How do you write about sex that’s neither flawed nor complicated?

Sex with Gabriel is perfect. I feel absolutely comfortable - he’s forever hard and I’m forever wet and there are no hang ups, no mood swings, no neuroses. It’s seamless, uncomplicated and nice. I don’t know how to write about that.

I’m working on it.

*

Lately I’ve been flirting with girls. It started with a pang of lust for a girl in a summer dress, and then Gabriel and I started talking about arranging a threesome. I started paying attention to women again, and now there’s one woman in particular who’s caught my eye. Unfortunately, she’s young. Aggressive, pretty, vibrant, and young. I’ve been feeling her out slowly.

Today she said, “You’re everything I’m looking for. You’re older. You have more sexual experience.”

I do have more experience, more than she knows, but it made me pause when she said “older.” Older. I feel way too young to be the “older” one, but I’m older than Gabriel and I’m certainly older than this girl, so, of course, I am older. But older implies wiser, and I really don’t know if I’ve got anything useful to say.

In the previous post, monochromist posted a link to a Myers-Briggs test. I’m a solid INTP, the ’scholar’ or ‘architect’ type. I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs a few times, and I’ve tried to throw the outcome by shifting my responses to some of the questions, but it always comes back INTP, or introverted, intuitive, thinking, and perceiving. It characterizes me as quiet and analytical, introverted when it comes to ideas and extroverted when it comes to intuition, strong at grasping complex systems and terrible at expressing my emotions to people (in writing, less so). As an INTP, it also means that I tend to ignore hierarchies or distinctions in authority, and I prefer to relate to people as an equal. So I don’t generally acknowledge people who expect me to defer to them. And I don’t know what to do with people who defer to me.

(Well, sometimes I do.)

This girl, this pretty, bright thing in her early early twenties, says she wants to be my sexual protégé. She wants a primarily sexual relationship, but she wants me to guide her down some path of outrageous bisexual debauchery. Which I can certainly do. But while my gut response is to pull back and point her toward a different sort of woman, maybe someone who’s naturally dominant, not naturally coequal, I might try to override my habits just so I can explore this girl a bit.

On some level, I’m just curious. I’ve never had a sexual protégé before and something about that idea intrigues me.

The other night, Gabriel made a comment about my “secret life.”

“What secret life?” I said.

I felt like I’d been so transparent with him that it hit me hard when he said it. Especially since I’ve been hearing this a lot, that there’s a lot I don’t reveal about myself, that I’m restrained, or evasive, or veiled. I’ve heard this about my writing and I’ve heard it from men I sleep with. When I try to express myself, I only express myself in fragments, and I wonder if I’m stuck in some perpetually impressionistic whore-mode. When I blog, it’s deliberate, but it isn’t deliberate in my private life. I need to get un-stuck.

Fuckbuddy used to ask me if I felt like the clients were changing me. He said that he had a hard time believing I could do what I do and not change, and we’d argue over this, roughly, until the arguing would tumble into his bedroom and we’d fuck it out. I’ve mentioned here before that with clients I needed to maintain strict boundaries while pretending that those boundaries didn’t exist, so I learned to switch on and off emotionally. But I’ve always been good at switching on and off, so it becomes a chicken/egg question: did the sex work change me, or was I just well-suited for the work to being with?

I had drinks with an ex the other night, so I asked if I’ve always been so evasive and distant. He’s known me for almost a decade.

“Well,” he said. “You’ve always done your own thing.”

“What does that mean, though?”

“I don’t know. I just never felt welcome, you know?”

That hurt. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

I worry that I’m treating Gabriel like a client, in which case fuckbuddy might be right. But it’s much more unnerving to think that I’ve always been this way. And maybe I’ve just found comfort and an excuse in perpetual pseudonymity.

I used to write under my whore name for a short-lived collective of high-priced courtesans and among my notes was a blurb on etymology, specifically my dorklust for the history and transformation of words. That short post on etymology resulted in many gifts from clients, mostly old etymological dictionaries. It’s appropriate that I’ve just made use of those gifts to look up ‘pornography,’ a word rooted in prostitution.

Pornography

1857, “description of prostitutes,” from Fr. pornographie, from Gk. pornographos “(one) writing of prostitutes,” from porne “prostitute,” originally “bought, purchased” (with an original notion, probably of “female slave sold for prostitution;” related to pernanai “to sell,” from PIE root per- “to traffic in, to sell,” cf. L. pretium “price”) + graphein “to write.”

