The Other Half

Ian is one of my pen pals. He sometimes visits prostitutes. It’s nice to have his perspective because he’s thoughtful and intelligent and not someone—as far as I can tell—who complains on message boards about a certain escort only giving covered blow jobs or charging too much or anything, really. I don’t think he’s the complaining type.

We don’t only talk about sex and sex for money. But recently he said something that I loved and it prompted me to respond with this:

When I first began sex work I was a baby feminist who became very bitter and misanthropic for a month or more but then somehow started opening up to clients, not in giving away details about myself but just in paying more attention to them, and I was overwhelmed by how much shame a lot of men felt around their desires, even when what they wanted was something sweet or tame or profoundly harmless. (Foot fetishists, in my experience, have a disproportionate amount of shame.) And I think work has actually made me like men more, and feel safer around them. Before I had this idea that their sexuality was always predatory, but I saw that they could and often do feel just as vulnerable as women do.

Here’s his line that started it all and stayed with me, and is so simple and true:

“What a weird sensation to discover as an adult that you are ashamed of your own desires (and not because they’re weird or outre, just because they’re desires.)”