Petit Mort

Petit Mort is … “The only magazine bridging art, fashion, and philosophy through the lense of sex workers.”

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The Gigolo

In the process of researching something I started writing for my newsletter but didn’t publish, I came across this 2013 post from Forbes.com that I wrote when was on a “XXX safari” in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the porn Oscars.

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I learned a few things about journalism doing my series on the porn blitz in Vegas this month, and here they are, in no particular order.

TIP #1: Get the right tools

For the last few years, I've been carrying around those composition books to take notes. That's got to stop. They're too big. If I've got too much stuff going on, I've been known to stick the composition book in the back of my pants. Not my back pocket. Between my back and the inside of my waistband. Not a good look. I need smaller notebooks so I can put them in the pockets of these pants I've been wearing as my "journalist pants" that look like I'm on a safari, only in this case it was like a XXX safari.

I also need to start using the neck strap for my camera. I spent my time in Vegas pulling my camera in and out of my bag. I should probably get over my fear of the neck strap breaking and killing my camera.

Speaking of cameras, I need a new one. Related: If anyone found my lens cap in Vegas, let me know.

I also need a proper bag. I used a bag I think I bought at Payless. It was for shopping at the mall. Not writing stories.

TIP #2: Figure out what you can handle

Before I got to Vegas, I thought I would maybe go back and forth between the convention and the media room and post LIVE FROM THE FRONTLINES. That didn't happen; although, I did walk around that entire first day with my laptop in my bag. Not only did I not post LIVE FROM THE FRONTLINES, I realized that I'm too slow for that. Or in this case I was, at least.

The other big thing was that I was adding taking photographs into the mix. I think I did this because I've been a journalist for 15 years, and I am looking for a new challenge.

At this point, I don't really have any big hangups as a journalist. For example, at one point, I was at the convention, and I was looking for this gigolo. I'd seen him on a panel. He sat at the front of the room with another guy, and the theme of the panel was, "A bunch of people have crossed over from adult to mainstream, but what about people who have crossed over from mainstream to adult?" These guys were supposed to be examples of that. The gigolo is the star of a Showtime show called "Gigolos," and the other guy was a rock star who ended up on "Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew" and then made a celebrity sex tape because "that's what you do."

Anyway, the gigolo's name is Nick Hawk. (That's him in the photo at the top of this post.) He has an entire line of adult products. When Nick was on the panel, he had a bunch of boxes sitting next to him with his products in them, and at one point he said of creating a product that is a reproduction of a part of him, "That was one of the biggest excitements of my life."

After that, I kept looking for Nick, but I couldn't find him. I was standing against a wall because my back was killing me from all the stuff that I didn't need that I was carrying, and then I looked to my left, and there was Nick Hawk, and he was about to walk into the men's room, which was apparently what I was standing right next to.

"HEY," I yelled at Nick, without thinking. For some reason, this was the highlight of my experience as a journalist in Vegas. That I am a person who is willing to shout at a gigolo going into the toilet in order to get an interview. There is no shame in my game. Not at this point.

I hope all young women journalists can learn from my model. That you should always yell at men you want to interview, regardless of their occupation or proximity to the lavatory, because if you don't, you might not get an interview with them, and then you'll be the journalist who went there and got nothing. Which isn't a journalist at all. That's just something else.

"I'm proud to be a gigolo," Nick told me after he came out of the bathroom. "I'm not sure I'd be proud to be a porn star."

TIP #3: Seek help from people who know what they are doing

I really liked going to Vegas because it reminded me who I really am. The hardest part was the taking photographs because my knowledge of photography is limited. Which is an understatement. So the photography stuff I did was time consuming, and sometimes it didn't come out right because I didn't know what I was doing.

When I got home, I made an appointment to hang out with a guy who's a photographer. We sat in a cafe, and he told me how cameras work, and we looked at some of my photos from Vegas that were still on my camera, and we talked about what was right about them and what was wrong about them.

Then we wandered around outside and took some photos. It was cold. The stuff I photographed outside was pretty boring. The stuff in Vegas was way more interesting.