That is to say, in the beginning, which was not very long ago, the term ‘pornography’ referred to written (-graph) descriptions of prostitution (porno-) and all the dirty dirty acts that prostitution entails (the sucking of cock, the fucking of ass). Since I’m here, I should mention that the term and concept of pornography is a nineteenth-century invention, though what we now call pornographic is as old as sex itself.

Eventually ‘pornography’ came to refer to salacious written and visual material, or, if we follow the legal definition in obscenity statutes, pornography is devoid of artistic value and serves only to stimulate us sexually. Unfortunately, for some of us, it’s the artistic value that makes us wet.

Or hard.

The other day, after we’d hauled through our last day at the hotel, our photographer and friend turned to us and said, “So, how does it feel to be a pornographer?”

He was referring to the fact that we’d just made some dirty, pretty pictures, including a set in a room where Helmut Newton once lived, on a desk where he once worked, modeled here by Kasia:

My response was that it felt good.

*

Kasia and I met virtually, at first. This was a long time ago, years even, and since then we’ve come to spend a fair bit of time together with a shared interest in sexuality. We both have a background in the visual arts, we’ve both traveled extensively (maybe compulsively), we’ve both tested our sexual limits over the course of our lives. And we both have a strong desire to see something better than porn. She calls it postmodern porn. I call it art porn. Maybe it’s post-porn. We just know sex deserves something better.

We started working on a website in the abstract back then, and after several false starts with different designers, we’re finally at a point where we can actually conceive of a launch. We’re not ready yet - we’re still testing for bugs - but we will be. And I’ve been waiting a long, long time to be able to say that much.

While we’re still figuring all of this out, we know what we like and we also know that there’s so much that hasn’t been explored yet, and that’s what’s exciting. Our interest was in creating a space for expression that’s too explicit for mainstream media channels and too experimental/creative/beautiful/challenging for the adult industry. Our thinking was that if we built a space for it, then maybe we’d see more inspiring sexual content in the future, the sort of content that turns us on, makes us think, and leaves an indelible impression. Or to use Kasia’s words, “to house a space that gives permission. To publish kinky shit, beautiful cunts, dirty thoughts and unspeakable fantasies.”

(So if you have something that might interest us, please get in touch. Photo, video, audio, text, illustration all interest us. And we’re always looking for models.)

This is a long-winded introduction to an introduction. Or maybe just a long, decompressive post after our trip to LA. My mind’s still going and I’m flipping through some gorgeous photos of some beautiful naked skin, and that leaves me prone to rambling.

(You’re right, London Chick. It’s FGT. You’ve got a fantastic memory.)

I’m in Los Angeles with Kasia. Our space here is great and from our balcony the city is a shimmery, liquid mass. New York glitters at night. LA shimmers.

Kasia shimmers, too. She knows how to dress for LA, but me, I’m wearing black. Again.

We’ve been brainstorming with a likeminded friend; we’re here to work on a project - a website - that’s finally in its last stages of development, and it’s been a long, long, long fucking labor of love. I’ll tell you more about this soon. We both will.

And while I’m enjoying my surreal stay in LA, I really miss Gabriel and his full-body lust and his perpetually hard cock. I miss him like an addict; I have repetitive thoughts and distracting pangs of lust. My pussy throbs and I need to refocus my attention to the task at hand. It doesn’t help that the task at hand is largely sexual.

Gabriel, I miss fucking you.  The next time I bring myself off I’m going to think of throwing my head over the back of the sofa while you fuck my throat. By which I mean, I miss you. Sweetly and deeply.

*

A number of you have emailed me and I really need to apologize for my radio silence. I’ll respond soon. Whore’s honor.

You know that post about Dave Elms? Over the past few days, I noticed a few spikes in my site’s traffic coming from sites I’d never heard of. At some point, I clicked a few of the trackbacks, just to see what these sites were about, and discovered that they were review sites and the posts leading to my blog had to do with Dave Elms. What exactly, I don’t know — the posts were deleted by the site moderators before I had a chance to see them.

I figured I’d give these sites the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the posts were horribly offensive and the site moderators thought they would crack down on the rampant misogyny. It could happen.

Last night I saw another one of these sites sending a surge of traffic to my blog. This time I manage to see the post before it was deleted. It was extremely brief, mentioning only that I had written about Elms and it included a link. I shrugged, left the site, went off to brush my teeth, and decided to check again before I shut down for the night. When I did, I saw that the post had been deleted by moderators.

