“I’m a Texas dancer, and these are my babies Belle and Burrito. They are BFFs, but Burrito likes to keep all the money—and the food, his and Belle’s—for himself,” says Austin, TX dancer Anna. We love how her work shoes are just visible in the background!
As I’m writhing under the crimson-lit, leather furnished room, his eyes never leave my face. Although my glance is cast downward, I know that he is smiling and I sense his contentment. I don’t bother to hide my smirk, as I lower my lips to his neck, and deliberately graze them across the wiry brush of his beard. My knees are at either side of his waist, and I wind my waist around until I press against the bulge in his pants. He exhales against my cheek.
The last week when he visited, I giggled quietly to myself as he fucked me from behind, out of sight and sound of the other customers, staff and my coworkers. Tonight we are in the smaller, more visible private-dance room. The gauze-like curtain does little to hide our activities tonight, and so I will maintain my professionalism. Peripherally, I can see a bachelor party gawking from the couches adjacent to us.
The thumping rhythm comes to an end, and with the sound of DJ Robert’s voice, I loudly sigh and plop back in to the chair. My husband closes his eyes, and takes a breath, before reaching for his beer.
“Well, thank you Penguin,” he says to me, as he reaches in to his pocket and passes money to my outstretched hands. I daintily take it, and tuck it into my waist cincher as I bend to kiss him on the cheek. He knows the drill. Apparently he is also aware of the couch-gawkers. The bills are singles rather than twenties, but it is of no matter; I’ll surely just use them to buy us coffee in the morning.
I stand to give him a hug, as I do most of my well-paying customers. I step from the room, smiling, keeping my gaze level with the crowd, and hold the curtain open for him. My beautiful, bearded man returns to the bar, and I head to the bachelor couch.
Smiling bigger than I mean to, I greet them. “Well, hello, gentlemen. I couldn’t help but notice you watching. So…who’s next?”
This year, I’m spending Valentine’s Day with a guy who’s not my boyfriend (though I wouldn’t say that to him). I’ll be spending my evening at a stuffy French restaurant in Las Vegas, with a married, submissive man who’s several decades older than me, listening to him ramble endlessly about mergers and acquisitions while I pretend to care. Back home, my boyfriend, Tom, will be spending Valentine’s Day not dissimilarly, at a stuffy restaurant in San Francsico’s Castro District, with a gay, submissive man, who’s several decades older than him, listening to him ramble endlessly about mergers and acquisitions, while he pretends to care. Throughout the day, my real boyfriend and I will send each other funny texts about the weird things our “boyfriends” might do to impress us. He’ll pick me up from the airport tomorrow; we’ll both laugh and complain and commiserate about the tedious fake-romantic evenings we spent with our clients. We’ll talk and talk until one of us inevitably says, “oh my god, we have to stop talking about these people,” and then sex work will fade into the background again for a couple days, until one of us has to work again.
I’m lucky; I’ve never lied. I started escorting eight years into my current relationship, and we had an open relationship well before that. Although my partner’s not the kind of guy who wants to meet or know the other people I bang, he’s the first to acknowledge that ending our monogamy saved us from a poisonous end. So when I chose to start doing sex work it was a leap, but a logical one. Our lives are pretty boring, and we let the job be a normal part of it: I complain about illiterate text messages sometimes, and sometimes I want the car when it’s inconvenient. The biggest difference is that we use condoms now. But I’m the only one who complains about that. He likes them fine.
Friend of the blog Visitor Design sent this to us via Twitter on Friday night. Get it? It means that Wódka is the kind of vodka that’s here to pay off its student loans and has its own well-designed website, but it costs the same as the kind of cheap hooch hustling the corner for enough cash for another night at the motel. It’s a smooth marketing take on the commonly assumption that sex workers are doing one of two things: either ho-ing from sheer desperation or enjoying a pampered, rarefied existence thanks to the largesse of generous men. Because you know the language: escorts are expensive and hookers are cheap. While there are certainly sex workers who charge a lot and sex workers who don’t charge so much, I can’t imagine this ad saying something like “Model Quality, Girl Next Door Pricing.” Oh, wait. This is a liquor ad. That could totally happen.
But: There’s a sheep in that ad. In this context, the image of the sheep leads us to a darker place, one where, when desperate men think of the relative pricing and availability of prostitutes, may ponder the free option. Wódka, what are you going to do to that lamb? A willingness to associate your product with bestiality is truly a maverick move.