The task he left me with is to do more things like Vegas. And get better. And I think if I can do those things, I'll figure out more who I want to be or whatever I'm becoming.

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Books I Read: Paying for It

The first time I read Chester Brown’s Paying for It was around the time it was originally published, I believe. I decided to buy a new copy and reread it when I heard that the woman who had been Brown’s “last girlfriend” before he started paying for it had directed a movie adaptation of the book. I seem to remember liking the book more the first time I read it. This time I found it kind of grim and sort of ick. I write about a fair amount of stuff related to this subject matter, and I even ran a website for a year where I posted anonymous emails men wrote to me about paying for it, but this comic is so dark and weirdly dissociated and lacking in any kind of empathy that I read it faster than usual just to get it over with. If you don’t know anything about paying for it or why guys pay for it or the politics of paying for it (particularly in Canada, Brown’s country of origin), this book may be of interest. Also, the drawings are cool. But to the Brown on these pages, sex workers are receptacles to be judged, used, and discarded. That take is retrograde, boring, and depressing.

Books I Read

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Why Sex Doll Brothels Won't Replace Real Brothels Anytime Soon

This story was published on Forbes.com in July 2018.

Back in 2008, when people wrote blogs, I created an online project called—be forewarned, clicking on this link will expose you to graphic language—Letters from Johns. At the time, I was writing a popular blog named for a sex position and which was cited as one of 2008's best blogs by TIME.com. I'd created the Letters from Johns project because I was curious to know why men sought out sex workers, and the project had stemmed from my posting a request on my blogs for emails from men who had seen sex workers and inquiring as to why they had done so. I received my first reply within a matter of hours, asked the sender if I could post it with his name removed to a new blog dedicated to such letters, and Letters from Johns was spawned. Over the course of a year, I posted anonymous emails from over 50 johns, and their letters surprised me and the project's many readers. Not long after Letters from Johns was launched, then Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was caught up in a prostitution scandal, and the project was covered by media outlets ranging from Salon to CBC Radio. What I learned during that year is that sex is only one of the many reasons men hire sex workers. There are other reasons, too: because they are lonely, because they want to escape, because they long for someone to listen, because the only way they can get someone to touch them is to pay.

Back in January of this year, I wrote about a new kind of brothel that had opened in Paris, France. Its conceit was simple: Sex workers had been replaced with sex dolls. "France's First Sex Doll Brothel Opens For Business In Paris" outlined the new high-tech brothel strategic plan. In theory, sex dolls were easier to maintain than human beings, men would be attracted by either the novelty or the efficiency of having a transient relationship with someone who not only didn't want an emotional relationship but was constitutionally incapable of having one, and the money would roll in for its owners. For around $110, you could have a date with the doll of your choice, and virtual reality headsets were available for those who wanted to both be there and not there at the same time. As a business model, the promise was there, if there was a market for that sort of thing. But could it scale?

Apparently, it could. This spring what was purported to be Russia's first sex doll brothel opened in Moscow. Just in time for the World Cup, this high-tech brothel would be testing the Russian market for what had been tested, by that point, in Paris, Amsterdam, Dortmund, Barcelona, and elsewhere. This June, I reached out to Sergi Prieto, who described himself as "Co-Founder and CEO of LumiDolls Group," which had opened the Moscow sex doll brothel. I had questions, and Prieto had answers. For around $100 an hour, a customer could spend time with any number of the Moscow-based dolls. "There are many different dolls, smallest ones, biggest once [sic], [...] elf ones," he wrote. "There are dolls for everyone." This was a business, after all, like any other. "Our proposal is addressed to all those people who want to live new and pleasant experiences," he wrote. "We propose a 100% legal brothel where you also will not deceive your partner since you will only interact with a sex toy." Why would anyone want to have sex with a doll rather than a human? I inquired. "Are two different things," he replied. "Sex with humans is something normal and usual. Sex with dolls is something new and people like to try new experience." Still, the high-tech wasn't quite there yet, it seemed. "There are some dolls that has a heating system inside," he noted, and that was it.