Why men give these sites any credence whatsoever is beyond me.

Here, I just want to repost Chicago Diva’s comment because it’s important:

Dave Elms is getting everything he deserves. He developed a site for reviewing the providers that started out cute and entertaining at first and turned into a huge opportunity to treat women like trash. I had several reviews up on TER and almost all of them where great. I had several clients tell me that they had submitted reviews to TER only to find out that they had been changed or totally erased. On many occasions I would post on the TER board to solicit new clients and would have negative post placed under it each and every time. One client tried to stick up for me and was banned and then TER accused us of self posting. I had no clue who this client was but negative rumors where spread that all the clients where comments from me. In addition all my reviews where removed from the site. I for one am sick of this site and the negative publicity it gives to providers for standing up for themselves. In addition, its even more sick and disgusting to know that this man has extorted sex from women to stay on the board. The other part is that women in the business need to stop letting guys like this gain so much power that we don’t control our own bodies and destinies. I feel men should not rely on this site for reviews and expectations for service, because many of the girls that have good reviews only have them because they have given away free sex to clients or the owners of TER. Please stop giving TER the power to control you business.

I couldn’t agree more.

He was kneeling there with his cock in his hand, his come dripping down the sides of my breasts. He looked puzzled.

“I came,” he said. “But I didn’t, you know, come.”

I was pretty dazed, so I was having a hard time processing confusing statements.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I came, but I didn’t have an orgasm.”

We both looked at his cock. I’d heard of the opposite, of someone having an orgasm without ejaculating, but I’d never heard of someone ejaculating without an orgasm. It sounded like a bad situation, like a really unsatisfying sneeze.

“That’s no good,” I said.

We continued to stare at his cock.

“I, uh… I could just put it back in,” he said.

As a general rule, if someone’s been fucking me and I’ve been enjoying it, they can always “just put it back in.”

And then he did come. And when he did, he ejaculated again.

Just when I thought I had a pretty decent grasp on the workings of the male body, something like this happens and I’m mystified.

Dave Elms runs a popular website called The Erotic Review. It’s where clients post reviews of escorts by assigning a numerical value (between one and ten) and a detailed description of the encounter. It’s also where many escorts find their business.

In a little-known success story, TheEroticReview.com has come to dominate the country’s prostitution scene, which is increasingly migrating from the street corner to the Internet.

Elms was arrested recently on charges unrelated to his website, and this merited a mention in the front section of the New York Times on Tuesday, by Matt Richtel.

When I started years ago, the woman who ran the agency asked me if if I’d heard of TER. I hadn’t. I kept to myself, did my own thing, and found my clients through other means. But while pseudo-documentaries still focus on the street walker, sex work moved online years ago, and sites like TER dominate. According to Quantcast, TER gets between 800,000 and one million unique visitors per month, and about 13 million hits per month.

As time went on and I connected with other women, I started to hear the stories, about how agencies paid Elms to inflate the reviews of their lady-merchandise. I’d heard that some agencies were shut out by Elms while others were favored, among them NY Confidential, which was busted in 2004 to subsequently unleash the exceptionally sleazy and excessively vocal Jason Itzler upon our media outlets, a man who likes to call himself “the king of all pimps,” because he’s a moron (we now know he was the “king of all pimps” because he paid Elms to inflate reviews, and I’d venture it’s also because he has a small penis). It’s counterproductive to take bribes to alter reviews, given that the supposed intention of a site like TER is to give johns at least the illusion of objectivity, but then TER is no Zagat’s. Maybe integrity isn’t such a priority.

Then I started to hear about the extortion. Women who had earned legitimately favorable reviews, and had grown dependent on TER for their livelihood, were being contacted by Elms directly. He wanted money from them too. And he wanted money not to alter those reviews but to simply keep them up. When those escorts didn’t comply with his demands, Elms removed their reviews until they did comply.

I’d heard that clients who posted legitimate reviews about these non-compliant escorts were having the reviews rejected or removed. When clients complained, they were banned from the site.

That’s what I’d heard.

I’d also heard that some women were told that they needed to meet with Elms directly if they wanted to keep their reviews up.

And those who did meet with Elms were forced to perform sex acts, either by coercion or by threats of violence.

The house in Hawthorne, Calif., where Mr. Elms lives is modest, with a well-kept yard. The only unusual signs are a surveillance camera over the porch and the late-model Mercedes sports car parked out front with the vanity license plate “Will She.”

