Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are. – Oscar Wilde
In the commentary on my column of November 15th, regular reader Susan asked: Maggie, perhaps you would like to do a science fiction anthology with sex work as a subject which we can all contribute? Well, I just thought that was a smashing idea so I volunteered to tackle the editing if we can get enough submissions. Regular reader Sailor Barsoom was kind enough to send me information on publishing via Kindle, which turns out to be spectacularly easy so I think I’m officially ready to accept submissions now.
Stories can be either science fiction, fantasy or horror but one of the main characters must be a sex worker, preferably in a positive role; I am only accepting short stories, so submissions must not be longer than 7000 words. Please copyright anything you send me by putting the date and your name at the end of the text document (I prefer Word format but can convert if necessary) and email them to me at maggiemcneill@earthlink.net with the word “anthology” in the subject line. You may make as many submissions as you like. Of the purchase price for each book, Amazon keeps 30% and I plan to donate 20% to SWOP or Desiree Alliance (maybe 10% to each). I will keep 5% as my editorial fee, and the remaining 45% will be divided equally among the published stories (one share per story) regardless of length; I don’t want authors padding their stories just to inflate their word count, and this way each story will be as long or as short as it needs to be. If you have any questions or suggestions, please use the same “anthology” subject line. Don’t be shy, y’all; if you have a good idea but feel your ability to express it lacks finesse just write it up and your editor will happily assist you in polishing it.
So if the average age at which a woman enters prostitution isn’t really 13, what age is it?
An anomaly on several levels.
Good question! A friend of mine who is still a working escort recently conducted a poll of 100 escorts who frequent a message board of which she is a member. She asked at what age they started the trade, and her results were as follows:
Younger than 15: 3%
15-17: 11%
18-20: 13%
21-23: 18%
24-26: 16%
27-29: 10%
30-32: 10%
Older than 32: 19%
She polled the “older than 32” respondents separately and the average age for that category was 42; she estimated the average for the “under 15” category at 13. Given these figures, the average age of entry into prostitution for American escorts is 26.46.
It’s difficult to know what percentage of all American prostitutes are escorts, but I would suspect 60% is a good guesstimate; with our standard 15% streetwalker estimate that would allow 25% in brothels and massage parlors. Estimating the average age of streetwalkers is tricky; I’m going to be really generous and pretend that HALF of all streetwalkers are underage. Now, by all reasonable estimates that’s much higher than the reality but I want to err on the side of caution. Let’s presume adult streetwalkers enter at roughly the same times as escorts (average 26); what’s the average for underage girls? Well, guess what; it still isn’t 13 even for them. As explained in this analysis, it’s about 16. If we average the two figures (26 for adult streetwalkers and 16 for underage) we arrive at an average streetwalker entry age of 21, a far cry from 13 even allowing HALF of streetwalkers are underage! We have no stats on brothel or massage girls, so again I’m going to be incredibly generous to the liars and fanatics and estimate that the average for that group is the same as among streetwalkers, namely 21. So let’s crunch the numbers: if 60% start at an average age of 26 and 40% at an average age of 21, the average age at which American hookers enter the profession is 24, which I think everyone can agree is safely into the adult range.
I’m a nurse, and most of the women patients I’ve dealt with in the past who have had anal forced on them stated they couldn’t help but scream when it was happening to them. Some passed out from the experience and woke up after the fact. Yet neither time you were raped did you do either. How were you able to get through that?
Well, there’s a vast degree of difference between a hooker who is not remotely an anal virgin and an amateur who fights such an assault rather than bending with it like a willow. To use an analogy a male might appreciate, your patients stood still and tried to resist punches in the jaw by brute force rather than rolling with them. Also, some people scream as a reaction to shock; I tend to react with a sharp intake of breath instead. With all due respect to those ladies, passing out during a violent assault, especially a sexual one, is a good way to get yourself killed. In my humble (and experienced) opinion, fighting a rape is a good strategy only until actual penetration has been accomplished; at that point it’s best to relax as best one can so as to minimize physical injury and to keep as calm as possible during the ordeal so as to be able to think clearly to plan one’s survival and/or escape strategies. Unless one is in a place where screaming may bring help, I would avoid it because it may anger the rapist and make him even more violent; rape is bad enough without being beaten or strangled as well.