At this point in history, we're sitting in a kind of evolutionary uncanny valley between what we can imagine insofar as technology transforming the most intimate aspects of our lives and where the reality is. Earlier this year, I took a trip through the hellscape that is the current state of virtual reality pornography, and what I saw wasn't pretty. Body parts disconnected from other body parts. Pixel-based faces aroused a sense of discomfort, rather than pleasure. And I had a hard time forgetting I was staggering around a startup's office with a large piece of machinery attached to my face as simulated men and women engaged in virtual erotic acts before my eyes.

All of which, of course, takes us back to the gap between what I read in those letters from those johns and whatever lies inside of a sex doll brothel. After all, a brothel never really sells sex. It sells an experience, one that is largely rooted in the sensory. Interacting with a living, breathing human being is one thing. Engaging with a silicone doll with an internal heater is quite another. The latter can neither think nor speak, she senses nothing and is incapable of any kind of authentic connection. She is an inanimate object. What I'd heard from those johns was that they'd wanted everything that a doll wasn't. They wanted someone who was alive, someone who listened, someone who, when you reached out to touch her, was blissfully, breathtaking real. Right now, that doll isn't.

In the future, well, one can presume that'll be another story altogether.

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Books I Read in 2024: An Honest Woman

I really loved Charlotte Shane’s new memoir, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Beautifully written and poignantly rendered, it’s an evocative recounting of her life story; how she got into sex work; what she learned about men, sex, and herself along the way; and what it’s like to navigate that space and ultimately fall in love. It’s Pretty Woman without all the bullshit. I highly recommend it.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer

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Thanks, Naked Capitalism

It was nice to see that Naked Capitalism shared a link to my 2017 story about financial domination. Thank you!

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The Hustle of Financial Domination

This story was written by me and published by Topic Magazine in December 2017.

Part I—Haven the Great

You can call her Goddess Haven—although, on Twitter, her handle is @Haven_TheGreat—and if you’re what’s known in the curious world of financial domination as a “pay pig,” you’re going to have to offer her a “tribute,” if you want her to even acknowledge that you exist.

In “findom,” as it’s known, it’s all about the money. Or, as Haven puts it in her Twitter profile: “Pay first, learn about me later.”

Haven is 24, based out of Orlando, Florida, and supports herself by monetizing her talent for financial domination, a BDSM fetish-based relationship in which women financially dominate men for profit.

Haven, who got into financial domination at 19, is a natural.

“I guess I have a dominant bitch personality,” she says. “I’m naturally a pretty mean person. I don’t even really feel like it’s work.”

Financial domination takes many forms. Some men get turned on by giving a dominatrix money, some men want to be insulted while masturbating during a live web camming session with a dominatrix, and some men want to send gifts and be ignored. Many of these interactions are technology-based—phone, texting, emails, Skype. Fundamentally, the pleasure for the financial submissive is in offering a payment—known as a “tribute”—to the dominatrix.

Ask Haven if she likes her job, and she’ll tell you: “I love it.”

Once upon a time, Haven was a go-go dancer. Then she started camming—conducting live webcam sessions for paying clients. Along the way, she heard about “sugar babies,” young women “kept,” financially, by older men, “sugar daddies.” She was intrigued—except she didn’t want to have sex with the guys. When she heard about “findom,” she thought, “There’s no way this is real. There’s no way men can give you money for no reason.” She joined a fetish website, created a profile offering financial domination, and started making money.

As Haven sees it, findom is “a power exchange with financial transactions.” The men are surprisingly normal, she says. “A lot of these guys are, like, really stable people, but they really just want a switch up from their everyday routine.” Many, she says, are white collar professionals—CEOs, lawyers, real estate investors—in their 30s or older. Some men do financial domination—straight, gay, posting photos of their abs or dick pics to social media to attract willing pay pigs—but far more women are financially dominating men.

