The Honest Courtesan

Let’s start getting the word out that whores are no different from other women, and that “a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body” is more than just a euphemism for abortion.  –  “Friday the Thirteenth”

By the beginning of my fourth week of blogging, I was already starting to pick up new readers beyond the friends who already knew me from other places on the internet; my traffic had almost doubled from the month before, but the number of visitors I got per day was still lower than I get in a slow hour now.  Still, it was enough to excite me and inspire me to keep working at it.  A number of my July columns were actually chapters from a book I had thought about writing or other essays which I had written previously, but by August that material was exhausted and I had no more crutches to lean on.  In those days, I posted at irregular times; many days I actually wrote the column in the late morning and posted it in the early afternoon, and sometimes they didn’t get posted until sometime in the evening (I didn’t realize I could schedule them ahead of time for another year).

But even by the end of this month, I was trying to develop more regular habits; many of these columns were written the day before or a couple of days out, then staged in a folder for me to post just after breakfast the next day.  This system had innumerable disadvantages over my current one, but it had one advantage:  it was extremely flexible.  If I saw a news story in the morning, I could pre-empt my planned column for that day, quickly write about the story and get it posted that day (or the next if I didn’t see the story until after my daily column had already been posted).  This happened twice in August: “How To Be a Stupid, Greedy Whore” was my very first column written about a current event, and its subject was the first inductee into my Hall of Shame; it was followed only ten days later by “Legal Sundries”, my very first miscellanea column (the predecessor of today’s “That Was the Week That Was” feature).  Nor were those the only firsts that month; “Lammas” was my first holiday column, “Traitors to Their Sex” my first full-length discussion of neofeminism, “Here We Go Again” my first look at the “sex trafficking” hysteria, “New Film Reviews” my first review column, “Marilyn” my first biography of someone I knew from my work and “Friday the Thirteenth” my introduction of the day for non-sex workers to speak out on our behalf.  “Aversions” (sexual things I hate) was my very first “listicle”, but it was quickly followed by “Advice for Clients”, “Bad Girls” (the various types of bad hookers) and “Out and About” (my favorite Greater New Orleans eateries), all in the same type of format.

The average column was still quite long at that time, and some concepts took several days to explore; “The Only Working Girl in New Orleans” is the three-part story of the months after Hurricane Katrina, when I was the only escort in town;  “Regulars” is only two parts, but its discussion of regular clients continues with a discussion of recurring “Nuisances”, “Recognition” and “Celebrities” together are a two-part look at what happens when an escort already knows her client from outside of sex work, and “Whore Madonnas” forms another dyad with “Red Shoes Lady” since they both talk about the maternal feelings of whores.  I was also still writing a lot of introductions to basic concepts then; besides those I’ve already mentioned there was “Cops and Condoms”, which tells how the self-destructive male aversion to condoms is even stronger in cops; “Nothing in the Dark”, which explains why smart sex workers don’t let clients turn off the lights; “The Clipboard Effect”, which looks at how savvy escorts come and go discreetly; “Presents”, which talks about the extra gifts clients give their ladies; and “The Rescuers”, which examines people who want to “save” hookers from our lives.  This month’s harlotography was about “The Empress Theodora” and its fictional interlude was “Painted Devil”, one of my personal favorites; rounding out the selection were “Whores and Wives” (a cross-section of the ways women react to discovering their husbands paying for sex) and “Just Plain Weird”, a look at my oddest requests (which aren’t at all what you think).