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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.
the last few sentences are again crazy
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.
i was never propelled by the same thing exactly but this confession moves me nonetheless
[verbs doesnt really seem like the right word here tbh but i get what she means]
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.
lollll
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.
rough
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