On Thinking Yourself a Tourist: Sex Work & Class

There’s this line in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, where the protagonist (dirty old scholar that he is) imagines the escort he frequents making fun of him. He believes himself wise, saying “He has a shrewd idea of how prostitutes speak among themselves about the men who frequent them, the older men in particular. They tell stories, they laugh, but they shudder, too, as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night. Soon, daintily, maliciously, he will be shuddered over. It is a fate he cannot escape.”

The protagonist, being a a former lady’s man and a member of the upper-middle class (professor) imagines himself not only outside of the shudder, but also with the ability to peer into the secret life of his Discreet Escort (who is gendered, classed, and raced differently from him). He imagines himself a tourist in the world of sex work, able to flit in and out of the class he enters when he goes to the brothel and imagines his education gives him insight into the world of the prostitutes that other men can’t access.

There are certain professions that assign themselves third-wall hubris (also known as the Third Person Effect). They observe and move through spaces - antropologists, media critics, writers, etc. - supposedly objectively, relatively untouched by the circumstances they’ve chosen to surround themselves with. They wield  ‘choice’ as a protective barrier that makes them objective observers over active participants. No matter how close their bodies bump up against what they’re observing; the war, that censored song, their ho, they are first and foremost outside of this experience. They have chosen to be here, and can leave at any time.

This happens, too, when members of the upper-class foray into the working class. Of course, it’s always an upper class coming down from the mountain to visit the working class. The working class simply can’t afford to be tourists in the upper-class, marking yourself a visitor of any sort comes with implicit capital privileges. It’s a notion I’ve been working through as I try to process my own internalized sex worker stigma, which is bound up in the class I think I occupy with my white skin, ivy league college degree, and middle-class family.

I had this client the other night. He’s been here once before. He’s youngish, late twenties, early thirties, and he comes late at night. He wants me to list all the men I saw that night and what I did with them. It doesn’t matter if he’s into what I did to them, his focus is on the sheer volume - not the specifics. His fetish is the fact that he’s paying me. He wants me to list the clients I saw, tell him how many, how old they were, how much money they gave me. He asked me how old I was. “Twenty-two,” he repeated. “I get to buy twenty-two.” I was on the verge of telling him that, actually, no, you get to buy a specific service with a twenty-two year old for an allotted amount of time, but he sensed my loathing and semi-corrected himself by tacking on a ‘half an hour.’

He disclosed to me that he was a writer. He’d been working on a semi-autobiographical novel about his ‘wacky adventures’ in college. He went to Journalism grad school at Harvard (I think 40% of my clients are Harvard boys, eck). I had this flash of him as a doughy faced college kid; him on his friend’s yacht, taking weekend flights to South America to sex tour Brazil. Did his wacky adventures include going to see a twenty-two year old sensual masseuse?

Something clicked inside my brain and I realized just how much I hated this man I was slowly jerking off. That asshole, using his fucking privilege to write for Newsweek and the AP and to come get a massage from me, while he aspired to write for the neo-liberal hole that is the Economist. In my mind, I made a pact with him. If he was going to write about this I was going to write about it, too. And if he published it, I would get it published and use his real fucking name. 

I finished up and told him he should keep his cum. He was confused. “You know, you should keep it. Like a souvenir or a memento. You paid a lot of money for that sperm. It’s worth something now. 160 dollars, actually.” 

I asked him what the authorial tone of his autobiography was. Was it some sort of Tucker Max shit? No, he said, it’s more….”illuminating.”

I realize now what really pissed me off about him was that he got to be a writer, paid and played, while I schlepped dick so I can write in my free time. We both were pretending to be tourists here. Me, a young professional who moonlights as a sex worker and him, a wacky college guy who visits massage parlors so he can write about the ‘gritty’ experiences of real life. Really, though, neither of us are tourists or ‘just visiting’ this situation. He’s still a regular who pays to get off and this is still the best paying job I’ve ever had.