Sometimes I don’t have sex with my clients. In a booking a few weeks back, the client and I just sat around and discussed his sobriety. This is unusual—most clients, even if they do want emotional labour and social company, also want sexual intimacy.
While I was with him, he answered a call from a girl who had been phoning him incessantly, and he stepped away from me to talk to her. I quietly fiddled on my phone to give him some privacy, but given the tight space in the apartment I could still hear their conversation. She spoke to him the way a lover or girlfriend would, with some claim to his time and affection, and begged to see him that night because she wanted to support him while he struggled with sobriety. He reiterated that he was fine and just wanted to be alone. I sat there, paid, in an obvious rebuttal of that lie—and realised in that moment that the narrative he had given me about being alone was untrue. Really, he had someone desperate to help and please him.
When he got off the phone, he dismissed the woman as “just someone from AA”, and I pretended I hadn’t been able to hear her pleading. We went right back to talking; he showed me his artworks. I wondered how she would feel to know that he was paying another woman to be there with him—and not even for sex but for comfort, something she was offering him freely. If I were in her place, that would somehow hurt me more than him paying someone for sex. It made me think about how some people are so accustomed to deceit. He had lied to both of us, without hesitation and probably entirely out of habit, given that lying often goes hand-in-hand with long-term addiction.
The interaction also bought to my mind an episode of Sex and the City where all the characters discuss monogamy. The camera pans to a random man on the New York street who says, “My definition of monogamy includes sex with prostitutes.” I know that statement is true for many clients of mine—that, to them, sex with a sex worker does not count as cheating given it is transactional and boundaried and no threat to their romantic or public relationship. Honestly, I do understand this outlook—even though I feel for their wives, I also feel for heterosexual people who feel trapped in sexual fidelity by societal expectations. To me, emotional fidelity is what matters most, and I think the unnatural pressure to sleep with only one person for life destroys many relationships.
What made me uncomfortable about this client, though, was that he had extended his definition of monogamy to include not having sex with a prostitute, instead relying on one emotionally. Arguably this a greater betrayal to the relationship he is engaged in with the woman on the phone, because it put me outside the bounds of where I’m meant to be—simply a sexual receptacle or distraction—and into other, murkier territory. It raised questions as to what I meant to him, what she was to him, what need was I serving, and what need he would not let her serve. In most bookings, my purpose is clear. To me, his not fucking the hooker was more disconcerting than his lying.