On video hosting platforms like iWantClips, which specializes in “The Best in Amateur Fetish Video Clips,” Haven sells original video clips. “I’ll do verbal humiliation, where I’m insulting them. ‘You’re such a fucking loser, you’ll never be with someone like me.’” On other sites, a client pays her a flat rate or by the minute to communicate with him. With live web camming, “Usually, it’s a guy waiting for instructions on whatever he paid for. If he paid for jack-off instructions, I have to be like, ‘Take off your pants, loser,’ and I have to tell him to go fast or to go slow, until his time is up. They‘ll keep paying for me to keep degrading them. Sometimes we have to sit there and watch them jack off, while we take their money.” Another client might “clear” her Amazon Wish List, buying her everything on it.

She’s only done a “cash meet” once, she says. “This guy literally drove down [to Orlando] from an hour away, handed me some money, took me and my friends to get our nails done, and took us shopping.” In “wallet rape,” she says, “You’re just taking whatever it is you want from” a submissive who “has no limit” to what he’ll spend, through whatever platform or mode of communication he prefers.

Perhaps the most extreme version of financial domination requires TeamViewer, a software package that enables remote viewing of a computer. The client surrenders his passwords to the financial dominatrix, and she takes command of his computer. She drains his accounts as he watches. “I’m literally taking over their computer.”

This year, Haven estimates, she’ll make six figures.

One financial submissive bought video clips from her and exchanged messages with her online. On one occasion, he gave her $42,000, she says. On another occasion, it was $44,000. He was a vice president at a bank. “He’s into foot fetish, so he just wanted to talk about feet, really. He talked about his life and stuff. I like to act interested—because it makes more money, obviously.”

According to Haven, she deserves what she gets. “Women were meant to be happy and pampered, while men work.” Women who get into this, she says, “just want to take control over our lives.” (Some men have told her that a woman of color who does what she does should charge less than a white woman doing the same job.)

At first, her boyfriend of four years didn’t like her career. Now he doesn’t really care. “Sometimes he says he thinks I’m weird and that I don’t really have a conscience, for taking money from these people. I think I’m offering something in return. It’s therapeutic for most of my clients. It’s a sense of release.” She files taxes as an independent contractor. As for profits, “I save a lot of it, and I invest a lot of it into real estate with my dad.”

Still, it’s always a hustle, and financial dominants are hunting for a “white whale,” that rare financial submissive who isn’t a “time waster” and tributes thousands of dollars. It’s the equivalent of winning the lottery in the findom game.

But whales are few and far between.

Part II—The Pro-Dommes

“Financial domination is pretty much not what people imagine it to be,” says Tara Indiana, who’s been a dominatrix for 28 years. “You imagine they’re rich, powerful executives. That’s not always the case. They tend to have a very stable job. They work for the government, or they work in an office—a steady job with a steady paycheck.”

For someone like Indiana, financial dominatrix is but one more tool in a box of BDSM tricks. She’s done both real and virtual financial domination. “Very often, you don’t meet them or see them in person,” she says. “The idea is that the only way that they can be with a woman that’s beautiful like you is by giving up the money. That’s the only thing they have to offer.” For some men, it’s not so much sex, per se, but wanting a “trophy.” “So it’s all about lavishing and pampering and keeping you in the lifestyle that you’re accustomed to.”

Is financial domination about sex or money? “‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power,’” says Indiana, quoting Oscar Wilde. “It’s about surrendering your power to a dominant person. That power could be a whip or that power could be money.”

A long time ago, before financial domination was a thing, Indiana worked the phones at an escort business. One man liked to book appointments with escorts and negotiate a generous budget—$5,000, $10,000, $20,000. “He’d send the girl to him at his house,” Indiana recalls. “She would handcuff him to his radiator and take his credit card and go up and down Fifth Avenue—to Chanel, Dior—and go shopping, and she’d pick out an outfit.” The escort would call the man on the phone, telling him what she was doing. “‘Oh, I just got this olive green dress with matching alligator shoes.’ She’d describe [the clothes] in American Psycho detail. ‘And I just spent $7,000,’ and she’d laugh, and he’d scream at the top of his lungs and hang up on you.”

Justine Cross—owner and “Head Bitch in Charge” of two popular Los Angeles BDSM dungeons, Dungeon East and Dungeon West—has turned domination into a successful business. Her extensive repertoire includes financial domination.

