Content warning—the following contains descriptions of underage sex work and an adult fantasizing about sexual activity with a pre-teenage child.
I don’t know how I started seeing Jeff. I can’t remember meeting him, or what the first session was like, or what he looked like in clothes. I just remember when it turned.
Jeff was a big money client for me at the time. It was my first year as a pro-domme and I worked in the sketchiest dungeon in town. Jeff would book me out for the entire night, freeing me from having to charm individual clients during meet and greets and guaranteeing me enough cash to cover my rent. He was easy too: the session was almost entirely verbal and consisted of my languishing on a velvet padded throne and rattling staccato words at him while hoovering lines of cocaine off the mirror in my Chanel compact. He would sit at my feet, cross-legged and hunched over, slavishly masturbating and smoking poorly rolled joints. He requested that I wear street clothes during one of our early sessions. I returned to the room, minus the latex, in what I had arrived at work in: platform boots, skintight ripped up jeans, and a tube top. I could tell he was hoping for something different, and he came to our next appointment with a small plastic shopping bag.
After I took Jeff’s money and dutifully handed it over to the biker who ran the place, I went into the dressing room to inspect the contents of the bag: a very small pair of shorts and a very small camisole, both in the lightest shade of pink, made of waffle knit cotton. There was a second where I wanted to sit down and cry. I was never molested as a child, but for some reason introducing the specter of childhood into an S&M session disturbed me more than anything else I did at work. From my first day on the job, I had a preternatural ability to perform acts of severe subjugation without being affected by them. I could fist a guy’s ass, piss in his mouth, beat him until he bled, and it didn’t touch me. It didn’t disgust me or traumatize me or make me feel much of anything aside from the intoxication of desire and the masturbatory pleasure of receiving the cash. But the kid stuff fucked with me. Calling it “age play,” the euphemism of choice in BDSM circles creeped me out even more. I didn’t ever want to be called Mommy and I didn’t ever want to play a little girl. Even though I was just seventeen, technically under the age of legality for sex work in New York, I felt like an adult at work, and I wanted to keep it like that.
Working for the biker, I didn’t have a lot of leeway to refuse sessions, certainly not for reasons as fussy and nebulous as emotional discomfort. Plus, I was extremely unlikely to turn a six hour session down for any reason at all. And Jeff was nice. He always brought bottles of wine, never tried to touch me or share my cocaine, and, once he regressed into his stoned helpless session-self, he was very docile and easy to deal with. So I peeled off my garter belt, stockings, and corset, and pulled the little pink outfit on. I didn’t know what to do with my feet. The six inch black stilettos I had on looked pretty wrong with the candy stripper underthings, but I couldn’t exactly go barefoot, could I?
I realized as I marched back towards the session room that I didn’t even remember what Jeff liked to talk about in session. I knew it was all verbal, but what did his fantasy even consist of? The blank that I was drawing was perplexing, but I knew from experience that once I had a few lines in me, everything would flow out, the words thick and hot and exactly right. I didn’t really need my mind as long as I had my vocabulary.
“Mistress, I brought some pictures today,” he sputtered as soon as I entered the room. I could tell from the urgency of his voice, like a kettle left boiling, that I had taken too long getting ready. It took a second to wedge my dominatrix entitlement over my codependent desire to please, but just a second. The job was teaching me fast.
“Sit down. I’m not ready to hear from you yet. Understand?” He nodded, chastened, and folded his doughy body into a pretzel at the foot of my throne. I had to step over him to sit down, and just as my ass was about to hit the seat, he spoke again.
“Mistress? I’m very sorry but may I ask you something please?”
“What is it?”
“Would you be able to take off your shoes?”
Jeff wasn’t a foot guy, I remembered that much. He wasn’t really an anything guy, not compared to my other clients with more specific fetishes, at least. He didn’t want a beating or an ass fucking or a golden shower or bondage. He just wanted to sit at my feet and get fucked up and talk. So the removal of the shoes held a higher purpose for him, one that I understood a few minutes later, when he showed me the pictures he had brought with him.