During an encounter I’m sure sooner or later the condom broke during vigorous thrusting, did some clients “finish” inside you? If so what did you do about it?
Yes, that happened twice in my career. Since I had a hysterectomy at 28 I had no fear of pregnancy, but obviously any working girl who is still fertile should be on the pill just in case something like that does happen. Smart hookers don’t rely entirely on condoms for disease prevention, either; the condom is just the “safety net” if something slips through the other two layers of defense, which are 1) catering to a clientele who tend to be clean in the first place, and 2) careful visual checking as I’ve talked about before. One of my two breakages was with a regular whom I believe saw me exclusively; he was more worried than I was afterward! The other was just a typical call. In both cases I douched like crazy with a strong vinegar solution as soon as I got home and then went to my gynecologist for testing; neither accident resulted in any problem.
I was reading in your blog recently that you really don’t desire to sleep with other men? Doesn’t monogamy get kinda old for a sexually liberated woman like yourself?
Nope. As I said in my column of September 22nd, “my sexuality is almost entirely receptive; though I have no aversion to sex whatsoever, it’s pretty rare that I actually crave it. In other words, if nobody propositions me I just tend to cruise along, not really thinking about sex or wanting it, yet if someone I find attractive or interesting or nice or generous approaches me for sex I tend to get interested quite easily unless there’s some reason I shouldn’t (in which case I can resist just as easily). You might say my ‘on’ switch isn’t hard to find; it just isn’t equipped with an automatic setting.” Obviously, cheating on a husband one loves is an act of epic stupidity, so I never allow the switch to go on with any man but him; besides, I’ve had enough stranger-sex for several lifetimes. I must admit that I’m sometimes attracted to a pretty girl, but since my husband says that’s OK I make no effort to resist it when it happens.
I sent you something, and I know it needs polish. I’ve got some other stuff in mind if what I sent isn’t right.
I’ll send you my story as well by the end of this week, although I think that since you are the editor, your “robowhore” story should be first on the lineup.
Thanks, Susan! I’m not sure where I’ll put it; in some anthologies I’ve seen stories written by the editor take the last spot, which seems more appropriately humble to me. 🙂
I remember you said this also when we talked once about whether or not women would ever pay for sex, Maggie, and you concluded that some might, but you never would. So I felt curious, and I have a couple of question for you on this topic — I hope I don’t offend you with that. (I’m not trying to force my opinion on you, or to tell you what you feel — as if I could possibly know it better than you. No — I’m just sincerely curious.)
Now, I’m sure you, me, everybody buys everyday things that we like less than sex. Say, cheese. (Replace it with some other kind of food that you think you enjoy eating less than you enjoy having good sex.) We all could say about cheese something similar to what you once said about sex: ‘I do like cheese, but I almost never really crave it; if cheese is offered to me for free, and if it’s good-looking, I might take it and actually enjoy eating it, but if that’s not the case I just cruise along, not really thinking about cheese at all; and should I ever really feel so hungry, there are lots of other types of food I could have for free, I wouldn’t need to pay to eat cheese!’
And yet I and you and everybody has probably already paid for cheese — bought some in a supermarket, for instance.
What is the difference between a woman’s never-desperate desire for cheese and a woman’s never-desperate desire for men that allows her to still buy cheese, but not a man’s attention and intimacy? (My impression would be that you can’t really get cheese for free — if you could, then you’d never buy it — whereas you can get men’s attention and intimacy for free; in fact, they even pay you for it.)
I also wondered if the “I can get it for free all the time” factor also created a sense of sexual self-worth, of dignity, that you and other pretty women feel; something like “a pretty girl shouldn’t have to pay for something men are always trying to give her!” I say this because, when we first discussed this topic, you vehemently denied the possibility that you might ever buy sex from men; and even though every statement you made could simply be a statement of fact (“I would never want to pay a man; it would defeat the purpose; that’s the way I am!”), re-reading them I can’t avoid a feeling that you were also trying to defend your honor and dignity a little (“I would never bow so low, even if for some crazy reason I really craved sex! Paying for it is beneath me!”).
