking on high-dollar clients, charging $500-$1000 an hour. Based on an in-depth interview she recently gave to News.com.au, she learned a great deal about men's needs—and some of what she says is surprising.

Montenegro began her career after she'd been stripping for a while, but she says that when "you’ve been paid for sex once, you can’t take that back." So she plunged into it even though she was "a good country girl" who had come from a "Christian family."

Asked about the requests she fielded from clients over her career, Montenegro gives an unexpected answer: "A lot of them don’t want all this hardcore kinky sex," she tells the Aussie publication, "that’s such a small percentage of the men (. . .) But I didn’t see a lot of the men that had these sick fantasies. Most of it was just normal sex."

In response to a follow-up question about whether the men she was with wanted "emotional comfort," Montenegro says in part that "clients I would see would be an hour plus and I mean sure, they wanted the sex, but a big part of my job was just talking."

"There was always some sort of psychological game from it," she continues, "There was always a feeling of … you could sort of tell they felt more validated as a man or some of them felt like ‘I can control you’. They’d walk out with this strut."

Montenegro naturally has a compelling take on why men even seek sex workers in the first place. "Because that man feels emasculated in his relationship, he wants to feel masculine again," she tells News.com.au, "They’re seeking validity for their virility."

However, she admits that there are also "men who want to play the game. They get an intense delight out of controlling women. They get more of a kick out of feeling like they control you, than they do off the actual sex. So a lot of it is from a psychological motivation."

Women seeking to understand male behavior, Montenegro says, should "Detach the emotions — look at it from the outside. The man will give you all the cues from his behavior and his relationships."

Montenegro published a book about her experiences a few years ago, and there's no doubt she's got unique knowledge on her side—but only about 20 percent of men in the US alone ever seek a prostitute (the number is lower in the UK). So Montenegro, for all her experience, did deal with a unique population.

Just saying: The remaining 80 percent likely don't want to be evaluated using those guys as a standard.