And then I’d heard that women were being raped, blackmailed, and assaulted not just by Elms, but by other employees of his site as well. It was becoming clear to me that TER wasn’t a review site at all, but a means for Elms to freely extort money and sex acts. And if women resist, there’s always the threat of violence.

[T]he police were called to a hotel where they found him with 3.8 grams of cocaine and a loaded semi-automatic weapon. A prostitute was there and said Mr. Elms had forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, but there was not enough evidence to press charges on that accusation.

This is unacceptable.

I’d venture Elms and Itzler suffer from the same feelings of penile inadequacy, what with Itzler’s pimp-king sobriquet and Elms’ coke-addled cock, a cock so ineffectual that it requires persistent coercion and the threat of death to become even remotely compelling, but what do I know. I’m only a professional (former) man-fucker.

*

It’s time these women have some form of real recourse.

___________________

Follow-up: Through a trackback, I found this post at a blog called Feminist Law Professors. Referring to the last paragraph from the NYTimes piece, regarding the woman who was forced to perform a sex act at gunpoint, she writes,

And the reason there was “not enough evidence to press charges,” it goes unsaid, is that the testimony of “the prostitute” about her sexual assault is considered inadequate and unreliable, despite the incontrovertible presence of a gun.

Last week, I was asked to give my response to an episode of Showtime’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl, the British import based on Belle de Jour’s blog and book, which airs tonight.

(I have a hard time remembering the name because it resembles the title of every escort memoir I’ve ever seen. The term ’secret diary’ is sort of an interesting device, though. It suggests something prurient and hidden, as if it’s some lost relic and has only recently been brought to light.)

Anyway, watching that episode was a strange experience, strange because while the show wasn’t particularly good, it brought up a lot of memories for me. Like Belle, I worked for a high-priced agency for a while, so I recognized the midday call for a gig, the separation of identities, the mercenary attitudes, and the little details, like how to enter a hotel, or the mental notes we make on clients. I recognized the fun of playing with a kinky client for the first time, as well as the quiet panic of letting your real name slip. But these familiar details were dipped in cliche and some of the scenes were painfully lame, so the show felt both real and fake. There was also a palpable emptiness, which was probably unintentional, but telling. I’ve been thinking about that, about the show and the reality.

Most of the women I know who’ve been call girls or courtesans have very rich interior lives. Many are very thoughtful about their approaches to clients and recognize that they play a very therapeutic role (this is something outsiders probably won’t immediately understand). Some of these women pursue careers in activism or they develop their own businesses or pursuits. Some travel the world. I knew a great fetish worker who went on to become an escort, and she was a fascinating, restless creature with a truly spectacular ass and a Masters degree in political science - she hooked to pay for her trips to Turkey and South Asia. I know another who is easily the wisest woman I know, who is very thoughtful about sexuality and humanity and life. Actually, most sex workers I’ve known have been wise beyond their years, with startling clarity on their lives, and I wouldn’t describe any of them as superficial. This isn’t to say the women I’ve known represent the majority, but I don’t think they’re that unusual either. At least, not among independents.

Working for an agency is very different from working as an independent (I did both). It’s cynical, mechanical, and mercenary. Superficially, it can be glamorous, and this is probably because there’s an importance placed on image and fantasy. But the demands of being on-call make it difficult to develop a life of your own, and I’ve always had this rule to maintain a career outside of the sex work. I remember trying to schedule some language classes while working for an agency, but every time I put a deposit on something that required regular attendance, I’d be called out on a gig or a string of travel appointments. And the pressure to take days off of work was relentless.

When I watched the Belle de Jour show (I’ve already forgotten the name and I can’t be bothered to scroll up), it brought up memories of this, and it conveys - to me, at least - a fairly hollow existence. It made me think of the women I met through the agency. With the exception of one or two who focused on their own careers, most of the women just went straight for the money, with no goals, no side projects, and no exit strategy, and that was due in part to the unpredictable nature of agency work. It’s hard enough to protect, let alone cultivate, a private life. I knew a young twentysomething who (unwisely) used her money to support her boyfriend, and had no plans to finish college. I met another who spent all of her money on shoes and put nothing aside for the future. I knew several who just didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives and generally felt depressed and unmoored, and working on-call didn’t help.