People pay me for sex, not vice versa. It’s simply a fact. During long periods (two years once) when I was celibate, it never bothered me; when my husband is gone for a month or more it doesn’t bother me. I think that as Scorch said, the idea of not craving sex is just so alien to your male psyche that you can scarcely believe it. 🙂
I’ve also gone through cheeseless periods, and I never regretted it; when I spend a month without cheese I don’t mind it either. Yet I have bought cheese, and I’m sure you have too. What is the difference?
I note you didn’t answer my questions; you just again reacted as if I had said that if you were desperate enough you’d buy sex, which I didn’t say. I made a comparison with cheese, which I suppose you’re not desperate about either and yet probably buy? I suppose sometimes we read what we think should be written rather than what actually is. Sigh!…
I’m really curious, about the difference, so I’ll post this in the hope that you will reread my questions and then give an interesting answer. But if you prefer to imagine that I just don’t get that you don’t crave sex… feel free. Again… sigh!
Your analogy is presented from a masculine point of view, so of course you don’t understand my answer. Let me express it a different way: When I was a librarian I saw a study in which men and women were asked what the greatest pleasures in life were, and the two top results for both sexes were sex and food. However, on the male list sex was above food and on the female food was above sex.
I DO sometimes crave cheese. I don’t crave sex. Yes, I’ve given it away to men I merely liked, but I’ve also done friends’ dishes or helped them move for friendship as well. Sex without love is absolutely, totally uninteresting to me; you might as well ask if I’d ever pay to be allowed to do office work. So what you’re actually saying is, “Maggie, if there were almost no supermarkets left in the world, wouldn’t you pay to be a cashier in one?” And the answer, obviously, is “no.”
Does that make more sense?
Yep, it does. But let me explore it a bit further. Forgive me my ‘male perspective’ if you want, but I’m just drawn this way. 🙂
Well, if you think that an occasional craving for cheese disqualifies the comparison, let us try with something that you never crave yet will sometimes buy. What would that be? You say women — I suppose you, too? — might put food above sex; so let’s try with something that is not food. Say, candles? Have you ever bought candles, despite never craving nor needing them?
Your second comparison is much more interesting. You said it would be like asking if you’d want to be a cashier in the last supermarket on earth, or to pay to work in an office.
The interesting point is that these are things that pretty much nobody likes. Barring outlier cases, pretty much nobody likes to wash the dishes, or clean an office, or be a cashier; these are all things we don’t enjoy, and of course wouldn’t pay to do. We only do them because we need, or as a favor to someone.
If this analogy is correct, then sex is for you like washing the dishes, or working as a cashier, or cleaning an office? In other words, are you saying that you don’t like or enjoy sex in any way more than you like/enjoy washing dishes, working as a cashier, or cleaning an office? Is sex for you personally always and only a favor to someone else?
That would be correct. Loveless sex is a chore to me. It’s sometimes an easy chore, sometimes a pleasant chore, but a chore nonetheless. And I don’t pay to do chores.
Sex with love is wonderful; sex without it is of no interest to me except as a means of generating income or doing a favor for someone I like.
The comparison Maggie used was buying tickets to a sporting event. She isn’t that interested in sports, and would never pay to go see one. She doesn’t think that people who pay to see sporting events are “beneath her” her or “less good than she is,” but she herself wouldn’t pay to see, for instance, a football game. Same thing, she said.
Except, Maggie, it’s not quite the same thing. The suggestion that you would buy a ticket to a football game if you’d gone a long time without football is incorrect, but the notion that you might, under any circumstances, pay for sex is not only inaccurate, but seems to be genuinely offensive to you.
“Not maybe!”
