“I have to say that each time I visit with you, I am left wanting to see you more,” he wrote after that. I heard this sort of thing all the time, often in more ardent forms. The sentiment came from married men, single men, men who were divorced, men a few years or a few decades older than me, men who were wealthy and men who were rich, men living under secret, crushing debt. Some cried over how much they felt for me, wrote me songs and poems, daydreamed aloud about marrying or impregnating me. I felt highly desired, and I was, verifiably, highly desired. Coveted, even. There was proof: the messages, the money, the affirmations. I became a sex worker because I suspected, and hoped, it would be this way: a private, minor form of celebrity. An alternate version of myself.

After a year together, he told me he didn’t want to hire anyone new anymore. A lot of clients, lying, said the same. Men seemed addicted to pledging monogamy and then violating their unsolicited promise. I think the lie made them feel important, or they thought it was necessary to access something otherwise denied—condom-less sex, lower rates. But I believed Roger. From the start of our relationship, I didn’t doubt that he told me the truth. He was reflective enough to understand his motivations, and he shared them with me because his own gratification impelled him to. (For the international date, he encouraged my intervals of solitude and freedom “so that the time we are together is the best possible.”) Since he found fulfillment in psychic and emotional unburdening, deceiving me was not in his self-interest. It would have been closing a door he needed open.

MEN HAVE AN EASIER time respecting prostitutes than women who hate prostitutes care to admit. There’s a line in a Lorrie Moore story: “Her father is of that Victorian sensibility that deep down respects prostitutes more than it does women in general.” Men can think more highly of the former than the latter because unlike a civilian woman, a prostitute is direct and therefore honorable, ballsy—forthright, like a man. That’s how they see it, anyway. She’s forgone weaponized emotions and commitment-focused schemes in favor of an explicit exchange. By acknowledging sex as transactional, she divorces it from perpetual obligation. Isn’t there a cliché about husbands who cheat with unpaid mistresses to disastrous effect before they wise up and turn to pros? If not, there should be. The mistress is a lover who must be wooed and tended to. Her demands are mood-influenced, unpredictable, insatiable. She wants the man to forfeit too much for her: his home, his marriage, his good name. She can easily become his enemy and undoer. But the prostitute is not a burden. She only wants cash. She says so up front, then leaves. In her apathetic constancy, the whore is man’s “accomplice,” says writer Virginie Despentes, who worked as one.

Prostitutes are more public than civilian women, too: public like men because we negotiate with men and because we’ve refused to play what men see as other women’s games, using sex to engineer family and parasitic security. Despentes says that when men dream of being women, they imagine themselves as whores, not as housewives, because they can’t fathom giving up their freedom. The whore can roam the streets, stay out at night, sleep late, sleep around, while the wife is burping the baby and washing dishes. Many of my clients liked to imagine being in the position they imagined I was in. I know because they said so, amid their rote leading questions: Didn’t I love doing this? Wasn’t this an inconceivable delight? This would be their dream job, they said, if they were women. But because they were men, it was not.

My male friends proved that hunch right. They were everything I thought they’d be and more. Nothing prepared me for the contagious ecstasy of their pubescent masculinity—not previous experience nor avid reading nor extravagant daydreams. They were perfect human beings to me, godlike because they were limitless, meaning they acknowledged no boundaries or rules. And they were cute, unbearably cute, even—especially—when they were wasted, when they slurred and doled out emphatic affection, put their arms around my shoulders and leaned in heavily, murmured unintelligible words against my ear as they staggered toward another blackout. When the night wound down and we clumped together like littermates on floors or beds, I hoped the next day would never come.

This was a life I’d hardly dared to dream of, one suffused with tribalism, freedom, and exultant chaos. I was like a burr snagged in the fur of a running wolf, swept away at an exhilarating gallop. I would have done anything to be near the boys because when I was, anything could happen—bad things, good things, things I’d never seen or done or thought of before. I loved when things happened. I didn’t feel capable of making things happen on my own, but I hoped to be present when they did.

My objective as a teenager was to find the boys, to link up with them because they were the party, they were the event. Years passed, and the objective stayed the same, with the focus shifted to sanction my own creativity: find boys to make a band, find boys to make a movie—find boys because they’d supply the verbs that would propel my life. It wasn’t just that they were necessary for sex or romance, though they were for me. More than that, they were the only means of getting at all that life has to offer. They were both the gate and the guides who ushered you through it.

Because I started sex work early in adulthood, I’m not sure if the lessons I attribute to the job are in fact lessons gained in the usual course of growing up. But judging from the public’s reaction when men who are married to great beauties cheat on their wives with less impressive-looking women, a lot of adults remain invested in the notion that a woman’s beauty should be protection against suffering and betrayal, and it’s not. Nothing is.

Attraction is dependent on so much more than looks alone, though hotness is treated like the determining factor because it’s the easiest to package and sell. I’m rarely the best-looking woman in a room, but thanks to sex work, I trust my capacity to charm and seduce, to convince many of those in the room that I am. I know now that when people look at you, they don’t see what you look like as much as they see their idea of what you look like, and that idea can be negotiated, improved, revised. Every dimension of a moment—power differentials, circumstance, timing—influences desire, which is capacious but can also be capricious, hyper-specific, and evanescent. Its mutability is a comfort and a curse.

My wildest dreams involved getting paid for being desirable, because payment concretized validation. Becoming desirable was a goal in and of itself, of course, but I wouldn’t believe that goal had been achieved until I had the money to prove it. I reasoned that if I were accepted into environments where women were expected to be sexy—if my presence there was tolerated, even if I had a long way to go—there must be a seed of sexiness somewhere in me.

“You look better than your pictures,” he said after he opened the door. He’d sent me a blurry one of himself in sunglasses, from the chest up. He was in his forties and much heavier than I’d expected. I can’t remember if I told him my real name, but I hope not. He apologized for the quality of the hotel and said he’d chosen it for my convenience because it was near Penn Station. His unfamiliarity with the city should have given so much away. He sat next to me on the bed. The conversation portion had concluded. He touched my breasts.

Though my escort friends and I were scornful of clients who imagined our work as purely pleasurable, it could be a blast. Women with straight jobs who started moonlighting as strippers or call girls often left the white-collar world to spend more time at their sex job because it paid more, offered more control over working conditions, and entailed less harassment. I took these escorts’ word for it that their clients treated them better than customers and bosses in other contexts. So many of them said so, it couldn’t have been just a few flukes. And all of us agreed that clients treated us better—exponentially better—than most of the men we fucked for free.