13 Men Who Bought Me: Prologue

Note: This is a series. This is the first piece of the series, the prologue, and thirteen chapters, and an epilogue, will follow past this point. While you can read these as standalone pieces, you will get the best out of them if you read them in serialised fashion. I will link subsequent pieces to the end of each piece and a full catalogue will be available under the tag "13 Men Who Bought Me". This series is available to Patrons only, and upon its completion I will be compiling it into a book. The Kindle version of the book will be available to all patrons for free, and on sale to all other readers on Amazon in both Kindle and Paperback format. 

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Prologue 

I would tell you that when I was a little girl I couldn’t have imagined I would grow up to be a whore, but that would be a lie. I decided that’s what I would be the first time I saw a prostitute. It was at the bus-stand. My mother and I were there late one evening, having a midnight snack, because for whatever reason the bus-stand in our town served the best egg-rolls but only after 10 PM. We were sitting in the car eating our rolls when my mother pointed her out to me.

“Look,” she said, clearly thrilled to have seen her, “She’s a prostitute.”

I didn’t know what a prostitute was back then. I looked, and I saw a women in a white tank-top, a short red skirt and shoes it should have been impossible for her to walk in and while it wasn’t customary for women in our town to dress like that or wander around with men so late at night, that wasn’t what struck me about her. What struck me was that she seemed like the most confident woman I had ever seen.

“What’s a prostitute?” I asked my mother.

“You know…” She said, sometimes I think my mother forgot I was a child and wasn’t born knowing everything already, “She has sex with men, for money.”

“You can do that?” I asked, swinging towards my mother so fast, I dropped some of the mint chutney on the car seat.

I was genuinely surprised. I had a vague and impractical understanding of sex. I knew what it was and its primary purpose, or at least what I thought was its primary purpose, I have since come to the conclusion that since sex results in pleasure far more frequently than it does in babies, the primary purpose of sex must be pleasure. When I was a child, I didn’t know any better. I do remember being thrilled to discover that you could sell sex.

“But, how do you know she’s a prostitute?” I asked my mother.

“There’s just a look,” my mother responded with more than a hint of admiration in her voice, “Sometimes you can tell by the way someone behaves.”

I saw what she meant. There was something different about that woman. Ever since we were little girls, we were taught to be afraid of the night, and of men. We had to come home before dark, avoid dark alleys, never be alone in the dark and always watch our backs around men. It was as if we were going to be robbed of something but no one could tell us what it was. She didn’t seem to have any of that fear. She walked like she owned the ground, the buses, all the egg-rolls and everyone who looked at her.

“Isn’t she scared?” I asked my mother, in awe.

“Why should she be scared?” My mother asked, “She’s selling what they want to steal from women.”

“They want to steal sex?” I asked, and maybe I would have been more confused if I wasn’t so enamoured.

My mother looked at me like she had had enough of my questioning, but also like she couldn’t believe I was asking such silly questions. I looked away from my mother and watched the prostitute, she caught my eye and I couldn’t help but smile at her, she winked back at me. I was giddy with excitement. To me she was like a superhero. I was a curious, chubby and talkative but shy young girl, I couldn’t imagine ever having the kind of confidence that allows you to sell sex and wear little skirts. Over the next five years, I destroyed that little girl. Don’t feel bad about that, it’s not my morality or my conscience that I destroyed, nor my “real” personality, it was my upbringing and societal learning that I destroyed. I wasn’t really ever shy, I was merely taught that girls should be soft and speak sparingly. I wasn’t born with a fear of the world, it was taught to me, and all I did was decide to unlearn it because after the night the prostitute winked at me, I had decided, that was what I was going to be when I grew up. In pursuit of that goal, I spent every single day becoming more confident.

They might tell you that the industry of sex is one of beauty and vanity, but those aren’t the fields I studied, I spent my young life learning not only math or French or Geography, but also the art of conversation. It’s a different world now, and perhaps a socially-awkward whore could now have the space to build a market for themselves, but that isn’t how I saw it. For some reason, when I aspired to be a whore, and perhaps the aestheticism of that reasoning is why I don’t use the more clinical but perhaps more acceptable term sex-worker, I saw it as the highest of aspirations. To me, it involved being as skilled, intelligent, socialized and articulate as being the CEO of a large corporation. That tired and exploited image of a whore that I learnt about in my later years, that’s not what I envisioned at all, and I don’t discount the reality of that, I know this profession has been exploitative of women longer than any other, but to change that I realised that more women had to opt in to the job as opposed to fall back on it.

Within the context of selling it, I learnt sex as a luxurious thing. It is. Even when it is a carnal, primal act, it is not the mere moment of orgasm that matters to the quality of the experience, the experience starts much sooner. With a whore, it starts the moment you meet her because she is a sure thing. From the moment you conceptualize her, you know you can fuck her, and how much you enjoy the act of fucking, depends on everything that comes before it. In that context, you can be relief and fulfilment, or you can be an exquisite luxury, a Veblen good but maybe not one that is driven purely by hype. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with how attractive you are either, because while beauty is in the body, true luxury comes from the mind. Beauty is silk sheets, but luxury is knowing a perfectly temperature-controlled room is vital to thoroughly enjoying the sheets, and providing it. I was never exceptionally beautiful, but I was always going to be a luxury.