As soon as I tapped the cocaine out of its little vial and snorted it up my nose, I remembered how Jeff’s sessions went. I felt his cloying hand on my shin as my face went numb, and by the time he asked “are we going to talk about Sarah?” I was ready to play ball. His fantasy entered the room without entering me. I saw it, smelled it, tasted it, even touched it, but it existed outside my own mind. Jeff was sexually obsessed with his very young step daughter—Sarah—and came to me to talk about his fantasies of touching her. As soon as he sat down and started smoking his joints, he regressed to approximately her age. I could see and hear it: his body became languid like a child’s, his voice got high and his diction slurred. His fantasy wasn’t to be an adult molester, it was to be a child with her, to be forced into sexual activity with each other by a twisted, manipulative adult. That was my job. The fantasies I fed him were threats of what I would make them do to each other, together. He said her name over and over again, and so did I, and when I pronounced it with the crisp diction of my cocaine high, his cock jumped and his whole body shuddered.
This had been going on, I presume, for all of our sessions. The combination of denial and drugs had allowed me to neatly compartmentalize it, to leave the hideous scene inside the session room when I closed the door behind myself. I didn’t acknowledge the sessions enough to rationalize them, but even so, I had this justification at the ready. By facilitating Jeff’s fantasies and providing him a place to release them, I was protecting this little girl. I was allowing him to be a fantasy molester, in order to prevent him from being an actual molester. It was practically social service.
Everything had been fine, the tightly wound strings of my oblivion and his obsession taut against each other, supporting the whole experience for both of us, until he showed me the picture. I could say the girl’s name, and know she was real, and wear the outfit that I knew in the pit of my stomach was a version of one she wore. But the picture was too much. It wasn’t pornography or even at all suggestive. It was just a snapshot, of a brown-haired little girl, maybe nine or ten years old, in a pink playsuit. She was smiling in that unselfconscious way that she would only be able to smile for a few more years, the way that we can no longer smile once we feel men looking at us. She was innocent and perfect, and she was you and me and every other girl, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t look at Jeff’s greasy hand stroking his dick, I couldn’t breathe the stench of his sour breath and his bad weed, I couldn’t cosign this moral abomination for one more moment.
That was the moment that I learned that I could have limits. I thought being a sex worker meant relinquishing all limits, and that I had given up the right to be disturbed by anything. I thought so because I had come to sex work alone, underage, and under the tutelage of a predatory man. But I found that boundary in the session room with Jeff, staring into Sarah’s limpid brown eyes, and I asserted it.
I didn’t finish the session that night, and I never saw Jeff again. I think about him occasionally, but what I really mean is that I think about Sarah. Was I a friend or an enemy to her? Had I helped her, or harmed her? Did she even exist, or was she the figment of a sexually tortured mind? She would be about 25 now. I hope, against logic and likelihood, that she is still smiling that self-possessed smile she had when she was ten.
Jesus, what an incredibly powerful piece. I went through a less extreme version of this myself: an awful client who treated me terribly but who I didn’t feel like I could stand up to until one day he asked me to punish him (he said this while grinning) for leering at fourteen-year-olds. All of a sudden I found the words to tell him I wasn’t gonig to see him anymore, and he didn’t need punishment, he needed intensive therapy.
The guy in this story needs intensive help as well. His fantasies are only age play in so much that he is playing a different age; mostly, they’re pedophilic. Age play never involves actual children, never involves fantasizing about them. It involves the tropes of childhood and regression of adults and fantasizing about adults either regressing or engaged with these tropes. That may seem like a dubious distinction to an outsider, but as someone who does age play, it’s a huge one. Those of us who are genuinely into the ABDL, DD/lg blah blah blah are often survivors of childhood trauma, not perpetrators of it, and are just as freaked out by sexualizing actual children as any halfway decent people are.
It’s the same difference between getting off on whips and chains and getting off on actual kidnap and imprisonment and torture– which, yeah, we had one of those men in our dungeon as well. He would bring in photographs of genocide. I’m not nearly as articulate as this author when talkinga bout this stuff, I just kind of run out of words and…. god, this fucking sick fucks we have to deal with sometimes, I just…
Wow. This is really beautifully and articulately written. I too had a multi-hour regular client (fs massage work though, not pro domme) with pedophilic fantasies, and it was easy to compartmentalize… until it wasn’t one day. Solidarity and love to you. <3
I’ve had those exact same thoughts: Maybe I’m saving a child by dealing with a pedophile’s fantasies. What if the only thing stopping him from abusing is me?
That’s a lot to shoulder. I’ll think about this piece for days, and what it means in my life. Even knowing we aren’t alone in our work, some aspects (like wondering if I’m perpetuating child sexual abuse or preventing it) can feel awfully lonely.