“I have people [that I’ve never met] who will just send me money or gifts,” she says. “I had someone purchase me thousands of dollars of lingerie, and I said, ‘I’ll show it to you on cam,’ and he said, ‘No, I just wanted to give it to you.’ Other people want to go shopping with me and buy me gifts.”

As Cross sees it, what’s “sexual” is hard to define. “It’s always sexualized, but some people have a different definition of what that means,” she says. “Some people are really getting off and giving money, and some people are really getting off and giving money.”

Nowadays, competition is growing. On social media, more women are angling to get what seems like easy money. A newbie might set up an account on Twitter or Instagram, start posting sexy selfies, and hashtag away: #findom, #paypigs, #tribute, #walletrape. But findom is hard work. “I always say to people, ‘Do you know how hard I work to wake up one morning with a few extra thousand dollars and [Christian] Louboutins on my doorstep?’” Cross says.

Some financial dominatrixes are full-time, but not most. “They’re not just doing one thing. They’re doing things like NiteFlirt, and clips, and private webcam shows. So there’s a lot they’re doing. It’s not like there’s a lot of people doing that. There’s a handful of top earners in the world of BDSM.”

Not all pay pigs are committed or financially faithful. A friend of Cross’s landed a whale. He paid for her Central Park West apartment and gave her $60,000 two times a year. It turned out he was doing the same thing with five other women. “There’s a lot of money out there,” Cross notes.

Part III—A Sensual Sadist

Mistress Mara Julianne is 28. Based in Los Angeles, she’s a “sensual sadist” who employs financial domination as one of the many tools at her disposal. “I really like dishing out pain, but I’m one of the nicer dommes.” Currently, she’s a solo operator; in addition to paying clients, she has a “sub,” a man who is submissive to her but doesn’t pay her, and with whom she’s involved in a personal relationship. In 2013, she started working at a local dungeon. Right now, being a professional dominatrix is her career, but, she says, “I do play on my personal time when I can.”

In order to support herself as a full-time dominatrix, she meets a variety of fetishistic needs. She does bondage and is studying shibari, the art of Japanese rope bondage; she loves impact play: spanking, caning, and flogging; there’s body worship, in which a client caresses or massages whichever body part of hers that he fetishizes; using plastic wrap, she mummies clients; in role-playing, she might play the part of a mother or girlfriend; for pet play, she pretends her client is a puppy or pig and “the submissive doesn’t get to answer like a human, they have to roll over or bark, and I have to take them on walks.” Foot fetish is big, too. For “the longest time, my mother told me I had stinky feet.” Men pay her to let them massage, lick, and smell her feet. Of course, she does financial domination.

Depending on what a financial submissive wants, she issues orders. “I can instruct them to pretty much do anything, whether it’s giving me money or ignoring them. When they’re done with that, they hang up.” One regular gives her $100 three times a week. Recently, they met in person for the first time. He gets off on “the satisfaction of knowing he’s improving my life.” He’s married, retired, and lives in Orange County. On “Takeover Tuesdays,” she picks items on her online wish list, and he buys them for her. “He used to be some sort of software engineer,” she adds.

Before she became a dominatrix, she was a photographer and graphic designer, skills she’s using to brand herself. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, in online financial domination. “A lot of these girls are young, and I don’t know if they want all this coming back to them later on in life. I’ve chosen to expose myself, and I know the risks that come with that. They think it’s really easy. Most of the girls that try it drop out within two weeks to two months. You have to market yourself.”

In financial domination, some women of color get low-balled by their mostly-white clientele and some leverage their race to increase their revenue. Mistress Mara targets a niche. “I’m a mix—Chinese, Filipino, Spanish.” She intentionally plays into a stereotype of cultural strictness or cruelty, one she believes comes naturally to her due to her “tiger mom.” “It’s been tailored into my play for corporal punishment, because that’s kind of what I went through.”

