"The wall opposite us was almost completely covered by an enormous flat-screen TV, which was cycling through a Chromecast screensaver consisting of close-ups of dew-laden flowers. This was what I looked at while replying to Derek's questions about myself. I didn't hold back, but answered honestly, and I enjoyed our conversation. I was conscious of performing a feminine charm. It came naturally, being a mode in which I was well trained, and which inflected many of my interactions with older men, with men in positions of authority, and with my dad. When I think of this flirtatious manner I am reminded of a line from a novel: “Most people, he had discovered, won't go out of their way to punish a clown.” I had discovered that most men won't go out of their way to punish a pretty woman who flatters them with her attention. In fact, they will reward her.
But punishment and the avoidance of it—being, perhaps, the original currency—are the more intuitive terms in which to think of it. For me, anyway. Because I had always been afraid of my father. And it was out of fear that I learned the charm, the flattery, and the dissimulation that made me, that night, such a good prostitute...
Though I was bad at asking for things, I was okay with being transactional. I thought the “non-transactional” relationship that Derek envisioned would be like working for a nonprofit, the kind that expects its workers to put in extra unpaid hours for love of the cause. I suspected that he wanted the transactional side obscured both so he could feel more loved and desired, and so he could have me at his beck and call.
But this, I now realized, was exactly the opposite of what appealed to me about sex work. I didn't want an overbearing boyfriend or, worse yet, “mentor” (as some sugar daddies like to fashion themselves). No, I wanted to instrumentalize my body for my own purposes. If that form of use symbolically dispossessed my father of the body he sought to control, so much the better. But more important was to deny the meaning entirely: to deny the sanctity that others attributed to my body. I would fuck for money, and I would do it like any other job."
You know that thing where you look at a building and wonder "What's going on in there?"
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