“Never ever”
However, I don’t think that this is because you hold those who pay for sex in contempt, but because you hold it to be MALE behavior, and you are FEMALE. To suggest that you would pay for sex is to, almost, accuse you of being unwomanly.
It’s as if somebody suggested that if I went through a long pussiless dry spell I’d start french-kissing dudes. Well, no I wouldn’t. Because I’m a straight guy. Doesn’t mean that I despise women who french-kiss dudes.
And you wouldn’t pay for dick even if it were the only way to get it, because it would be, I don’t know, out of character for you.
Am I anywhere near the truth here? It does seem to be a suggestion you react to more strongly than to sports or cheese.
I had noticed that too, Sailor, and it struck me as like a guy saying he’d never wear skirts, or something like that. The comparison with french-kissing guys is apt, but still: note that in prisons men often end up having sex with other men, precisely because there are no available women around. Also, in other cultures, the idea of having sex with young men while waiting for a woman is not unheard-of: I’ve read somewhere that, in Islamic cultures (in the past, I think; I’m not sure about the present), it was OK for young men to be ‘male whores’ for a while precisely because of that.
In other words, maybe the reason why you and me think we’d never go around french-kissing guys is that we do have, after all, sufficiently much chance of sex with a woman.
@Sailor Barsoom: Yes, you’re right on the money. To me, a woman paying for sex is just…weird. And kind of creepy. Like you would feel about snogging another dude.
@Asehpe: Right, but you’re a GUY and your sex drive is independent of emotion, whereas a woman’s is not. You seem to not grasp that there are intrinsic differences, differences of kind rather than degree, between the male and female sex drive. I’ve seen women who were desperate for attention, but I’ve never seen one who was truly desperate for coitus. And apparently you just can’t get that. Male and female are NOT a continuum, no matter what the queer theorists claim; we are sky and earth. The presence of a few things which float between sky and earth (clouds) does not mean there is some gradual transition from solid to gel to heavy liquid to liquid to effervescent liquid to heavy gas to gas as we increase in altitude; it just means that as with everything else in the cosmos there are exceptions to the rule. But the presence of exceptions does not invalidate the rule, no matter what most denizens of the internet seem to believe. 🙁
Maggie, the fact that I’m a GUY (:-)) doesn’t mean I can’t grasp differences of kind; it’s simply that I am a ragged empiricist, and I’ve often seen — in physics and elsewhere — enormous differences in observed properties being derived from variations in a single underlying property. Please don’t feel that I’m trying to “prove that you’re wrong”, or that I’m denying any matters of fact. I’m not. Honestly! 🙂
A continuum doesn’t imply that there is mobility up and down the scale; it doesn’t imply anything about transitional states. All it says is that observed properties can be explained/expressed in terms of one underlying variable.
We all know that vapor, water, and ice, despite their strikingly different physical properties, occupy places along a continuum defined by temperature; but we all know this only because we happen to live on a planet with the (extraordinarily rare in the universe) right conditions for intermediary states to be observed.
But we don’t live in a world with the right conditions for us to see obviously that glasses and liquids are also along a continuum, defined by viscosity — some people think glass is a supercooled liquid, others that it is an amorphous solid, but these are nomenclature problems (see e.g. here). As a result, we tend to think about glasses and liquids as totally different things, unrelated to each other — because the similarities in their internal structure are not visible to the naked eye, not in terrestrial conditions.
Also, a continuum doesn’t imply that all the intermediate states must have visible properties that are also intermediate. There are such things as catastrophic phase transitions: ice/water ‘solidifies/liquefies’, water/vapor ‘evaporates/liquifies’, and there is nothing in the mere scalar structure of the continuum that should make us expect that: catastrophic (or first-order) phase transitions are actually a fact in need of explanation by themselves, not an expected consequence of the continuum of temperature (and pressure) states.
All I’m saying, Maggie, is that the observed differences in sexual behavior, no matter how big, still may derive from variations along a continuum. Nobody disputes that vapor and ice are very different things: all their observable properties are strikingly different. Yet they are two different states of the same substance along a continuum of temperature and pressure. Just because a difference is big, or apparently unexpected, it doesn’t follow that it HAS to reflect an underlying difference of kind. Nature doesn’t always work like that.
