When I first started working as an escort, I quickly discovered that most men just wanted vanilla sex. Some in-person clients did want to incorporate violence, but only when they were the recipients. Even the most casual research will bear out the fact while dominatrices can make a good living kicking the * out of men, female submissives are so rarely in demand that most have to work as a switch in order to stay afloat.
Those who deeply distrust the sex industry, have been personally harmed by it, find it threatening or who associate it only with exploitation, often get very angry when escorts (or academics who study sex workers] claim some clients dont want sexual interaction.
But its true: some dont. Ive been hired by men who never asked me to get *, never requested that I touch their *. Theres always conversation, regardless of the other activities during a date.
Clients talk to me about their parents (especially their fathers) and about failing marriages or life after divorce. They often show me pictures of their children and, sometimes, spouses.
The longer Ive worked, the more it seems that the sex is often a front. Its an entry point that allows men to make their real request (for affection, understanding, and connection) while still satisfying stereotypical ideas of masculinity.
What most men want is a great romance or, at the very least, a great friendship. They want to feel like theyre falling in love. They want to feel loved in return.
The clients who do want to have sexand of course, there are manydont want that sex to be uncomfortable or unpleasant for me. They want to me to take pleasure in the act as well.
They want to feel attractive and competent and gentle and attentive. Many of them are all of those things. If they express guilt about paying for sex, I dont try to talk them into feeling otherwise.
When one man said he should stop seeing me because the money he spent on our appointments should be going toward his kids college funds, I replied, Well, if it makes you feel any better, its going toward mine. (I never saw him again.)
Yes, Ive met men who didnt respect my boundaries and who harmed me, inadvertently or purposefully. But such men were few and far between, and I refused to see them again.
Not every man who visits a strip club, watches a clip of porn, or pays for sexual companionship wants to commit an act of violence against a woman. Rapists and murders are the ones who want to rape and strangle people; some of them hire escorts, some dont.
When
Melissa Farley tells The Economist that men who hire prostitutes are not nice guys looking for a normal date. They regularly attempt to rape and strangle women, shes not talking about my experience.
Farleys cloudy thinking rests on the belief that a mans sexual interest in a woman is fundamentally disrespectful, fundamentally abusive, and fundamentally wrong.
But whats wrong is the stigma surrounding sex work. In the professional world, there is no other service arrangement in which clients are accused of hating those whom they hire.
Not janitorial work, furniture moving, notoriously dangerous meat-factory work, or any other job that requires use of the service providers body in grueling, unhealthy ways.
