The Sex Sensei

I don’t know if the burden of stigma ever completely lifts, but I’ve found it’s gotten lighter with my transition to full service sex work. For a while, the issue was my partners’ comfort with the idea. For one of them, it was an issue of masculinity. What would it say about him, as a man, if I could be bought? Of course, there’s no “buying” me, there’s only renting time with a very specially tailored version of me. It’s not the Selena who sometimes wears a mustache, or who hardly shaves, given the choice. But for the right price, you can use my hole for a while. That is something that’s for sale. And for whatever reason, that says something about the men who are my partners? Even though I’m free to have sex with whomever I want within my nonmonogamous relationships... But when money enters into the equation, somehow the situation changes substantially? Which isn’t to invalidate this nuance. I do believe that the guidelines around sex within nonmonogamy can be incredibly nuanced and specific. But I’ve never been good at rules.

Stripping was incredibly difficult and demanding. To begin with, you have to perform peak cis realness. If you’re on the femme side, it’s high femme with makeup, jewelry, the outfits and shoes, lashes, hair extensions and wigs galore. You shave or wax every inch of your body, and spend six to ten hours propositioning strangers, the majority of whom will reject you with varying degrees of politeness. You must constantly reinforce your boundaries while performing sensuality. You will ruin your knees and come home with more bruises than you ever thought possible. And there is no guarantee that you will leave work with any money. You could leave with $40, your body still hairless, your baby hairs cemented to your forehead, and $100 worth of shoes killing your feet. For masc strippers, there is the dieting, traveling like a snail with your entire livelihood in your trunk: costumes, spare cash, a speaker system, hygiene products, snacks, and directions to a gig that could turn sideways at any point. They spend hours at the gym chiseling their muscles, they shave, wax, thread eyebrows, mix their own music, run their businesses, and travel everywhere at a moment’s notice to catch gigs when they can. We all face rampant sexual assault. We’ve all been stiffed or underpaid. We all nurse our injuries on our off days.

There’s also the issue of the whorearchy among both *male* and *female* strippers. While we all know some of us are doing more than others, and we all can kinda agree that customers can be unruly assholes, we still blame those willing to perform full service for market issues. “How can I compete with her when she’s giving blow jobs?” “How can I book gigs like him, when he’s fucking the bachelorettes?” Beyond the intergroup shaming, we also see managers penalizing those who perform full service. I’ve had plenty of friends threatened into tipping more, blackmailed with backroom tape footage. It’s not safe to be a stripper, particularly one who is also a whore.

In a way, I feel significantly safer switching to escorting. I think that, having spent so much time finding ways to do everything but full service, I’d reinforced the shame I was seeking to dismantle. Because in the end, I don’t feel bad about having sex. Sex in itself isn’t shameful. Sex with strangers isn’t shameful. Yet sex with strangers for money somehow equalled shameful? Somehow it was more shameful than getting fingerbanged in VIP. Maybe it was the club environment that augmented the weight of stigma. Having to walk from the champagne room smelling like a latex condom was always a hard one. Latex has such a specific odor. I’d always imagine it was more detectable than it was. The irony was how many of my fellow dancers were out about being whores. They’d laugh about an expensive blow job or a limp dick grasping at life for some anal. I wanted to be that brave, but I also didn’t want to risk losing my job. It wouldn’t take much for management to get rid of me.

Yet, I miss it. I miss the hustle and glory of bringing home thousands of dollars in a single night. Nowadays that’s a lot more sporadic. Maybe once every few months I get a lucky GKM outcall when he’s feeling generous and flushed with cash. But that used to just be a Saturday.

