Bad Johns V. Bad Customers
I don’t have many ho-ing friends. I have a lot of ho acquaintances, but in the great sprawl that is Manhattan and its outer-boroughs, it’s rare I bump in to them. I work alone, in an in-call space I rent out for the privilege of working alone, and the other girls who use the space I see only briefly, as we hand it off. Usually she’s pulling on her clothes and I’m pulling mine off. My lovers and friends are far away, on the other side of the 49th, and my relationships here are too fresh to be deep. So when I have a bad client, I keep it to myself.
I almost feel I have a duty to make sex work seem like the Holy Grail of Work All of the Time. It’s fun and easy, it’s easy money, it means I work little and have lots of time to spend on my writing and I get to run around looking like a ho because I am one! Trashy clothing = fun times, right? I want everyone to think I’m making a healthy emotional choice picking sex work over office work, and most of the time this is true. But sometimes after work I’m tired and disgusted and some asshole stuck his tongue down my throat or pressured me into letting him worship my ass because I was too fucking exhausted to say no and those are the days when I never want to see a dick again and I think I should get the fuck out of this business.
Because the work I do is so stigmatized, I feel like it can’t have the plus and minus columns of a normal job. It can only be overflowing with pluses to justify what I do to other people. Relaying the bad to someone not in the industry, their disgust is sometimes palpable. The bad of sex work, the disgust that sex in of itself often generates, just seems too icky when measured against the bad of office work. Paper got jammed in the copier today v. client got a little too excited and stuck a finger where it shouldn’t go – who comes out on top?
However, the disgust expressed by some friends at some aspects of my job is also the disgust that the moral temple built around sex generally affects. Heterosexual outrage against buttsex (and believe me, hetereo guys can not wait to be fucked in the ass behind closed doors) is the same outrage feminists or friends display when I talk about paid to play golden showers. The icky of sex work is only icky becomes icky because it carries such a heavy moral weight. A bad experience makes me a victim in the eyes of a lot of my friends, and I can’t have that. I chose this work. I’m empowered by this work. Not sexually but financially. I make a stupid amount of money, I don’t work for anyone, and I certainly don’t work forty hours a week. That’s worth the occasional pushy john and wandering hand and I’ll chose it over the grueling halogen lights of temp work or the demanding bitchy customers at cafes any day.