That’s all Maggie, nothing more than that. I’m honestly not trying to offend. I’m just trying to understand how the observed differences between men and women, as reflected in your personal experience and introspection, actually mean for the underlying order — I’d like to understand why we need more than one variable to account for them. Maybe we do, maybe we don’t; but the reason can’t be simply that the observed differences are big. The kind of differences that we observe matters more.
Hmmm… Interesting!
Let’s see… If I understand it well, love is inherently based in alterity — it’s interest for the other, not for the self. This prompts the question: why should love with sex be better (or is it?) than love without sex? That is to say, if you were truly in love with an asexual man (it seems there are some, but even if there weren’t let’s try it as a thought experiment), would sexless love with him be for you the same, ‘just as good’, as love with sex would be with a normal, sexual man?
If this is the case — if it would be the same –, then what you like and enjoy is the love, and the sex is in the equation because you love him, and he wants it — i.e. it is again a chore, a favor, something oriented outward; never for you, always for someone else. You like sex with him as you like washing his clothes for him — or better yet, as you like watching the movies he likes (war movies, it seems) with him. But not for yourself, not because you the activity; what you enjoy is that it’s for him (as Kant might say, you enjoy the “for-him-ness” of the action).
Would that be correct, or am I misinterpreting your answer (always a possibility, alas!…)?
I don’t claim to be a wholly selfless being; I’m not an angel but a living woman. I have needs as well, and one of those is to be needed as a woman rather than as a domestic servant. I could not be happy with an asexual man not because there is no sex, but because there is no need. If my husband is away on business and asks me for phone sex, I am still happy because he has demonstrated his need for me even though I get no sex in return; likewise if all he wants on some particular night is a blow job. Obviously if that were all he ever wanted I would begin to think there was something wrong with me in his eyes and it would no longer be satisfying, but that again is due to the need for being needed sexually rather than the need for sex.
That is actually quite instructive; you’re therefore saying you agree with Mme de Staël’s famous saying that you quote in one of your posts: your desire is not for touching or being touched, but for being desired. Right?
In that case, it wouldn’t matter to you if you weren’t touched, or had no orgasms (the phone sex is perfectly sufficient for you), because if you see in his eyes that your husband desires you, that would be enough. That is already the satisfaction in itself, the point of the whole thing, the male orgasm equivalent as it were. That is, if the need to be desired is satisfied, there is no internal need for further action; only your husband has a need of his own, and you duly take care of it because of your love for him, because of your pleasure in seeing that he has his needs satisfied.
That also makes it easier to see what you claim you wouldn’t pay for sex. If the need is for the desire in the man, not for doing anything to him, then paying for it would be like paying for a compliment: if you pay for a compliment it isn’t a compliment, and therefore you aren’t getting a compliment. It would approach a contradiction in terms. Is that close to the truth as you see it?
Now, if my hypothesis here is correct, I would imagine that there is a couple of further consequences, that I would like to ask you about. I understand that these would be very personal questions, and I fully understand it if you tell me it’s none of my business and prefer not to answer. But I believe in testing hypothesis, so…
(a) if your desire is not really physical (to do things, or have things done to you) but really oriented externally, towards the other and the desire he shows for you, that should mean you wouldn’t find any pleasure in masturbation; or at least that masturbation would have to be based on fantasies with a strong love/romance component. Would that be correct?
(b) does that need for desire from the Other also explain your bisexuality? If you also feel (esthetically, as you put it, but still sexually, I presume) attracted to women, does this mean you feel like doing things to them (= internally motivated desire), or do you also simply feel like seeing desire in their eyes (= desire motivated by the Other)? (By the way, I suppose what you said about ‘feeling desire for men in your guts’, when comparing your attraction to men to your attraction to women, is also a reference to love — your guts have to tell you you love the guy, which agrees with something I had heard before from another girl, something like: “I need a warm feeling in my belly for him before I can go to bed with him.”)
