He liked to keep the TV on. The TV, much more than my company, was his vacation. And it wasn’t a smoking room—no rooms are smoking rooms—but he smoked constantly. As I sat next to him, pretending to watch a VH1 documentary about a minor band from the ’90s, he told me to suck him off. I unzipped his pants without his help and struggled them off his backside while he begrudgingly heaved up his hips from the couch. He didn’t look at me or talk to me because the TV was more interesting, though he reached down and pinched my nearer tit with the force of someone gripping the fat around their own waist.

Some men would have eroticized my submission, fluffed up their sense of dominance in that moment. That was what I got a lot of when I worked on a webcam. Yeah, you like that, don’t you, you nasty slut. Gag on it. Say you love it. But to want to degrade someone, you have to recognize they contain a quality—a soul, a sense of self, an integrity—that can be degraded. And I might as well have been a Roomba gliding over his dick. He was that fabled villain who treated other people like inanimate objects because that was how he saw them. Most clients don’t want sex to be that way. Most people don’t. Even if a man has a predilection toward sadism, he wants to know he’s with another human being.