Still, there are a surprising number of benefits to whoring. Firstly, I can be myself. I don’t have to pretend as if there isn’t any Black in me. I don’t have to wear straight wigs or extensions. While I am certain people discriminate against me, I don’t have to directly interact with bigots. If they aren’t interested in my ad, they simply scroll past. If they are interested, it’s because they like me. And I don’t need to obsessively remove every bit of body hair. I have clients who prefer my hair and request that I grow it out. I’ve had a few people ask to stroke my armpit hair, strangely enough. Longshoreman even requests that I wear a mustache every now and then. I don’t have to tone down my queerness as much I did at the club. Secondly, sex on soft beds is signficantly lower impact than dancing on hard wooden stages. Pole dancing is painful, but floor work is brutal. I was running through my cartilage, grinding away my patella. There were Sundays when I could only limp after a Saturday shift. Of course, I miss the bangin’ body I had back when I was killing myself for it, but I’m a lot healthier now. I also have paused the hearing loss I was incurring working at the club with loud music blaring. There was a point where I was very concerned the damage would be so significant, I would need hearing aids at a young age. Not that there’s anything wrong with hearing aids, but I didn’t want to ruin something I’m lucky to have. Thirdly, there is no question as to how much I’ll leave an outcall with at the end of the night. I know what I’ll make. Sometimes I’m lucky and I get more if a client has a request that raises the price point, but generally the number is set in stone. Nobody has tried to haggle me down. While the money isn’t incredible right now, it’s steady. I don’t have to deal with the heartbreak of leaving the club after a bad night, short of my goal, having gotten all glammed up for nothing. I also don’t have to wait. I know that an outcall will take approximately four hours, plus an hour give or take, of drive time. I don’t have to spend hours twiddling my thumbs, waiting for a serious customer to walk in. When I get to work, I dedicate my time to working, rather than feeling underutilized. Fourth and finally, I don’t feel ashamed. I am what I am. There’s no beating around the bush. Well maybe there is, if it’s what we agreed upon. I don’t have to sneak around judgmental coworkers or predatory managers looking for a cut. I’m accountable to myself. I feel like I’ve leveled up and joined the community of strumpets I’d always admired.

Of course there are dangers. The first meeting with a new client is always a little frightening. I worry about them harming me. I also worry about accidentally running into a cop. Using tax dollars to bust consenting adults engaging in a sex for money transaction is an attrocious waste of time and money. I hate cops so much. Usually I’m good at sniffing them out, but the fear is always at the back of my mind. For the first time in my life, my primary source of income is illegal, which means I am accepting some risk. As I perform the antistigma work of discussing my life candidly, I also know that I am putting a lot of trust in your hands my dear readers. And I hope in the end my trust is not misplaced. If it is eventually, well, I’ve had a good run of it.

***

As much as I would prefer to primarily focus on female clients, they are few and far between. I might get invited to do an occasional Zoom party or fundraiser, but it’s not often the deeply intimate work I perform with my male clients. The exception is of course, Lily. We are approaching the one year anniversary of Cassandra’s passing. January 29th is around the corner, and Lily and her friends are planning a series of commemorative events they can attend while social distancing. She has been taking Covid precautions particularly seriously, and hardly sees anybody outside of her Covid bubble. I’ve still never met Lily in person, and in all honesty, I can’t imagine it at this point. I feel like it would ruin the suspension of disbelief we have going on. It would exacerbate our age differences, and make it a bit more difficult for her to consider me her “sex sensei,” as she’s fondly taken to calling me.

I don’t remember when Lily and I first started talking. In our earlier days, I was throwing anything and everything against the wall. I tried strip games; sexercize challenges; assigning erotica writing homework; all the good and bad ideas I could facilitate doing via video chat. And while there were intermittent high points along our explorative journey, we finally hit our stride when we turned off the video and began reading erotica. I started off by having us switch who was reader and who was listener. I wanted Lily to find her voice, and break out of her “oh god” habit (her words not mine). She wanted to expand her erotic vocabulary, and I figured the best way to do that was to read the work of the experts. We began with Sinclair Sexsmith’s stories--who if you’re a lesbian and not familiar, it’s time to take a dive--then a bit of lipstick lesbian fiction with Alison Grey; some saphic pop work by Harper Bliss; and a bunch of duds not even worth listing. The struggle with lesbian erotica is sorting through the numerous men who have tried their hands at it, only to make clumsy, voyeuristic works that inevitably have a line about breast size and manage to objectify every female character in the story. The other stumbling block are all the exhausted stories of “her first time with a woman,” stories about “otherwise straight” women who are “turned gay” for a night, or worse stories about “straight” women who date and marry men, but who go on annual lesbian retreats. They’re such clit boner killers. In the world of free erotica, you pretty quickly hit a wall with viable lesbian erotica. Lately, I’ve been spending my coin to purchase anthologies hoping to sift the gold from the silt. Which creates another issue: to better my sessions with Lily, I’m ending up investing a significant chunk of time and money. Now, what I do for her is a labor of love. My goal was never to rake it in with our sessions, but it can become a bit of a mental block knowing I’m making about $20 per hour of sex labor. Still, my first foray into sex therapy has been rewarding, even if not financially. What began as tentative steps toward reengaging a piece of her that was tightly woven into her partnership with Cassandra, has blossomed into an array of bold explorations. The first of which began around the end of an unrequited crush.

