Sexual Healing

Sexual Healing

I have a yen for problem pages, agony aunt columns, Dear Deidre’s (although not specifically, or indeed, actually, the column Dr Deidre). I may reassure myself I am scoring them for advice on my ‘intimate and fraternal’ dilemmas, but, in recent years I’ve been avoiding any sociality that would require such advice. Sticking, near ruthlessly, to interactions with other humans that are as low in the maintenance and stakes departments as is anti-socially possible.

It’s truly that I perversely enjoy considering how I would respond to the troubled letter writer. The sagacious, yet homely, way I imagine I’d proffer up wisdom on how to manage the usual personal dilemmas. Really, of course, all my advice-tendencies can be concretised down to the same ethos: Dump Them. Sack them. Block them. Fuck them off.

And I concede, that would not be terribly therapeutic. Nor would telling someone that they should avoid human contact until they’ve learnt how to put one emotional foot in front of the. I am to understand that the job of therapy is to help people comprehend their problems, not tell them how to fix them, and certainly not to offer people what I call (from just this minute) ‘bleach counsel’ - cheap, corrosive, but, on-its-own-terms, effective steps for change.

And even if Dump Them, Sack Them, Block Them, Fuck them off…did turn out to be the answer (which, let’s face it, is true at least a significant minority of the time), no-one jumps from a freight train the moment they get an inkling they may be trundling along the tracks with some bad actors. Or from a window the minute there is a light, errant spark. It usually takes a narrative build. Part of that is getting one’s subjective truth to line up with the intellectual truth; knowing mentally that a situation is bad - a friend cruel, a lover dangerous - and comprehending that emotionally, are two separate things.

It’s probably why I’ve often been far more intolerant of people refusing to even contemplate uncomfortable realities, than I have ever been of people simply making - and stewing in - bad choices. In their personal life, or elsewhere. I think that might be a counter-narrative. Ordinarily, folk don’t like it when they are presented with other people’s incoherence. The typical pragmatic refrain is ‘Don’t complain about it, if you are not going to change it.’ Or more crudely, ‘Crap or get off the pot’. The catch is, of course, we are far more emotionally forgiving of our own dissonance. We expect others to line themselves up neatly, mouth-to-heart, but we forgive ourselves our murkiness. The maxim shouldn’t be “I think therefore I am” but “They think, therefore they ought”.

It used to be commonly said, that being a sex worker, is offering up a kind of intimate therapy. The first time I heard this was a long while before I ever became one. I may have been as young as fourteen. I was watching a thirty-something woman in a satin-grey dressing gown, squeezed uncomfortably close to a man on a slightly shabby two-seater, him shunting a fat, furry microphone under her nose (a nice twist). It was in, in what my memory reassures me, a compact, terrace-house living room. She had the long dead-ironed, cream coloured hair, fashionable in the noughties, and a pleasant, earnest expression. She told him that most of her clients didn’t really book for sex, but for emotional comfort, counselling even.

I sensed she was distorting the truth, even back then, though I wouldn’t have understood why or to what end. Escorting has suffered from a long association with artlessness, even ineptitude. The crass stereotype that prostitution is a job you do when you can do nothing else. Other than perhaps low-paid, low value work (if only you weren’t so fucking lazy). Indeed, I recall a stunted discourse I suffered with an old acquaintance who was trying to convince me to give up ‘that awful stuff’, suggesting cleaning, waitressing, factory work, “anyone can do that stuff”, she said, charitably.

“I’m thinking of starting a medical degree. “ I replied. “Or law. Or training for military service. Or to be an aerospace engineer. Or private advisor to the PM. Or maybe just midwifery.” She looked horrified, like I had told I was planning to drop out of an eight-story building, using a tailored jacket as wings.

It’s understandable then, that some hookers may wish to embellish their work with the textures of more legitimised labour. True enough, sex work isn’t a piss in the park. It can require skills and aptitudes (not simply the obvious). But I became a dollymop in no small part because I didn’t care for being seen by others has having fulfilled bourgeois norms of occupational respectability. I understood there are consistent differences between what looks good and difficult from the outside, and what’s truly going on in the office. I understood that, with some lifesaving exceptions, a lot of people were winging their jobs a lot more often than they’d care to admit. And that the people who were successful weren’t always the most authentically talented in the corporation, but the ones who gave good power point presentations, and knew how to shmooze the boss.

That all may, itself, be an unhelpful exaggeration of the situation. But the point stands that, trying to get people to value your contribution to the world and respect your experience, is a mugs game. Some people are shallow, and they court connections with people they dislike just because they’ve got a good résumé. They mooch about with them feeling like they are in the ‘right crowd’, their envy providing a strong liquor to get them through. What have you earned? Friendships thinner than a gossamer stocking. Unfortunately, this kind of social gaming is not uncommon, but whether the status-surfing is about wealth, looks or footing, opting out is always an option.

That was the benefit of being a strumpet; few women consider this job as a possibility, despite the potential for decent, even high earnings with flexible hours. And that’s at least, in part, because being a harlot is considered to be one of the most problematic things a woman could chose to be. Of course, some women are simply more sexually exclusive than others. But because there is a taboo around my work/lifestyle, I get to enjoy the manifold benefits of it untroubled by too much saturation or normalisation. Excellent.