Everything I did in my young life was in service of that goal. I learnt how to differentiate forks so I could be with men of high stature and society. I learnt how to speak four languages so I could be with men from different countries. I learnt about business and finance so I could talk to investment bankers and I learnt about trade-routes so I could talk to exporters. I learnt about politics so I could talk to government officials and I studied law so I could talk to advocates and judges. I learnt about the human body and medicine so I could talk to doctors. So thorough was my approach that before I had graduated from school, I had completed my schooling. I know what people think of this though, I even get it, because if I'm going to be a "woke" prostitute I should do it in service myself and my own liberation. I shouldn't define myself in terms of what I bring to other people, I shouldn't objectify myself. However, who gave objectification such a bad name, anyway? Legally, and socially, I think millennia of treating women like objects who exist to cater to the whims and aesthetic needs of men is sufficient, we don't need to take this any further but if I opt to objectify myself and package that into a service that I expect to be paid for, it's not the same thing. The key is the payment here, and I know you're not supposed to say that when you're doing something you love, then you are supposed to do it for the love of the game but I object to that, it's just part of the conspiracy to keep creation and efficient services flowing without ever having to compensate people for them. Women haven't been compensated for the services we have provided, whether those are domestic, biological, social or aesthetic, for generations, and as a result they should have to function at a professional level to provide these thing, but should they train themselves in the art of sexual and romantic service, that's a professional skill and being compensated for that as much objectification as there is with a lawyer providing their legal skill.

And I love feeling like an object, a commodity, to be more exact. I remember when I met my first "manager" whom I shall henceforth refer to as my first pimp because that tickles my fancy a lot more, I came into my own as a commodity that day. I met him at an office after contacting him online, as is customary, at first he didn't take my inquiry seriously. Apparently a lot of women wish to get started in sex-work but lose their nerve at the last moment, and I understand that, it's all fun and games until you're taking your clothes off in front of a man who is assessing your body to determine how much it is worth. The office I met him in was not really an office, it was definitely an office space but there was no staff, no sign on the door, no papers, no form of business was conducted there but there was a desk. It was an old desk, one of those metal contraptions with a wooden top that school-teachers used to have, and stood in front of it and he stood on the other side because there were no chairs. He wasn't a man who looked like a pimp, although I wonder what a pimp even looks like, he looked completely ordinary. He wore a grey shirt that at the right angle looked like it might have been silver. His trousers were tighter than they needed to be and his shoes were shining. His hair were oiled and pulled back and he wore a thin gold-chain around his neck with a little caricature of some god or other hanging from it. He asked my why I wanted to do this and while I have had an answer to that my entire life, I lied.

"Money problems, sir," I told him.

My mom taught to me to always refer to functionaries as sir or ma'am, she insists that it takes you a long way to display an elevated amount of respect to everyone. She also taught me to always understate my ambition; to always appear a little less intelligent, a little aware, a little less confident than I really was. I never took that advice, until I decided to lie to my first pimp about why I wanted the job. I figured I would garner more sympathy by appearing ordinary. I did.

"Everyone money problems," he said laughing, "Me also money problems, you also money problems."

He wasn't very good at English, but he was undoubtedly a rich man. His service boasted women who made monthly-salaries in one night, he had a payment system and consulting-firm set up to legitimise the income, and he didn't even meet women whose portfolios he did not approve of. When I sent mine in, I heard back from him in only a couple of hours.

"Your portfolio good," he said, "But one problem, on your face, not enough expressions in photos, smile more, face should not look dead."

God, I hate it when people tell me to smile. As if that is actually a reliable indicator of how happy a person really is. I told him I would take more pictures, ones that made my face look less-dead. He walked over to me and stood very close. He looked closely at my skin, asking questions about whether I exercised regularly and whether I kept current on the news, he asked about my education, and what I was studying at the moment. He touched me, starting with my breasts, and then gripping my waist to assess the firmness of my abdomen, but it didn't feel sexual at all. It felt like due-diligence, and I was the piece of land he was planning to invest in. It was the most thrilling moment of my young life, it was the moment in which my dreams were coming true, and I knew it. He asked me to remove my clothes, and I did it without even thinking about it, I think I had expected it. He didn't touch me when I was naked, nor did he look at me in a way that made me uncomfortable, and even though I could feel him take note of every part of my body, it didn't seem like he was going to rape me. I've felt much more unsafe while in a bars, fully-clothed, than I did naked with a man who was planning to sell me. His assessment lasted a long time, as did his questioning, but after it was over he turned around so I could put my clothes back on, and even today, I don't understand why someone would do that after having already seen the person naked. People have strange quirks, and bless them for it, really. I would be so bored without it.

"You start today?" He asked me, scrolling through his phone.

I immediately felt a panic at the prospect because no matter how long you spend designing your dreams, the moment in which they come true is always overwhelmingly nerve-wracking.

"Today?" I asked, pulling my phone out to pretend I was checking my schedule even though I was eighteen-years old, I had no schedule, "I can't start this weekend?"

"No," he said, seriously, "You don't start today, you won't come back."

I never got to test that theory but I had a sneaking suspicion that he might be right. We had a long conversation after that about the details of how everything worked, where I had to go, what I had to do and how I had to take payments. He told me about the paperwork that would be required for me to legitimise my work, and the schedule I had to keep to follow up on that. There was a lot of work that came after the first client, but the first client was the baptism by fire that I later learnt every girl had to go through with urgent immediacy. Perhaps it was his hook. For me though, that feeling of being a service up for sale was the hook. In that room I felt more powerful and exhilarated than I ever had before.

"I start today," I told him at the end of our conversation.

And just like that, I was a commodity.

These are the stories of the men who bought me.

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Read Chapter 1 here.