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Surviving Long Appointments

For lots of money, I bet she could! (image by Anne Taintor)

We all say we want them, but do we really? Longer appointments—all day, overnights, weekends or more—can be great money, but they can also be really taxing on your soul. No matter how much you like your work, staying in character and putting your client’s needs before your own for a long period of time can make anyone go a little crazy.

Whether you’re a stripper who’s committed to a couple hours in the champagne room, a dominatrix with a super-devoted slave, or anyone else who’s found themselves committed to more than they thought they bargained for, here are some ideas for making it through with your sanity intact.

If you have some other tricks of the trade to share, please leave them in the comments section.

Aw, You Shouldn’t Have: A Compendium of the Odd Gifts We Receive

(photo by worth1000.com user garrettkipp. image via worth1000.com)
(photo by worth1000.com user garrettkipp. image via worth1000.com)

Sex work comes with a lot of fringe perks: convenient hours, creative work uniforms, and basically having the coolest job on the planet. One of the lesser-known perks of sex work are the gifts we receive: the tokens of appreciation that the men that favor us hand out around the holidays. Most of the time we get the traditional pretty girl-type gifts. A box of chocolates. An austere piece of jewelry. Maybe a bottle of perfume.

Any veteran sex worker will tell you that he or she has also unwrapped something a little…peculiar. It’s true—we get a lot of weird gifts (it’s worth noting that weird isn’t necessarily synonymous with bad). We’ve learned over time how to gracefully accept some, shall we say, unconventional presents.

Our clients and customers try, they really do, to mixed results. Bless their hearts.

We wondered: What sort of oddities have our readers received?

“Pretty Woman” Is Real

Ahh, marital bliss.

If there’s one element Pretty Woman is most commonly maligned for, it’s the improbable ending of a street working prostitute whisked away by a filthy rich client. Civilians love to crow about how wildly unrealistic it is to think that a john will ever marry his sex worker and yeah, if you’re entering into sex work with the goal to use it as a dating service, you’re probably going to be a disappointed. That goes for clients and providers. But it’s not uncommon for sex workers to have romantic, unpaid relationships with men they first met as clients. I’ve been in just such a relationship for almost six years. And at last count, I know five married couples who fit the same bill. (I should stipulate that two of these are now divorced, which is consistent with the national average.) It’s not just escorts; strippers, too, can end up with a patron. Nor it is limited to folks who work indoors. A street worker I know spoke to me once about a burgeoning unpaid relationship with a former client, although she made it clear to me (and to him) that she had no intention of quitting work just because she began dating him.

That’s where Pretty Woman really gets it wrong: even when sex workers find a man willing to support them, they often want to keep working.

John Franc Wants Us Hooked (2011)

“We were all monsters” the nameless narrator tells us four sentences into Hooked by John Franc. The “we” refers to nine men who live in a city where prostitution is conveniently legal and when the men learn this fact, they begin a downward, hooker-hopping spiral of frightening velocity that ends in the most melodramatic plot development in the history of ever. (Does any American man have nine friends he’d trust to join him as he frequents brothels? I digress.) As you might imagine, for me, a prostitute, that opening line was about as appealing an introduction as a fart in the face. But it was accurate warning for what lay ahead. I can’t think of many books I’ve hated as much as I did Hooked, and it’s easy to explain why. The book, a novel imitating a memoir, is essentially a polemic. The husbands are unsympathetic villans, the wives are unsympathetic victims, and prostitutes are the objects with which men hurt non-prostitute women—and ultimately, destroy themselves. Shorter version: prostitution is bad, mmkay? When men hire prostitutes, other people end up hurt. It’s a literal [spoiler alert, as if anything could spoil the already terrible experience of suffering through this] killer!

The plot, which doesn’t show up until halfway through, centers around one of the men deciding he has to tell his wife the truth about his philandering. The other men are all like, “nooo, don’t do it, because we’ll get in trouble too!” and then someone disappears and children start crying and there’s suggestions of committing murder and finally the police show up—you know, the usual fall out from paying for sex even when it’s legal. If you’re conservative-minded enough, Hooked‘s course of events is completely plausible, and the book will be unhesitatingly received as a sober warning against a pressing contemporary danger. (Did you know that nowadays men can cheat on their wives without much trouble? Cue the pearl clutching.) But if you’ve got any objections to our time’s most commonly held sexual mores—monogamy is essential in a romantic relationship; cheating, unavoidably, ruins lives; women are always the vulnerable/wronged parties when it comes to sex—Hooked is going to seem about as hysterical and offensive as those anti-marijuana ads where the guys at the drive-through window killed a little girl on a bike. It’s not profound; it’s just stupid. 

Quote of the Week

I never allowed myself to depend on one client entirely . They had to understand that their money was not the commodity—I was the commodity, and they could only buy access to me if I was willing to grant them the transaction.

Arden Leigh about her time as a pro-domme in The New Rules of Attraction