Slutever Page 14

  “It’s true.” He nodded. “Out of respect for my wife.”

  Over the course of the meal I learned that Edward was born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and American father. He grew up poor. He really wanted me to know this—he had been poor, very poor, as a child, which apparently gave him free rein to act as decadently as he liked in his middle age without guilt. When he was fifteen his family had moved to Nevada. He’d been a smart kid, and by eighteen he’d made half a million dollars gambling, counting cards in Vegas. He went to Yale. After college he got a job at the CIA. He lived for five years in China, working as a spy, then decided he wasn’t cut out for the job and quit. He started a business and then sold it for a bunch of money. After that he started another one and sold it for even more money. By his midforties he’d made enough that he could devote the rest of his life to having almost daily threesomes with random women from the internet at awkward intervals throughout the day in accordance with his weird nap schedule.

  I have to admit, I was reluctantly impressed by Edward’s story. By this point, I was both drunk and intrigued enough that my rash had subsided. I was actually having a really fun time. Madeline, on the other hand, was immersed in her phone, clearly having heard this sermon like twenty times already.

  Edward told me that one of the first things they teach you in the CIA is how to lie. I immediately grabbed a pen and a napkin. While I took notes, he explained that a good lie has three main components: First, you should keep your lie as close to the truth as possible. Don’t fabricate wild stories or excuses, because made-up stories are difficult to remember, and they’re even harder to back up if you get caught. Second, don’t give out unnecessary details—if someone asks you how your night went, tell him, “It was good,” and leave it at that. You should never give people information they don’t need, because information is what gives you away. And third, it’s important to remember that it’s not just about how you lie, but also who you’re lying to. Lying is a cooperative act. A lie has no power until someone believes it, and it’s a lot easier to convince someone of a lie they want to be true. “‘No, honey, I didn’t cheat on you’ is actually quite an easy lie to get away with,” he said, grinning, “because your target wants to believe that you’re telling the truth.”

  Maybe all of this sounds sort of obvious to you. But it didn’t to me at the time. Or at least, breaking it down like that—presenting the act of lying as something skillful and mathematical, rather than moral—was exciting to me. In hindsight, it’s so predictable that I’d go for a guy like Edward: an unquestionable sex maniac.

  As soon as we got back to Edward’s hotel, it was clear that he would be in total control of how this all went down. I was more than happy to sign over power of attorney. Luckily, Edward was a natural dictator—“Get on your knees,” “Turn around,” “No, not that way, this way.” All we had to do was follow his instructions—it was so easy! I wasn’t super physically attracted to him, but I tend to close my eyes during sex anyway, so whatever. The only awkward moment was when he kept insisting that Madeline put her fingers in my butt, and she kept being like, “No fucking way, I just got a gel manicure this morning.” But other than that, it was totally chill. And I didn’t even have to fake it, because I just made myself come while watching them fuck, like real-life porn.

  And then came the part where he handed me $1,000. Now, this is the funny thing about being offered money in exchange for sex: It seems like such a deviant and far-fetched idea…until it actually happens, at which point it suddenly seems extremely logical. It’s like, “You’re going to pay me money to have sex? Only an idiot would turn that down.” Or like how in middle school your friends were like, “Ugggh, how much would you have to be paid to fuck Mr. Shepard?!” And you were all “EWW!!!! Three million dollars!” But that’s just because you’d never paid rent before, and then you grow up and realize that realistically it’s more like three hundred.

  In the elevator, on our way back down to earth, I felt a new sense of power with the money shoved down my bra (he’d put it into my handbag, but I relocated it to my bra because that felt more cinematic). “Threesomes are the best,” Madeline cooed. “You only have to do half the work, and they last half as long, because the guy can’t control himself.” She was such a savvy businesswoman. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, half seriously. “Andy Warhol said making money is art, so if we make money by having sex, does that mean when we have sex, we’re making art?” I didn’t have an answer. “One time,” she added, “I got my period while with a client, and afterward the sheets looked like a Pollock canvas.”