Now you’ve got it! Paying a man for sex would be like paying someone to take me out to dinner; the very idea is an absurdity. I already explained all this in my column of July 21st: “…it should be obvious why it is a rare woman indeed who will pay for sex with a man: It is an undeniable statement that he is not attracted to her, and that invalidates the primary reason for which she might seek unprofitable, non-relationship sex.”
To answer your questions: A) Correct. Except as part of a show for a man, I haven’t masturbated in almost 14 years (and it was pretty rare even then). B) I’m not interested in women who don’t want me, either.
Actually, that does make sense, Maggie. Now, trying to generalize — why do you think vibrators and dildos are commercially viable? If you mastrubated so rarely, I understand you’d never needed or owned one of these implements; still they’re out there, have been for quite a while (initially marketed as “massage helpers”) and are mostly sold to women. Does this indicate variation among women as to the extent to which their sex drive is purely externally motivated? (One thought that occurs to me is that pretty and ugly women, given the different amount of male attention they get, might differ in that respect.)
I’m peculiar in that respect; I daresay most women who aren’t asexual or repressed masturbate more than I do. But masturbation and actual sex aren’t the same thing for either gender, or else men wouldn’t pay for sex when they could just play with themselves.
Indeed, and that’s a point I’ve had to make several times in discussions with neofeminists (some of them apparently think the male sexual drive is simply orgasm-oriented; I point out if this were the case masturbation would be more than enough).
But as many point out masturbation does have something to do with one’s response to stimulation by others as well — people who masturbate get some first-hand knowledge of how their physical sexual response actually works and can help their partners learn how and where to touch them. Masturbation helps.
If I may, at this very late date …
Yes, Asehpe, indeed. My wife tells me that she was not able to orgasm *at all*, when she was first beginning to become a sexually active woman, until she bought herself a (very basic) vibrator and explored her body with it, trying this and trying that and discovering what felt good. (Many years before we met.) She continues to use it, from time to time. (I’m glad; it takes pressure off of me to “perform” at a moment’s notice … which is not as easy as it used to be!)
And, Maggie, it seems to me that you are offering us an account with two facets to its point of view. One of course is your feminine point of view, which of course has a number of contrasts with our masculine points of view.
The other is *your own* point of view (OK with receiving attention, but don’t get horny per se and don’t feel a need to pleasure yourself, with or without a vibrator), which may have some contrasts with other women’s points of view.
Your point of view exists, is real, is valid; their points of view exist, are real, are valid. You (plural) will have some features, in your points of view, that you hold in common, and some that you do not.
Just as we Y-chromosome-types will have some features, in our points of view, that we hold in common and some that we do not.
Thank you for your account. The shame that surrounds “sex” in our society prevents most men from asking about this; it prevents most women from answering such questions.
Thank you.
Hey! Where’s this science fiction anthology you were talking about? How can I get my hands on it?
I’m still taking submissions if you’d like to contribute. 🙂
The one I was going to write turned out to be the beginning of something much longer, and so I’m not writing it, at least not right now. I ended up sending in two other things instead, but they may not be right, since each is related to another project of mine (Hector’s Harem and Tomboy).
Thanks for an interesting and informative post (as always), but I wanted to correct one point: You state ‘any working girl who is still fertile should be on the pill just in case [of condom breakage]’.
In fact, any working girl who is still fertile and does not want pregnancy should be using some type of contraception other than condoms, as decided with her health care professional. She certainly is not limited to the pill, in this day and age; there are a number of other options (the contraceptive implant, injection, or intra-uterine device with or without hormone) that are of similar or greater reliability than the pill but have the major bonus of not requiring to be remembered on a daily basis. Or there are diaphragms, which are less reliable but may be preferable for some women. Just wanted to ask you please not to equate all non-condom contraception to the pill, as it’s misleading.
Thanks, Dr. Sarah! You’re right, of course; I myself had a hysterectomy several years before I started working so I never needed to use backup birth control myself, but I should’ve said “a backup method” rather than just mentioning the pill. 🙂