While the number of amateurs doing financial domination is rising and some pro dommes do it solely for the revenue, Mistress Mara prefers a sensitive approach to emptying a man’s wallet. “I see them as human beings, even if I treat them like crap, because they are willing to give themselves completely to me—emotionally, spiritually, financially,” she says. “That, to me, is the biggest gift a human being can do that for another person. It’s almost like an act of love, in a way. I know, it’s romanticizing it. I’m not going home with them. The session will end. It’s monetary-based. But I give 110 percent every single time.”

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Death of a Pimp

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on October 18, 2018.

Dennis Hof was a pimp. Perhaps he would've preferred the term "brothel owner," for that he was, too, at the time of his death earlier this week at 72. He was found dead in bed at his Love Ranch Vegas brothel in Crystal, Nevada, on Tuesday morning by adult performer Ron Jeremy. An autopsy will be conducted to identify the cause of his death, but foul play wasn't suspected.

It was a busy time for Hof, who was in the midst of a campaign to get himself elected to the Nevada State Assembly. Ironically, he may well be elected, despite the fact that he's dead, because, according to the New York Times, in the 36th District in which he's running, 45% of those registered to vote are registered as Republicans, compared to 28% who are registered to vote as Democrats. His Trumpian political platform included lowering taxes and defending gun owners' rights.

In June of 2017, I interviewed Hof for an article I wrote for this website in the wake of a news report that former FBI director James Comey had used the term "hookers" in a Statement for the Record released one day prior to testifying in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Hookers" appears in Comey's summary of a March 30, 2017, call he received from Trump. "[Trump] said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia," Comey wrote. Was "hookers" Comey's word choice or Trump's? Interested to hear what sex workers and their minders thought of the high-profile disparagement, I reached out to Hof and his employees.

As it turned out, Hof had a Trump story of his own. "I met him 27 years ago," he told me. "I was in the timeshare business. He wanted to timeshare the [Trump] Taj Mahal, and he wanted me to come aboard to do that. I didn't do that. I said there's not enough money in the world to make me live in Atlantic City." It was hard to know whether or not to take Hof's claim seriously. Instead, Hof recounted, he became "the pimp master general of America," anointed as such by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. He'd voted for Trump and liked the guy—"We need a businessman," he said—but he preferred the term "working girls." Either way, Trump was good for business. "Business is humping," he told me. "We feel the difference with Trump in office."

It wasn't the first time I'd connected with Hof. Over the prior two decades, I'd encountered him at various events, from adult movie sets to X-rated conventions. The first time I'd met him was on the set of an adult movie being shot in the San Fernando Valley, the content of which was so outré that I won't detail it here. On another occasion, I talked with him at the Hustler Store in Hollywood. And he was a regular presence at the AVN Awards—the so-called "Oscars of porn"—in Las Vegas, Nevada.

He wasn't the first pimp that I met, and I'm sure he won't be the last, but he was like many pimps that I've encountered over the years. He was charismatic, likeable, friendly, a consummate showman, and the sort of person who could make you feel comfortable about anything, including, one presumed, showing up at one of his brothels in hopes of paying one of the women who worked for him a few hundred dollars, or more, to share some intimate time, in the parts of Nevada where that's legal.

In a way, he wasn't that different from sex workers I've known. For providing a service in demand across the country, they'd been publicly vilified and systematically ostracized. Hof was a larger-than-life character—a pimp, you bet—but he was also a businessman who knew well that if someone will pay for something, there's money to be made, and that's the American dream.

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Porn Star in Fishnets

A porn star on the set of an adult movie in 2009. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.

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Fuck You, Pay Me #6: Letters From Johns Revisited

This is part 6 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Letters From Johns, a 2008 project in which, over the course of a year, I shared emails that men sent me about their experiences paying for sex. (As you can see on the project’s website, by submitting their letters, the letter writers were granting me permission to share their letters, anonymously, of course.) This letters project was part of what would become a five-year project I called The Letters Project, and which included Letters From Working Girls, Letters From Men Who Watch Pornography, Letters From Men Who Go To Strip Clubs, and Letters From Cheaters. The Letters Project as a whole got a fair amount of media attention, including coverage by Salon, CBC Radio, and Newsweek. In a weird coincidence, I launched Letters From Johns on January 3, 2008, and then New York governor Eliot Spitzer was entangled in a prostitution scandal a little over two months later, the latter bringing some attention to the former. (That’s timing for you, I guess?)