  Professional Baby

  The day after our threesome, I quit my job at the Chinese restaurant—literally the following day. A premature ejaculation, in hindsight. But when you realize that you can make a grand in just two hours of “work,” it seems ridiculous to keep a waitressing job that pays you the same amount for two solid weeks of physical and psychological torture. It’s like Woody Allen said in Deconstructing Harry: “Every hooker I ever speak to tells me that it beats the hell out of waitressing.”

  It was just weeks before my twenty-seventh birthday. I’d been working at the Chinese place part-time for almost two years, and it was really starting to wear on me. On some days, I felt like my life and writing career were going pretty okay—Slutever’s readership was growing, I was writing cover stories for Dazed & Confused magazine, and I was making a satirical sex-ed web series for Vice. But none of those things paid me any real fucking money. It was unnerving to think that, to date, my most lucrative output had been my urine. Slutever brought in literally zero dollars, and Vice was still in a phase where they insisted the company was doing you a favor by giving you a platform and making you “cool.” (If only you could pay your rent in cultural cachet!) Dazed paid me roughly $350 for a cover feature that took me a week to write. Basically, the publishing industry was and is a fucking nightmare, and despite working really hard, I was well below the poverty line and totally unable to support myself. And while I was proud of the creative work I was doing, I couldn’t help but feel like my waitressing job was representative of my failure as a writer. (And it didn’t help that once every couple of weeks, a customer would come in and be like, “Oh my god, I love your blog!” and I’d smile and then have to get down on my knees to wipe up soy sauce from beneath their clogs.)

  Like being a dominatrix, sugaring felt like a way that I could make money fast, so rather than devoting thirty hours a week to being a noodle slave, I could spend more time on MY ART (bleh). But sugar-babying seemed even better than being a dominatrix, because it paid more, and because I enjoy having sex exponentially more than I enjoy peeing into strange men’s mouths.

  However, as soon as I quit the restaurant I regretted it, because I realized that I was kind of freaked out. Having a paid threesome with a man your friend vetted for you was one thing, but creating my own escort profile and going it alone felt scary. And more than being scared of the logistics of selling sex, what I was really scared of was the idea of becoming a Sex Worker—with a capital S W. What did that say about me? Who was I? No little girl grows up with the dream of becoming a prostitute (although if that girl exists, I definitely want to meet her). No matter how much of an enlightened, sex-radical feminist you grow up to be, the moment you make the decision to become a hooker, you can’t help but wonder—what did I do wrong to end up here?

  There are many reasons why I—or someone in my position—would think this way. The most obvious is that, almost unanimously, sex workers are thought to be gross, desperate skanks. And unfortunately, I didn’t have many examples to aspire to of powerful, creative, respected women who also did sex work. I can’t think of a single instance of a whore being portrayed in a positive light in a film or on TV. Pretty Woman sort of goes there, but the reason we’re given permission to like Julia Roberts’s character in the film is because she’s a hooker who wants to be saved. Particularly, she wants to be saved by a rich white man who rescues her fro
m her life of streetwalking victimhood and engages her in a classist civilizing process, ending with her being dressed up in Chanel. It’s the classic rags-to-riches story, ending with all parties segueing happily into social convention.

  But almost ubiquitously, whores are thought to be tragic. It’s no coincidence that “You’re a whore” is one of the most popular insults flung at women—by men, but also by other women. This is in part because of the lingering belief that women should be pure, that women who have a lot of sex are somehow worth less than those who don’t. And even if you’re intelligent enough not to believe that bullshit, that doesn’t mean that you don’t still want to be accepted—by your friends, by your family, by society. The reason people get married when they’re not really ready is basically the same reason that people don’t become sex workers when they kinda want to—you know what I mean? It’s because they don’t want to be ostracized. You can rationalize that sex workers should be given an equal amount of respect as any other person while simultaneously understanding that, in the world we live in, that’s unlikely to be the case.