Great work Margo. So many levels.
Such an incredibly powerful story, one that resonates with many sex workers I imagine. It’s strange because I think you’d need to really be intensively trained to handle that situation responsibly (what would a psychiatrist with 10 years practice with pedophiles had done?) yet you seemed to do an amazing job as a 17 year old, not just for Sarah but for yourself.
I can empathize with your morale dilemma. I remember when I was 14 I met with my best friends pedophile who had been raping her and who suddenly had a fresh fancy for me. She allowed him to rape her because in her mind she could cope and she was saving him from raping other girls. I didn’t like her logic, her reasoning was that of a martyr’s and certainly not one a 14 year old should have. So to show her exactly what she was doing, I offered myself up as bait knowing he had greedy eyes for me. Once I put the offer out there, she stopped allowing him to see her.
I sometimes often wonder if I ever did manage to save her or maybe she was right, maybe she could have coped a lot better than other teenage girls. Maybe in fact I managed to ruin more lives by not allowing her to consent, by manipulating her kindness against her, maybe he would continue to hurt a number of other girls. You don’t know these things and you never really can know.
At the end of the day I like to think we’re not the ones responsible for a mans abuse, no matter what the circumstances are, nor should we ever be forced to be. I think you did the right thing for you and for him. He should have been seeing professional help, not a sex worker to vicariously live his pedophilic urges. It might had been a case of the lesser evil or it may have been a case of the slipper slope, who knows. At the very least I do know we’re not supposed to be the ones who have to deal with those issues.
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
I can relate SO much to this peice! My name is American Cassidy I’m an escort who writes http://www.hookerproblemz.blogspot.co.uk. I have had many requests to act like a child since I started escorting at 19. they always asked before hand, as I take my own phone calls, and I always denied their request. A few months ago I had a client who started off as a normal meet until he wanted role play. I thought he wanted schoolgirl but he asked for daddy daughter fantasy. I disn’t have my usual comfort of being able to hang up on the caller since he was in front of me.
I dismissed the idea by suggesting a naughty neighbor fantasy. He participated but was disappointed. Once he left I began wondering if I messed up. Maybe he came to me to avoid acting this fantasy out on his actual daughter. What if I drove him into her legs?!
I still get the odd requests, I write about them and my experiences on
http://Www.hookerproblemz.blogspot.co.uk
To be clear: I am NOT the Margo who wrote this piece.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR DISTURBING SESSION INVOLVING MOLESTATION
Excellent writing.
One of the worst sessions I ever had involved a client pretending to be a little girl. It was a role-play in which I “abducted” her and took her to my house and kept her there. In consultation, nothing about the fantasy was explicitly sexual, which is why I agreed to it.
About half an hour in, I realized that he was pretending to be his younger sister, who was molested by their dad and himself.
I’m a masochist and a heavy player…but I have seldom been so creeped out and revolted in session as I was when I realized what the client was actually playing out.
And then I was furious, because I felt tricked into participating in a session I would not have agreed to had I known what it would entail.
These sick fucks really let it all hang out with sex workers…and I suspect fetish workers get it the worst because we work at the nexus of sex and violence. I saw so much weird shit in my SW career. Nobody sees the sick parts of men like sex workers. Maybe psychologists and, so a lesser extent, social workers…maybe cops, a little bit. We are the fucking liver of society, man.
What I hate it when they’re dishonest about what they want and then kinda force it on you, like what this client did with the picture.
Just read this….I’m still not sure how I feel about such customers. I used to work as an erotic masseuse in a city where fetish clients are quite common in massage parlors as well and I would get paedophilic vibes from clients every now and then. Never anything where I had to pretend to be a small child, but there was one guy who wanted me to hold up a picture of a girl in front of his face while I administered the happy end, which seemed very weird to me at the time. I just shrugged and held up the 5×5 photo as I jerked him off, glad that I didn’t have to look at this particular client’s face for the last bit of the massage. I was generally pretty good at psychologically blocking while working at the parlor, but I remember feeling unusually odd after that session…like I’d betrayed the girl on the picture in some way, or almost like I’d used her myself. It’s still kind of hard to shake off that feeling, even though it happened a few years ago. I do agree that customers like that let out a lot of kinky junk in the sex business that they know they would otherwise be punished for in society, and especially a lot of things that most psychologists probably wouldn’t know how to handle.