In August of 2013, as The Letters Project was winding down, I published an essay about the project: “You Were My Studs.” I wrote about how the whole project had started with a shot in the dark: I had put out a call on my blog, asking readers why they had paid for sex. Within a few hours, I had my first answer: “The Night I Drove a Call Girl to Her Next Stop”; it begins: “I am writing because I can’t tell this story to anyone I know and retain my dignity, but since your soliciting I figured I can get it off my chest.” There were more letters to come. As I wrote in my essay: “Over the following year, I heard from over 50 johns. Their letters came at all hours of the day and night. They were from young guys and old guys, white guys and black guys, military grunts and corporate drones. The letters were poignant, exhilarated, nostalgic, terrifying, revelatory. They were all confessions.”

One letter in particular, “I’m a State Investigator,” struck me:

“I keep a coded diary, in case it's discovered. 1 dot is oral, 2 dots is vaginal sex, and 2 connected dots is anal sex. In the event that someone questions the dots, they are associated with good/bad days: no dots are normal days, 1 dot is a good day, 2 dots is a great day, and 2 connected dots is the best day for that week."

As I wrote: “Of course, the letters weren't about sex, or prostitution, or johns. They were about love and loneliness, from guys who just wanted to be touched and men who had gotten dumped, stories in which call girls really had hearts of gold and mercenaries cruised foreign streets in search of bodhisattvas-for-hire.” After a year, each letters project was closed to submissions, and while I received many letters, I rarely responded: “I surmised the letters were not for me; they were for their authors.” But, as I recounted, I did reach out to one john: “I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done.” In an email, I asked him why he had written a letter to me (a woman).

His response, in part:

“By that, I mean I never considered that I was writing my letter to a woman. You're Ms. Breslin, with a blog about john experiences. Like my several john experiences, I was reaching out to no one in particular; I was, in hindsight, trying to find some elusive unidentifiable emotion. Although I gave you 'a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that information at its sole discretion, including incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books,' you cannot take from me the liberating experience you elucidated from three simple questions. Thank you. And again, thank you, if only for a few brief moments of experiencing ... .... ..."

Looking over the letters now, I remembered a lot of them, and how I got a kind of thrill whenever I received a new one. It was fascinating to revisit them today.

Like Letters From Johns’ “I Am a Gentleman”:

“There are many who would maintain that my philandering disqualifies me from claiming to be a good person, and definitely from being a good husband. Frankly, I don't care what they believe. I have a hobby that is infinitely more interesting to me than travel or theme parks. The ladies I prefer can hold conversations and appreciate the occasional session just to stroke their bodies. They do not judge. They do not become angry at requests. They treat the experience as an encounter between equals. There is no power struggle. There is no drama. There is privacy, and usually conviviality. What we do behind closed doors remains there.”

Or Letters From Working Girls’ “I Am Just An Ordinary Woman With The Knack Of Making People Love And Trust Me”:

“I am just an ordinary woman with the knack of making people love and trust me. These were just men who needed to love somebody who would let them. It's all so simple. Not complicated in the least. There were no perversions too perverse to get in the way of the trusting bond that was needed. Women suffer out loud, and men suffer in silence. Until we allow men to suffer out loud, many a wife will wonder where her husband is during his lunch hour, and in my opinion, a lot of those wives deserve it. (Not all of those wives.)”

Or Letters From Men Who Watch Pornography’s “I Was a Geek”:

“I've come to accept pornography as my surrogate sexual lifestyle: devoid of complication, disease, and odoriferous unpleasantness, and heavily populated with a wide range of women to satisfy every craving, it is a hollow yet adequate solution to my otherwise celibate bachelor existence. And while I am still aware of the inherent pathetic quality of being a man alone at my age, I would much rather be the connoisseur of an under-appreciated form of entertainment continuing to transcend the aesthetic limits hitherto placed upon it by forces of official history than a harried everyman, harangued by the burdens of emotional turmoil, personality conflict, atrophying sexual energy, and ludicrously inexcusable asinine conversations and circular arguments.”

