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Roger had an account on The Erotic Review and wrote reviews when a woman asked him to. When together, we followed the TER formula to some extent—the order is textbook straight sex, paid or unpaid—but he wasn’t an aggressive kisser and rarely wanted sex to last more than fifteen or twenty minutes from start to finish. I mimicked enjoyment, but he didn’t try to force my orgasms, and they didn’t occur naturally, which was fine by me. After I started working for myself, I realized I didn’t like coming at work. It was too private, and I hated turning it into a gimmick delivered on demand as if I were a captive animal doing tricks. Being able to determine when and how and if I came felt like an important indicator of my control over the encounter as a whole.
Moreover, I worried real orgasms would throw my faking into relief, thereby setting the bar too high for future sessions, though eventually I learned clients found my true orgasms less satisfying than the fake ones. It’s not fair to say their unwitting preference was proof that they didn’t care about my actual pleasure. They just cared about their own more, and my climax mattered not because of how good it would feel to me but because of how good it would feel to them.
If you market well enough, your reputation can do a lot of the work. No one likes to feel that they’ve wasted time and money or that they have bad taste or are easily duped. Circumstances primed clients to feel that they were with an irresistible woman, a woman most men yearned to be with and never would. There’s also curiosity and the fear of missing out. When a woman charges a lot and seems to be working a lot, it follows that there’s a reason for her success—she’s exceptionally beautiful or a sexual expert or both. Clients want to find out for themselves. They don’t want to pass up the opportunity to meet someone extraordinary. Sex workers are hopelessly fascinated by sex workers, too. They’ll arrange threesomes to meet a girl they’re curious about, stalk each other’s personal social media, gossip about colleagues on message boards. They can pretend it’s professional competition or due diligence, but it’s not.
I never had to do anything like that, and I don’t know that I’d have been able to. Any drama is too much drama; I require all my dealings to be neat. My most combative moments involved threatening to out a man who antagonized me, but I only resorted to that after suffering through months of invasive obsession. The offender posted pictures of my face on local message boards to ask for information about where I lived and encourage anyone who recognized me to contact the police or the FBI. “She may be someone you know or even a coworker with a double life,” he wrote in one of many listings, transparently optimistic, hoping for me to have a straight job he could use as a weapon to foreclose my future by wrecking my present. He was a former military serviceman, current military contractor. He had two children. I met him before I learned to listen to my instincts, which took years to do. He was one of the least attractive people I’d ever been with, and I mistook my unease for shallowness.
whomst among us
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.
lol
An escort friend of mine met this man before I did and said he told her a story about intentionally hitting a cyclist with his car without stopping to see if he—or she?—was OK. “This sums up his respect for humans in general,” she emailed me in her reference. “I almost left the date right then.” And yet she didn’t. “He’s not a cop,” she told me, “and he’s good for the $.” The money was my excuse for taking the booking despite her anecdote, just as it was her excuse for staying for the rest of the date, but I didn’t need the money badly enough to use the word “need,” and I doubt she did either. I was there because of my curiosity and my arrogance, and many escorts I’ve known, the expensive ones anyway, are the same. Barring a history of nonpayment, stalking, or physical abuse, we say yes because we believe we’re tough and special. We want to prove that our peers don’t have our unique skills—they can’t seduce or civilize the way we can. We also find ways to dress up the greed; we pretend we’re Robin Hood, reclaiming money from bad people to spend it among the good (ourselves, our lovers, our friends). We convince ourselves the money is better off anywhere else than with the Man—than with That Man, at least.
I took pride in being able to endure. I cherished my stubbornness as much as I coveted the money. Maybe that was my talent, my trade secret: that I’d inherited the selfish obstinance of my father. It was how I affirmed and sustained self-respect; I didn’t give up because I didn’t have to. And I wasn’t worried because I believed in my power and control. Sometimes they asked if I was afraid. One man tied me up and went through my purse, but I’d left my ID at home and he couldn’t tie a knot for shit—and he, like the man from Chicago, hovered over the DNS (“do not see”) list. (The BDSM agency he’d given as his reference said two girls had blacklisted him, but one hadn’t.) No, I wasn’t afraid. I felt no alarm, only disdain for his ineptitude.