Lily had for months pined after one of her somewhat distant coworkers. The woman is a busy single mother, and Lily had played an extended edition of Shrodinger’s Lesbian Dating Game: where it’s not a date, unless she agrees it’s a date, in which case, it is a date? They went on many *not* dates, from Zoom cocktail nights, Instagram soundbaths, to socially distanced outdoor porch hangs. Lily pulled out all the stops, preparing delicious drinks for the woman she was courting, and even agreed to cat sitting while the woman and her daughter took a mini vacation. For months, we pinned red strings across a metaphorical cork board of possible signs and signals that may or may not have indicated her love interest’s interest. After a while, I’d just say

Me: You know what would clarify these questions is direct communication.

Lily: That would be too easy!

I just wanted them to get together. In her mind, Lily was already considering the possibility of co-parenting a ten-year-old after years of having no interest in the offspring hustle. If her next soulmate came with a spawn, sobeit! Who was Lily to question the workings of fate? But in the end it was all for naught.

The night that Lily decided firmly that she would confess her intentions, I was quite worried for her mental health. It’s always a major risk, and after our confusing assortment of clues, I had no idea how things would go. Luckily, around that time, Lily had created a number of dating profiles. While part of our sessions are dedicated to erotica and phone sex, another significant junk is dedicated to talking through her app explorations. We crafted her Her profile taglines; discussed conversations with her matches; and strategized posting ads on Lex. Along the way, she’d randomly matched with a nonbinary person in Maine. We couldn’t figure out how the algorithm had paired her with someone so not at all in Southern California, but Lily decided

Lily: After six feet, who cares?

Six feet or six thousand miles apart, what’s the difference during a pandemic? I didn’t entirely agree, but the two seemed to hit it off, and that was all that mattered to me. It didn’t take long before they’d even passed the hurdle of sexting, which I was proud to have at least somewhat been able to facilitate. It was like seeing my student graduate with honors.

When Lily told me that her original crush had rejected her, she followed up by reassuring me

Lily: I kinda just transferred those feelings over to Maine.

I was grateful she had a distraction, even if this crush was perhaps even more impossible than the first. The two of them continued talking, as Lily and I pressed on, perusing the apps for more proximal matches. She would bounce responses to other ads off of me, to make sure that her personality was shining through or assure that it wasn’t getting lost in verbose specificity. Eventually, she met some she really liked, and after a bit of wrastlin’ managed to pin the person down for a Zoom date.

They were forty, so a decade younger than Lily, but still more age appropriate compared to Maine, who was a mere thirty-years-old. The person lived not too far from Lily, and serendipitously happened to work in the very specific field Lily works in. They didn’t waste time getting to their intention: they wanted to get fucked. That was the primary goal. They didn’t want anything serious because they had just ended a long-term relationship and were planning to return home to Idaho. They just wanted to be fucked, ideally dominated, and that was all. Undeterred by a challenge, per usual, Lily accepted their terms and the two agreed to meet up for sex.

Again, I felt like the nervous parent, waiting at home to hear how the night panned out. It would be the first time Lily had had sex since Cassandra’s passing. I worried it might be triggering. I didn’t know if it would exacerbate her sense of loss, feeling the difference between Cassandra’s body and her new lover’s body. I checked my phone throughout the evening, waiting anxiously for an update.

Lily: It was great! So glad I did it.

Me: Amazing! Congratulations! I can’t wait to hear about it.

Lily: Can’t wait to tell you about it.

If I was a crying fae, I would have cried in that moment. I was so relieved it had all gone down without a hitch. I was impressed with Lily’s bravery and sense of adventure, but she’d demonstrated it time and time again. Even involving me in her life was an act of bravery. I was so happy she had ventured out and found success.

But it also left me with a question as to where I might fit into her life. Admittedly, with Idaho’s leave date set in stone, there would be a period where I might serve to take the edge off of withdrawal, but I also felt like Lily had made incredible strides and might not need my advice. She was coasting, and were she to find her next long term relationship, I didn’t know if it would be necessary to have me in the background. Of course, I know that what I give to my customers isn’t particularly direct. It’s not just the sheath of my punanny for their cocks to rock. It’s not just the intoxicating musk of my husk. No, it’s much more emotional and changing. There are some nights where sex is an afterthought. We spend hours talking and sharing a meal or drinks only to remember that we gotta bang to make this $750 worth it. And with Lily, the talking has been as integral to our relationship as our phone sex. The venue to discuss relationship things in nitty gritty terms that don’t shy from the sexual and vulgar is valuable.

Still, I told her that if at some point she wanted to discontinue our meetings, I wouldn’t take it personally.

Lily: Thank you for saying that. I appreciate all that we’ve done so far, but I still feel like I have so much to learn from you.

It may eventually be on the horizon, but for the foreseeable future, we will be keeping our weekly meetings.