Pay for It, Part I
Riddle me this. You can pay for many things that help you get laid. You can pay for manicures and pedicures, for waxing and sugaring, for lipstick and mascara, for thin-strapped bras and matching thongs. You can pay a club’s cover. You can pay for cocktails that loosen you up, slide you from the chick who hates speaking up in meetings to the chick who is grinding her ass into a stranger, singing, Please don’t stop the music. You can pay for membership to an app that will, in theory, intro-duce you to the person you’re going to fuck. You can pay for medication and devices that let you fuck without procreating. You can pay for medicine and procedures that will terminate pregnancy if prophylactic measures fail. And you can pay for childcare if you want to have the kid, or have no choice. This being America, you can and will pay for the health care you need during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. It goes on and on. Hell, you may end up paying for the kid’s college degree. You can pay for everything that surrounds fucking, every spoke of that wheel, but you cannot pay for the fucking itself. You cannot pay for the hub.
Paying for sex is illegal, and, anecdotally at least, that’s the first reason most people give when asked why they don’t. But we do all kinds of illegal things. Little white crimes. We jay-walk, and drop litter, and text while driving. We take pens from the office and buy booze with fake IDs and give friends our Xanax when they’re nervous about flights.
Close to 30% of men say they have paid for sex. I know a few of them. They’re matter-of-fact about it. Years ago, a guy pal vacationed in Prague, wandering happily among the Gothic buildings and their ochre roofs, bingeing on beer and pork knuckles and Kafka and cafés. Toward the end of the week he visited a club. Amid the digital thumping of EDM and the poles of light from colored lasers, he started chatting with a woman. She told him she was a sex worker and, that evening, on the job. His calculation was quick, effortless: I’m horny. She’s working. Let’s go. No hand-wringing. No shame, no big deal. They left the club. She gave him head. He paid her. They parted.
But I don’t know any women who have exchanged money for sex. Maybe this is because there’s no presumption of safety with strange men, so spending an hour with one in a hotel room, for instance, could be as likely to lead to a police report as an orgasm. Maybe it’s because a woman’s orgasm isn’t guaranteed in the same way it usually is for men. Maybe it’s a thread of demisexuality among the fairer sex. Maybe it’s a coincidence. But I don’t think so.
I think the real reason women don’t pay point-blank for sex is because it just isn’t ladylike, it just isn’t proper, and most of us are still yoked to the idea of being or appearing to be the right kind of woman. We want to be normal. Paying for sex directly—the way you swipe your card at the nail salon—reveals hunger and ambition that is unbecoming. The hunger to fuck; the readiness to fuck without all the relational gymnastics; the willingness to use one’s money selfishly. We are taught to trade our relational work for sex, not our cash.
I considered paying for sex. I considered it at great length, in great detail, with great trepidation, with great debates between me and girlfriends, me and my therapist, with Sturm und Drang. On the surface, it seemed like a simple solution to a complex set of problems, one of which was simply that I wanted to have sex but I didn’t want to date. And yet, and yet—I scratched below the surface, and the complications started to explode like popcorn kernels, slowly at first, and then like something that might get out of hand. How would I even find a sex worker? If the sex worker was a man, how could I ensure I wouldn’t be raped and killed?* How likely was a random sex worker to grok the idiosyncratic pathways to my climax? Would the experience permanently alter my dignity, leaving me coated with a sleazy, scandalous slime that I could never scrub off? Could I even enjoy sex under these conditions? Or, dear God, might I enjoy it more, buttressed by a novel sensation of agency and authority, free from the boring dictates of cis-het sexual performance, free to make my pleasure the cynosure of those hours? Regardless, could I ever admit to what I’d done? To friends, to my therapist, to future partners? To my daughter, should she ever ask? In other words, could I actually go through with it, accepting all the implications and ready, at least in theory, to face the externalities?
The irony is, with all the jitteriness and pearl clutching, I failed to grasp that I had already paid for sex. I’d paid in ancillary ways—purchasing makeup and push-up bras and bikini waxes and cocktails. But I’d also paid pretty darn directly. There was a guy, and he was hot as hell, hotter than grease on a smoking skillet, like Lord, even my lesbian friends swooned. Our attraction was palpable, electric, deep. He had a job, but he had no money. Money slipped through his fingers. He was kind of a kid like that. So, it was always my treat. The drinks, the Lyfts, the food, the tickets. I even gave him cash because he said he needed it, and I had it to spare. Soon after—like, very soon—he ate me out for the first time. Rain fell and wind howled and “Beauty & Essex” came through the speaker, and I came on his painfully handsome face, scruff on scruff, the acquiescent ecstasy of orgasm. Our relationship progressed, and he got a raise, and the money thing evened out. But I think, in the final analysis, that was sex I paid for. It wasn’t ideal—not because I wholly reject the idea of being a sugar mama, but because I don’t have endless liquid cash like that, and I’m sentimental at heart, prone to developing feelings after enough sex has been had. Still, I got the sexual release I wanted without having to launder his gym clothes or cook his dinners. In the final analysis, it was worth it.