Does it peeve me when people make the leap that, because I’m an escort, I must be fundamentally inept? Uncultured, incompetent, uncouth? Sure. I recently wrote a whole essay about this very subject for Tryst. But that does not mean that I need to join in with the people who act like whatever particularity of paper-shuffling or keyboard bashing they get paid for is a godly occupation. You know, I don’t think that its’ very common for counsellors and other brain-prodders to proudly claim, “you know, I’m kind of like a prostitute in a way”. Even though, that would have its own kind of truth. Hookers who make such comparisons are naively conceding to the idea that other kinds of jobs are just ‘better’, and if only you can scrimp off some of their sheen, you can make better a bad situation.

Tosh! I don’t think booking a companion, or an escort or dominatrix, is ‘therapeutic’. Relaxing? Often. Cathartic? Sure. Energising, gratifying, pleasantly distracting? That’s the idea. Perhaps confidence boosting, that may be coded as a kind of therapy. But in general, therapy is about learning to confront your problems honestly and maturely and working through them realistically. I happen to think many people could do that by every-so often standing against a stiff breeze and shouting “I will be honest with myself today!” a few times, would do the trick and save them a few quid (with which to buy a blow-job). But then I would say that. Just like a therapist would tell you to stop getting so many blowjobs and come in twice a week.

My job, if it’s about ‘anything’ at all, is to give my clients a break from all that maturity and responsibility and reality stuff, and to indulge in a slice of the corporeal and the inconsequential. And I have no interest in defending that - sociologically or politically - by pretending I’m helping people with their problems or assisting them on the road to their ‘higher selves’. I don’t see being a companion as offering a calm, remedial space upon which to expose raw wounds, but an intermittent sensual exit point (trite metaphor incoming) on life’s, long drab, pebble-grey highway. I think pleasure and amusement for pleasure and amusement’s sake are probably a noble thing. And even if they are not, my amount of caring is so slight it could safely be stowed in a pin box. If we whores are to have a Greek goddess, she would be Aphrodite, not Panacea, and that’s OK.

That doesn’t mean I mind if clients talk to me about their lives, their problems. I may even try to offer some bungled advice. I’m human, technically. And bungled because my instinct to say, “Get a divorce, give all your money to a donkey charity, go pick fruit in Goa and learn to stand on your head” wouldn’t do. Even though, that is the right advice. But I’m not the brown couch I’m the topless version of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and I can’t and won’t be held responsible for anything remotely real. Similarly, if someone tells me about their crap colleague I have to be condescendingly benign and follow my first Peep Show orientated advice - “piss in his filing cabinet!” - with “I’m sure it will all work out in the end.”

Toxic Femininity Over Cappuccino

I had myself thinking about toxic femininity this week. I was sat in a small pokey coffee shop in York, tinkering on my laptop, and I saw a woman in a white shirt, blue jeans and white trainers, clutching her over-foamed iced frappe. As she was leaving, a chubby, hairy, diffident bloke in a black band t-shirt was arriving. They crossed paths, and she, contemptuously, disdainfully, lifted a flapping hand and shooed him out of her ‘right of way’. He stumbled awkwardly and red-facedly into a table, trying to style it by energetically search for his wallet. As though feeling through his pockets always made him fall into furniture. Poor guy. What a cow. Et cetera. I wondered how many people that woman pointlessly makes feel terrible each day, and if there was any way of collecting them together to form a committee.

I could just say that said woman was an arsehole, but I’m trying to pincer a theme, so let’s say she was an exemplar of toxic femininity. Contrary to the manosphere, toxic femininity is not being bisexual, having short hair, tattoos or cats, or feminist ideals or aspirations (yes, yes, yes, yes and yes). It’s not having ADHD or being vegan or writing Twilight fan fiction or knowing that Andrew Tate fans are imbeciles (no, no, no, yes). It’s not thinking rapists should go to prison or believing that beating your wife is wrong (yes, yes).

If toxic masculinity is following the ‘lore’ of masculinity to its logical extreme - trying to exercise purportedly masculine traits even when that hurts you or others – then toxic femininity is basically the same in the other direction. Women are encouraged to be nurturing rather than self-protective; toxic femininity could include nurturing people who are shitty or exploitative. Women are encouraged to be intuitive rather than analytic; toxic femininity could include repudiating rationality and putting too much stock in metaphysical woo-woo.++ Women are encouraged to think domestic comfort is important; toxic femininity could include obsessing over household perfection and diminishing the importance of personal hobbies or interests. Women are encouraged to think other people (men and women) ought to make space for their delicacy and beauty; toxic femininity could include rudely enforcing being prioritised or pampered. Acting the ‘diva’.

I should try and bludgeon this zygote into some sex-industry relevant schema. But I penned it to distract myself from imagining running down the street after that self-important sybil, taking the (iced) coffee from her hand, and putting it about her person.

Housekeeping

I have had a lot of fiddles with my upcoming trip-schedule, trying to shift around due to appointments and personal events and so forth. I am going to be in Reading in the first week of September (it’s almost Autumn already, harumph!) and I had planned to be in Guildford for mid-September, but I’ve changed that to Cambridge. I hope to meet Guildford instead in November (patent pending.) Then I have tours in Edinburgh in October and a short stint in the big smoke, London. I’m there partially for a group photo-shoot with KLE (Kinky London Escorts, a collective of escorts who offer kink in the capital). I’ve never done a group photo shoot before – something new for Cora! – and because I haven’t got around to scheduling my own this year, that should be a nice amuse bouche for next.

I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (the ‘first’ true crime novel), ploughing my way through the amusing but BUGGER ME dense, Balzac novel A Harlot High and Low, and binge-watching Vikings. If someone would like to source me a (plastic) axe and shield, I think I’d make a not totally unconvincing shield maiden.

Photos From My Summer