I haven’t seen the whole series so I don’t know how the plot will play out, but I’m sensing that they’ve missed an opportunity for complexity, or at least character development. They’re trying to making a light-hearted show about something that has, at its heart, the beginnings of an existential crisis, and they’re tuning it out. So it feels empty and the humor feels nervous, almost defensive, like someone off-screen keeps urging everyone to keep it light light light. And bawdy! Bawdy fun!

And in response to this show, TV critics and journalists prove once again that they know fuck-all about sex work.* On cue, they squeal that the show is glamorizing prostitution, and they do this by focusing on the sex itself. It irritates me that I’m still seeing perfectly intelligent people claim that prostitutes can’t enjoy what they do, among them Alessandra Stanley, who wrote in today’s NYTimes, “‘Secret Diary’ indulges the common male fantasy that whores truly enjoy prostitution.” The show is after a book and a blog both written by a woman, about her own experience, and Stanley’s claiming it’s written to a man’s fantasy? Because she enjoys sex?

And how about the common female fantasy to be a whore?

Or how about the possibility that some of us have professional-strength sex drives?

Even better, Stanley writes that Belle “keeps insisting that she really does enjoy the sex and has no underlying problems,” as if the opposite were true. That spectacular display of condescension feels familiar.

Aren’t we past this, yet? Is this even a question? Are journalists so incompetent, so incapable of carrying out the most basic research, that they can only assume that sex, for us, is intolerable? Or are these journalists really just uninterested in sex themselves and can’t resist transferring their sex-is-gross attitudes to the women who do it by choice? And why aren’t they capable of parsing the differences among sex workers, between those who have financial leverage and those who do not, those who are trafficked and those who act out of choice, those who have options and those with none, and so on? This isn’t rocket science. This isn’t even advanced sociology.

I don’t want to defend this show because it isn’t very good, and there are plenty of things to complain about, but failing to meet some flawed expectations about sex work shouldn’t be one of them. And with another show about call girls on the horizon, this one based in New York and produced by Darren Star, I think I’m going to need to brace myself for much more of this to come.

Bring on the platitudes.

-

* Susannah Breslin is one of the very few exceptions.

I have an aggressive former client who won’t let up. He called last night. He called the night before. He called the night before that. I open up my email account and there he is, subject line, “Where are you?” and “Call me” and “I’m in New York” and “Why won’t you return my calls?” This has been going on for months, even though we’ve only met twice. And the tone of his emails is becoming more hostile and aggressive.

Months.

When I took clients, there was always some hum of anxiety in my gut, a fear that one of these guys would do something destructive or controlling. That hum is starting to feel like an alarm.

I straddle Gabriel’s skinny hips while he lies back perfectly flat with his hands behind his head, his erection hard against his stomach. I’m distracted by the crease where his bicep meets his deltoid - I think it’s one of those details that’s inexplicably hot to me, like his hips and his hands. I want to run my tongue along that line.

Outside, it’s humid and hot. I grew up in a hot climate - I’m used to high temperatures - but the air here is so thick and damp that the street dirt sticks to your skin. You’d think summer storms would signal a break in the humidity, but then you wake up the next morning and your summer dress feels like too much clothing.

I hold his cock in my hands and stroke it in a slow, lazy way while we talk. At some point, he reaches forward and puts his hands on my waist to pull me against him so he can take my breast in his mouth. I’m leaning over him, his hard-on pressed between my pelvis and his stomach, and we’re moving in sleepy slow motion, his hands on my back, his mouth at my shoulder, and then I’m flipped onto my stomach, my legs spread. I grip the corner of the mattress for stability.

I’ve been gripping furniture all week. I’ve got a fading bruise on my hip from the frame of his sofa. And when we took pictures of my pussy the other day, I noticed light bruises on the insides of my thighs. Little coital contusions.

I’m bruised from days and days of this, from the furniture and the friction and the thrusting and the humping. It’s summer, it’s hot, it’s skirt season, and I need to remind myself to cross my legs.

*

The other night, I saw Philip Weiss on a re-run of the Colbert Report. He was promoting his article in New York Magazine, the now notorious think piece that attempted to complicate our assumptions about monogamy. The article included an odd and off-base attempt to describe what I look like, based on rumor, and while I was interested to hear what he had to say, especially given the criticism his piece received, the first thing I thought was, “So that’s what he looks like.” I hadn’t realized I was curious.

Gabriel was with me at the time. We were on the sofa, my legs draped across his lap.

“So would you fuck him?” he asked.

I watched Weiss for a bit and said, “Yeah. Probably.”

Then Gabriel called me a slut and we made out.