Whatever the men told themselves about who had the upper hand, I was my only boss. And I was there to prove something to myself, to undergo a ritual. It felt less like I was testing myself than that I was testing the world, waiting for something to give. It wouldn’t be me.
Each day in that Chicago hotel room, I shut the bathroom door and stared at my own eyes in the mirror. I would have had the look I usually had in private with my reflection at work: the suspicious and conspiratorial gaze of a woman studying her double, seeing herself when she was not quite herself—I mean, seeing myself not quite myself. My self was in a vault; that was what made the work possible then. In a vault even I couldn’t open. It didn’t matter whether the date lasted three hours or three days, whether I adored him or could hardly stand him—I always left with a part of me he hadn’t touched, a piece locked in a place without a key, without a door. An invincible dignity. An irreducible core. No other moments in my life made me so aware of its existence.
THOUGH ROGER WAS ASSIDUOUSLY honest with me, he didn’t extend the same courtesy to his wife. I wondered about her, as I wondered about most clients’ spouses, with lazy yet broad curiosity. Did the wives permit their husbands’ infidelity while feigning ignorance? Were they relieved to be free from the imposition of sex? At home, did the spouses speak to each other lovingly, touch each other casually? Were they physically affectionate, or was all skin-to-skin contact gone?
Bed death was the excuse offered by clients who felt obligated to explain why they were in a committed relationship and also naked with me, and to their credit it was normally presented with resignation but not accusation or enmity. “We don’t have sex anymore” held both parties responsible—or neither, as if they were just adapting to a circumstantial change, like they’d sold their sailboat or their outdoor cat had gone missing. If there really had been years of little to no erotic intimacy, surely the wives could figure out how the husbands coped. Maybe the wives coped by using adultery, too.
ack
It delighted me to glimpse people’s shadowed spots, the hidden recesses rarely visited even by themselves. I didn’t understand why any wife would want to stay out. Didn’t marrying the man indicate a willingness, if not a desire, to know him completely by sharing these sorts of private proclivities? But the implication of sharing is different when it’s someone you’re bound to. For me, a divulgence was simply interesting or amusing, but for some wives, perhaps, it happened within a context of long-standing imbalance or failure. If they felt neglected or put upon or rejected in their own ways, those sides of their husbands may have been irritating, disconcerting, disappointing, or they may not have had the energy to care. I think I handled my privileged information with respect. But it didn’t mean much to me because, usually, neither did the man.
I WONDERED ABOUT THE wives, but I wondered about the husbands, too. Some of them had plenty of sex at home. And some had gorgeous wives, young and vibrant wives, at least from what I could see in the images that came up when I googled the man’s name during screening. (Unsolicited, they might show me pictures during our appointment, not only of their wives but of their kids, in-laws, pets, and homes. Because I’m nosy, I loved it.) One man said his wife was a former model; another bragged that his wife never ate carbs. Yet another showed me a picture of his wife in lingerie to illustrate her fitness. They knew how attractive their partners were and how much time their wives spent alone while they themselves were away for work (and “for work”). Yet they didn’t worry about being on the other end of the cheating. I suspect their complacency came from knowing they had the money, and that their wives were unlikely to forfeit their lifestyles and incite the gossipy local scandal of a divorce. The husbands may also have assumed their wives were too busy with the kids.
My allegiance was forever shifting between the two, the husband and his invisible wife. Sometimes a tender, mild-mannered client who was especially talented in bed would say his wife denied him and I’d feel so bad for him and so unhappy with her, angry that she was wasting him and hurting his feelings. Throw the fish back if you’re not going to eat it. More often, on my back, I’d think about how well I understood the wife, how refusal was the only conceivable stance; if I could have outsourced or refused this onerous chore, I would have. You may want to think this was a matter of personal preference, and a different woman would have been overjoyed to fuck the man in question. But I think some guys would be fobbed off on someone else until they died.