  This stigma around sex work exists even in the most liberal and ostensibly sex-positive circles. It’s highly unlikely that today, even at, let’s say, a dinner of intellectuals in New York City, a woman could come out as an escort and have anyone consider that a “good job”—even if she earned more than everyone else at the table. It’s sort of funny, because when you really break it down, getting paid to have sex sounds like a pretty good deal, right?

  For decades, the cultural conversation around sex work has been essentially the same: Sex workers are abused, dehumanized victims, and sex work is bad for society. In the 1970s, radical feminists and antiporn crusaders like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon made it their mission to perpetuate the cultural misconception that all sex work is inherently degrading, bolstering both the sexual objectification of women and the patriarchy. Some have gone as far as to say that all sex work is rape. We don’t consider consensual sex violence, and we don’t consider being paid violence, but if you put the two together, you’re being exploited and need to be saved…apparently. While the moralists who preach this ostensibly mean well, what this discourse does is imply that sex workers have no agency. Even if a sex worker insists that she works of her own free will, she shouldn’t be taken seriously, because she must be either lying or brainwashed or on crack.

  So, of course, when faced with my own decision about whether to begin escorting, all these things were swirling around in my mind—along with “What the fuck would I do if my Catholic parents ever found out?” Of course, I had a choice. I was in no way being forced into selling my body in the dark and sensational way that we often imagine is the case with sex workers. I wouldn’t have starved or become homeless or died if I didn’t set up a sugar baby profile. But I might have had to move out of New York. And I might have had to give up on my dream of being a writer, perhaps taking out a loan to go back to school, choosing instead a career that was more practical but less fulfilling. And I didn’t want to do those things. So I made what I felt was the best choice for me at the time. I looked at myself in the mirror and said: “Yo, you have sex with people you don’t like all the time; you might as well get fucking paid for it.”

  Madeline, ever the mentor, offered to help me make my SeekingArrangement profile. I remember that afternoon vividly: We were lying on the living room couch in our pajamas, scarfing gummy bears, as Madeline casually spouted bits of hooker wisdom. “Okay, so the most important thing to remember when filling out your profile is that men have small brains but huge egos,” she said, mouth full of candy. “You have to convince these guys that they’re taking care of you, rather than paying for you, because that makes them feel pathetic. You want to make them feel powerful by using words like ‘benefactor’ and ‘mentor.’ Basically, you’re a scared baby lamb in the big city who needs a real man with a big cock and a big fat wallet to show you the way—or you’ll die.” It was all so…predictable.

  Madeline explained that there’s generally two types of guys on these sites. She’d nicknamed them the Bleeding Hearts and the Contract Sugar Daddies. A Bleeding Heart actually thinks he’s in a relationship with you—he wants to put his hand on your inner thigh in public, to go to sporting events together, and for you to pretend to come like five times during sex, basically. Bleeding Hearts are often saying things like “I’m always really generous with my girlfriends, so I don’t see why this is any different.” When the issue of money comes up, you both have to pretend that it’s for your rent, or a camera that will help you launch your photography career, or basically anything to distract from the fact that he has to pay a girl to stand next to him. And then there’s the Contract Sugar Daddies. These guys are more businesslike about it—they pay you a set fee each time they see you, or give you an allowance each month. These guys, she explained, tend to be more confident—they’re not embarrassed about the money element of the relationship, meaning they generally see sugar relationships as a convenience rather than as a necessity. Maybe they’re simply too busy or lazy to date for real, or maybe they’re married. The married guys, she explained, are the best, because they tend to have the least amount of free time to hang out with you.

  Madeline prepared me pretty well, but being the good journalist that I am, I wanted to do my own research. So I set up roughly a million dates. Essentially, SA functions like any other dating site: Everyone fills out a profile explaining who they are and what they’re looking for. The main difference is that, on SA, men’s profiles list their net worth, yearly income, and an estimate of how much they’re willing to spend on a sugar baby (ranging from a “practical” amount of $1,000 to $3,000 a month to a “high” amount of over $10,000 a month). There’s also a box where they note their relationship status—the “married but looking” option is one I assume they don’t offer on most “normal” dating sites.

