I must admit to being rather confused, amused and befuddled by virtually every part of this question, and I don’t think I was alone; Cabrogal replied to the first part with, “If Maggie’s in a closet it’s a glass one surrounded by neon lights with a painting of Sappho on the side.” And he’s completely right; I’ve never (not since graduating from high school, anyway) made even the slightest effort to hide my bisexuality, and wrote an entire column on the subject when this blog was barely two months old. I’ve referred to it repeatedly, featured lots of pictures of beautiful babes, and otherwise advertised my interest in my own sex to at least the same degree in this blog as I have in real life for over 30 years. I don’t think I could conceal my lesbian side any less if I went around wearing a T-shirt with “DYKE” on the back and a picture of Melissa Ethridge on the front. However, I’m bisexual rather than wholly lesbian; I have no aversion to males at all, and in fact was married for 14 years to a very dear man to whom I will gladly give a freebie (if he is so inclined) every time we find ourselves in the same city as each other. We can argue about exactly where I fall on the Kinsey scale, but it’s certainly no higher than 4; to say that I “know in my heart that I’m a lesbian” is simply not a reasonable approximation of the truth.
The questioner’s misunderstanding of all this could merely be a case of leaping without looking; he might simply be a new reader who didn’t peruse much of my back catalog before asking. But the rest of the query is not so easily explained; it derives, I think, partly from a lack of understanding of the differences between male and female homosexuals, partly from a desire to cram reality into a Manichean duality that doesn’t actually describe it very well, and partly from an underestimation of the degree to which individuals can differ from one another. Human sexuality is not like a standard light switch, which has two and only two positions; it’s not even like a dimmer switch, with an infinite number of subtle gradations along one linear path. It’s much more like a faucet, in which two kinds of water can be mixed to produce many temperature gradations while the intensity of the flow can also have many levels. In fact, if you can imagine a shower where the water can be directed to come out of either the lower faucet or the shower head or a movable nozzle or jacuzzi jets, that might be a model a bit closer to the truth. Though modern Westerners like to pretend that everyone falls into rigidly-defined boxes of “straight” or “queer” which they occupy from birth until death and never leave, the truth is that this does not adequately describe many, perhaps most, people’s sexuality. Kinsey understood that there are many gradations from “totally queer” to “totally straight”, and though most men seem to fall toward one of the ends, a large fraction of women fall toward the middle. Whether this is nature or nurture is hard to say; any sex worker can tell you that a lot of self-declared straight guys fancy transwomen, or crave being pegged, or otherwise display a fascination with penises that would seem out of place in the standard “all or nothing” interpretation of male sexuality. And women are, if anything, even weirder; we can apparently float all over the Kinsey scale in response to stimuli or environment, so I might be queerer right now than I was in 2013, and much queerer than I was in 1993, but not quite as queer as I was in 1985. The only “compartmentalization” that occurs in many people’s sexualities, and virtually all women’s, is that imposed by the individual or the society in which he or she lives.
Finally, though I obviously can’t speak for anyone else, I find the last part of the question to be highly overstated. All sex workers have to have sexual contact with at least some clients they find unattractive; it’s only a matter of degree. So while a straight escort might find only most of her clients unattractive, and a lesbian one might find nearly all of hers so, I hardly think that the latter is going to result in some special kind of emotional trauma requiring special techniques to overcome. I’m sure that lesbian sex workers probably do get pretty sick of seeing guys after a while, but given that most sex workers burn out eventually I hardly think that represents a unique level of emotional trauma. And though some people certainly identify as “queer” before anything else, I’m not one of them; I don’t think my relative preference toward male or female sex partners defines “who I really am” any more than does my preference for science fiction over “realistic” fiction, probably not as much as my preference for kinky sex over vanilla sex, and certainly nowhere near as much as my sense of self as an individual.
(Have a question of your own? Please consult this page to see if I’ve answered it in a previous column, and if not just click here to ask me via email.)
Maybe the questioner read Ayna’s guest column (May 11th) and didn’t notice it was a guest column.
(replying to the person asking the question)
Jeez, dude. Like as if sex has to be about “giving yourself an outlet for whom you really are”? Especially if you are taking money for it?
When a john pays a worker for sex, it isn’t about the worker. When someone pays me to develop a webapp for them, it isn’t about my personal purity as a programmer. They need a job done. I do that job. They go “This is awesome! Thanks dude!” and they pay me. I feel good about my skills, about having done something that someone values.
Underneath this whole question is a presumption that sex is a special magical thing to which the normal rules of human interaction don’t apply.
Sex work is work. Oh, it can be good and bad, it can be enjoyable and it can kinda suck. But ultimately, its about the money.
The only way to find out would be to move to a “post-work” society, where nobody has to work in order to sustain them. My guess would be some people (likely including some sex workers) would still work because they enjoy doing a good job of a task and were never really financially motivated. But most people would not work but instead do things with their time that are unproductive or or low productivity.
Um, no. Lionel Williams spent about a year or two on Amanda Brooks’ blog asking similarly weird questions. I guess he’s just moved onto you for reasons known only to himself.
…and, contrary to Oprah-style “follow-your-heart” idyllism, many if not most of us don’t work livelihoods which, if we’d had unlimited and unconditional alternatives, we’d have chosen to “give ourselves an outlet for whom we really are”.
We may even happen to excel at the work we do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we chose that work because it’s our passion: the reputation for quality I established during my decades as a self-employed builder wasn’t out of “love” for building, but because that line of work was my best option for earning money, and quality work, along with avoiding customer complaints, ensured me further earnings, period.
Heck — who I “really am” is a nude-suntanning, guitar-playing, frequent-and-hours-long-leisurely-(hetero)sex-and-sensual-connecting bodybuilder, but, lo ‘n behold, somehow, I never quite could find the high-paying job to give myself an outlet for thaaaat…
Question on “Sex Worker Burnout”: Is there a specific age-bracket where this tends to happen? In my profession (CS), a critical age is somewhere around 40, when people that have not kept up not only face professional hurdles but also are often regarded as too old. Many try to “power through” this, with predictable results. Others try to get into a management track with often a lot of stress.
I am just guessing here, but maybe this burn-out is something similar, like not adapting to changed biological realities or the like and that causing work to become much more stressful and much less rewarding to those that ignore the changed circumstances?
Do you have any research to support your claim that most sex workers burn out?