You Should Be Paying Me
By: Lydia Caradonna
Tags: Sex, Work, Sexuality, Social Media, People

You Should Be Paying Me

Why are men pretending to be sex workers online?

Picture the scene: a dimly lit room taken up nearly entirely by a bed. I’m on my back, my legs spread, counting the ceiling tiles. I’m 22 years old, blonde, and often the subject of sexual harassment on the street. The man rubbing his stubble against my vulva is in his mid fifties, has terrible personal hygiene, and is not by any means conventionally attractive. Why am I enduring this torture, you ask? Well, it’s because he’s paying me.

About two minutes into having my genitals mauled at, I fake a porn-star orgasm just so he’ll stop touching me. Satisfied at his sex-god skills, glad that he is Not Like Other Clients and cares about me having Authentic Pleasure during our time together, the client says the words that I fear the most.

“You should be paying me!”

It’s not always there. But I see it, sometimes, the look in their eyes when they say that. It’s an idea, a fantasy: perhaps, like me, they could have mind blowing and totally, obviously, mutually enjoyable sexual intercourse with people and get paid for it? Sometimes it’s a passing fancy, but on some dark, dismal days I see the idea take flight in their mind.

And then I see it. The profile on Adultwork, the same one that booked my friends and I mere days ago. It has been switched from seeking services to offering. The client has uploaded a grainy picture of himself sweating in a rugby shirt with a beer in hand, and another of his grimy genitals over a stained duvet. His profile text has been filled with badly punctuated paragraphs about how much he likes eating pussy and how great he is at it. He doesn’t seem to understand that escort advertising boards are not slightly more taboo dating websites.

I cringe.

Is that my fault, I wonder? Did I instil that poor, foolish man with a bizarre confidence in his horrific oral skills? Is he now under the impression that not only is his tongue bearable, but it has monetary value? Should I have taken one for the team, perhaps, and endured it until he gave up? I have created a monster.

Days from now, someone with a PhD will write a useless paper in which they count the profiles of these clueless chancers and use this meaningless statistic to claim that straight male sex workers are common and the industry is not as gendered as once thought. The idea that one might need to successfully sell sex at least once to count as a sex worker is trivial to them. But it’s too late, anyway. By faking orgasm, I have caused the body of academic scholarship on sex work to become diluted with bad statistics. It is my fault. It’s all my fault.

I would feel even guiltier if I thought that these men were actually being hired. The prospect of someone paying even a small amount of money for what I was being paid to endure is horrifying, but luckily I do not have to worry about that. Nobody in their right mind would book what is so clearly a fantasist for a sexual encounter. The very, very tiny pool of female clients would almost certainly book an established male escort with semi-decent ad copy and pictures.

Perhaps an escort like Marc, who last year advertised himself as the premier escort in the North East of England? Marc’s skills in the sack were so godlike that he had emerged as the top escort in the whole of the North East early enough in his career to have just six twitter followers and zero reviews. He was happy, however, to reply to everyone’s Tweets to tell us how much he wanted to have sex with us – as professional colleagues, of course, and therefore for free because it was basically networking.

Marc, as a very serious escort running a very serious business, decided to run a retweet competition to give back to his clients. This canny businessman tried to give away a free night with him as a prize, and when he received a grand total of three retweets – all of them from real sex workers trying to call his bluff – generously agreed that everyone would win. Had he been a client (though as we must remember, he was a very real award winning sex worker and definitely not a fantasist) then the man would have thought he had found it, the golden loophole that allowed him access to all of the escorts he desired: pretend to be one of them. Simple, really, and surprising that it hadn’t been thought of before.

Except it had. Repeatedly. And we were all sick of it.

His profile showed several telltale signs that he was a pervert fulfilling his own sexual desires rather than a professional, and at least once a week we spot the same things on near identical accounts. There are bizarrely improbable claims, like the suggestion that a client had shown up with her friend for an unplanned threesome or that the neighbour’s wife had sussed out his very real profession and shown up for an “early Christmas present”, both things that definitely happen outside of pornography.

Nobody seems to understand that sex work is about selling a fantasy to a client, not having a mutually satisfying hook up with extra steps, and they keep talking about women paying to perform unprotected oral sex on them as if that is supposed to be enticing. It is unclear if any one of them has ever met a woman, because they seem to think women everywhere are lining up to buy their skid-marked boxer shorts and club together with our friends to watch them masturbate in the corner at our girls’ nights. Without fail, the accounts all harass real sex workers, trying to have sex with us for free under the guise of “filming content”.

Occasionally we even recognise the men as our bad clients, the clients we have warned other workers about. At that point it stops being just obnoxious and starts becoming scary.

Marc, by the way, deleted his account after being asked why all of his “videos of sessions” had been stolen from porn sites.

When I posted about this phenomenon on Twitter, my mentions exploded. In fact, days later, I put my phone down to wash my face before bed and came back with 20+ notifications.

While the likes and examples contributed by my peers can attest to the fact that men essential cosplaying as prostitutes is a widely observed (and derided) phenomenon, a not insignificant number of people – clients, “straight male sex workers” and, bizarrely, genuine female sex workers – were flocking to my mentions to suggest that I, a lesbian worker with a pimp who has sex with men for as little as £10, was punching down on the far less privileged straight white men who only see clients they’re physically attracted to. In fact, the whole of Australia and its apparently booming market for straight male sex workers seemed to turn out to call me a whorephobe and misandrist. How will I ever recover?

So, for the sake of clarity: I have nothing against male sex workers. In fact, I am personally friends with at least fifteen. Because they’re not in the business for their own sexual gratification, all of them see the men who make up the vast, vast majority of potential clients – regardless of their own sexual preferences.

I don’t deny that a select few male escorts have successfully found female clients. I do, however, think that if you’re privileged enough in this industry to cater to the 0.5% of the client base that you are personally attracted to, you’re probably too privileged to contribute anything of value when we start talking about our rights and welfare. Feel free to re-enter the discussion when you start seeing clients you’re pretty sure are dangerous because you can’t afford not to, or when you get raided and have to have sex with a cop as a bribe.

And, esteemed straight male escorts of Twitter (and of Channel 4 documentary): please don’t insult us by spinning such unbelievable stories as “I see my high class clients on a mattress on my kitchen floor” and “I don’t have sex with clients on the first date despite literally being paid to do that” and expect us to believe that you have carved out a stable income.

Especially when you have a separate income stream “coaching” other men to become male sex workers for women.

We’re prostitutes, not idiots.