  At first, I wasn’t being selective, and I agreed to meet pretty much every guy who sent me a message. This proved to be a huge mistake and a nightmarish waste of time. I mean, imagine applying the same logic to Tinder—literally terrifying. In my defense, it’s harder to assess who you’re meeting through SA, because the majority of men don’t upload photos, for purposes of discretion, so you’re left assessing them by whatever they write in their profile. But they all write the same fucking thing. I’m paraphrasing, but it goes something like:

  Handsome businessman looking for beautiful young woman to explore the world with. I’m very busy and travel too much to have a regular relationship. I don’t mean to brag, but I know quite a bit about art and fine wines. Travel junkie!! Chemistry a must. No professionals!!

  Translated into reality, that means:

  Aging, frumpy businessman looking for someone young to have sex with because my wife won’t fuck me anymore. I sometimes go to Florida on vacation. I like drinking and traveling, like everyone else on earth, and I’ve heard of Damien Hirst. I don’t want to pay you by the hour and you have to pretend to like me.

  Of course, I didn’t know all this at the time. I was a newbie. But I was about to embark on what I now reflect on as my second desensitization period.

  The first guy I met was Jack. He was thirty-five and referred to himself on his profile as a “Cary Grant type.” We met at a dive bar in the West Village, and it turned out he looked less like a 1930s movie star and more like the Unabomber. When I asked him what he did for a living, he told me he was a “student of the world.” It didn’t sound very lucrative. To make a short story even shorter, it turned out that Jack lived in his mom’s basement in Long Island, and had recently been given control of his parents’ bank account, following his father’s death. I told him I had to pee and snuck out the back entrance.

  The next guy was a chubby-faced bond trader who, about seven minutes into our meeting, asked me if I wanted to move with him to Fort Lauderdale. After him was the guy from the Texan oil family, who took me for drinks at the Peninsula hotel and told me
I looked like a “perfect little Nazi.” There was more than one guy who didn’t even show up, and multiple men who, when I brought up the financial component, tried to make me feel embarrassed about asking for money in exchange for my time—as if that weren’t the exact fucking dynamic that the site was founded on. As it turned out, they don’t call it sex work for nothing—and I hadn’t even banged anyone yet. I felt like I was going on a million tiny job interviews and never being hired. These were not the glamorous rendezvous I’d had in mind.

  Meeting My $oul Mate

  I had a good feeling about this guy. He had invited me for lunch at Milos, a Greek place in Midtown with a distinct expense-account vibe, which seemed like a good sign. I excitedly put on my new prostitute costume. (In an effort to take the babying business more seriously, I’d Googled “Where do prostitutes shop?” and the most highly rated response on Yahoo Answers was Zara, so I went there and bought a Dolce & Gabbana knock-off dress that felt like the perfect combo of class and trash.) I was feeling very powerful.

  He was a geeky guy, around forty, with awkwardly long limbs and thick glasses resting on a big nose. The sort of guy who could put on a $10,000 suit and it would still be obvious that he’d been beaten up on the daily in high school (aka my type). He asked me questions about where I grew up and about my writing, which no other guy from the site had done (I’m pretty sure they all assumed I did nothing). And then I asked him what he did for a living, and that’s when my stomach made a leap for my throat, because I suddenly felt like he might just be the one (a different one than the one we usually talk about, but you know what I mean).

  I can’t give away too much information about him or I’ll get sued, but let’s just say he created an app that you almost definitely have downloaded at some point. I knew I needed to make a really good impression, so I downed three glasses of wine in like fifteen minutes. While I was drowning my nerves, App Guy was aggressively ordering more and more food, sending roughly every third dish back to the kitchen. “You have to send something back, or they don’t take you seriously,” he informed me with a straight face. When I brought up the arrangement, he abruptly cut me off. “Talking about money is boring,” he said, waving his hand in front of my face as if to say shut the fuck up. “How much do you want? You want two grand? I’ll give you two grand. Let’s just get drunk.” That was easier than I’d expected.