1. I’m at 7A trying to have a calm late night dinner with my boo. As always when we are in public, there is a black cloud trying to ruin our couple time. The lady at the next table is holding her table companion, and a large portion of the east side of the restaurant hostage. She is upset. She wants to be married in a year, but there are no good men. There are no good men because all the men she knows like strippers. There are two kinds of women: strippers who give blow jobs and women with brains. Men don’t like smart women with brains because they want blow jobs. I’m not sure what kind of desire economy experience she is drawing from (brainy women don’t give blow jobs?) but it’s clear to me that she hates me and she doesn’t even know it. I consider turning around and telling her I’m a stripper, that I have an honors degree in women studies and that I’d appreciate it if she would tone it down. I know, sitting here as a queer couple in my Audrey Hepburn on a yacht outfit, it would be taken with some amount of appropriate surprise, but I don’t because I’m terrible at confrontation and, anyways, it shouldn’t matter whether I was passing or educated or if I looked every bit the blow-job giving stripper she imagined. Later, as we leave the restaurant she calls after my boyfriend: Hey, sir, can I use your lighter? and then pardons herself. Sorry for thinking you were a guy. We were just neighbors, I’m so sorry. Thanks for the light. As X states, that was the least offensive thing she had said all night.
2. I have this client. A regular. He is always busy doing rich people things. He will walk in after a weekend at his cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, on his way to his Harvard reunion with Yo-Yo Ma ,or after he has just gotten back from breaking up a bad business deal in Tokyo. He lives permanently in Florida but he has an apartment overlooking central park that he invites me to frequently. He will tell me about the various corporate boards he sits on while my forearm is halfway up his ass. He will often forget to tip the fifty dollar extra for the fisting.
3. I’m with a friend at a wine bar in LES. We are both spending money we have made off our bodies. I as a sex worker and her as a model. She wants to talk about how we both exploit our bodies for money, whether or not we are successfully manipulating the male gaze for our own capital gain or whether we are being exploited. She talks about how tricky it is to navigate an unethical industry, how she has to prove to others she’s smart, whether or not we should apply to grad school, whether or not we’re both wasting our talents this year. She talks as if we are in the same industry, but we’re not. If I go to parties with the CEO of American Airlines or a top criminal lawyer they don’t know my real name and if we bump in eachother on the street, we pretend like we’ve never met. When she goes to parties with the Editor of Italian Vogue, it’s because she was Invited. E, I remind her, at least you can put modelling on your resume.
4. I often joke with my friends that my sex work memoir would be titled “Lee and the Titans of Industry.” As I rub literal shoulders with these strange rich men, the irony of the title hits me over and over. These men are not business contacts, they are not in my rolodex, they are something else. A strange subspecies of walking hundred dollar bills with dicks. I used to enjoy conversations with old men, now I am constantly waiting for the flip over. For the moment in conversation when we get to what’s really going. In their minds: how much will you do for how little? In my mind: how much will you pay for how little?
5. I’m watching the Matt Damon narrated film the Inside Job. It’s a simple documentary, the sub prime mortgage crisis spelled out in lay man’s terms. In it, they interview a woman who ran an escort business in the financial district before the bubble burst. She describes investment companies hiring girls out for top tier clients and executives, being given blank invoices for her to fill out. She states that before the crisis any girl who wasn’t charging 1000/hr at least was missing out. It’s a point about the excesses of Wall Street during the financial crisis, but also a jab at their morality. Y’know, how the far the mighty have fallen. It’s true, I work in a luxury industry - anyone who can afford to subcontract out their own masturbation certainly has an excess in pocket change - but it still grates a little. How often do I have to be reminded that I am a fallen woman?