Or Letters From Men Who Go to Strip Clubs’ “I Am Gay”:

“All of that is uncomfortable to witness, because none of it can be commented on nor helped without becoming far too intimate far too fast. The club creates the illusion of heterosexual intimacy, a coy game of it, but it refuses to actually allow or engage the real thing. So long as everyone involved simply enjoys the game, all is well; but the moment someone needs more than the game, they absolutely cannot have it, and so they stand there, open and raw and unable to share. Most of the other dudes are too engaged to notice, but the detached strippers and the detached gay man notice.”

Or Letters From Cheaters’ “I Have Always Been a Cheater”:

“Eventually, this split life I was living took a toll on my relationship. One day I pulled the plug. I tried to reform myself. I took up a daily meditation practice. I tried my best to avoid massage parlours, prostitutes and gangbangs. About eighteen months ago I met another wonderful woman. We’re talking about building a house outside the city, starting a business and, of course, having a child. I’m happy. But… I still can’t stop myself from looking at the online ads; I’m still not quite there, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I worry that everything is really just work and performance.”

Sometimes when people ask me what I write about I say sex or porn or the business of sex. The real answer is probably closer to intimacy. That’s what these letters, the best of them, anyway, the most real and raw and revealing, are about. Every so often, I think of one of the Letters from Johns that’s stayed with me: “I Have a Physical Disability.”

Here’s his letter in full:

“I have a physical disability known as Cerebral Palsy and am in an electric wheelchair. I have always struggled in my own existence, largely because I rely on a lot of people to assist me with the most basic tasks, such as dressing, showering, getting in and out of bed, and other basic things that many people take for granted. Although I am verbal, and highly intelligent, having acquired two university degrees at the age of 24, people do tend to judge a book by its cover when it comes to things such as dating and sex.

My entire life I have been trapped inside a body that I hate. It never does what I want it to. It always conspires against me. Although I am confident in my intellectual ability, I do not have a very strong self-image. This is largely because every girl I have asked out on a date has rejected me. Some were even cruel enough to say, ‘Why would I ever go out with a cripple like you?’ Even now, I still have not yet had a girlfriend.

A few years back, I was hanging out with a few other disabled guys who were less physically able than I was. They mentioned that they regularly used a pro because it was the only way they could get the release they craved the most. Most of these guys couldn’t lift their heads up on their own, let alone have the ability to please a woman the way they wanted to. They would go to a brothel and get a hand-job once every few weeks. One of them described his first time with a pro in a way that will stick with me for the rest of my life; he said that ‘It was the first time I felt like a real man.’

Sometime later, I fell in love for the first time. After pursuing her for several months, I was rejected once more, but this time was much harder to swallow than the others that came before her. After several weeks of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to do something about it. Remembering the words of my friends, I decided I would visit a brothel. However, unlike my friends, I knew I wanted more than a hand-job. I wanted to lose my virginity.

I searched through the phone book, found a brothel I wanted and asked about the processes involved. I soon discovered that like most things in my life, this could not be a total secret. If I wanted to have sex, I would need somebody to help me shower before and after, as well as to lift me onto the bed. This would put most of my other disabled friends off immediately, but it did not deter me in the slightest. Without a moment's hesitation, I asked my older brother if he could help me. Although he was initially stunned, he reluctantly agreed.

On the night we turned up at the brothel, we were two completely different men. I was excited, nervously anticipating what would await me. My brother, in contrast, was absolutely petrified, afraid that someone he might know would walk in. After a short while, some girls made their way out and introduced themselves. I picked one and we followed her into the room. She stepped out while my brother helped me get organized. I told him to go for a walk, and I’d give him a call when I was ready.

The whole experience was everything I hoped it would be. She started by giving me a massage, which eased my muscles that are normally tight and non-compliant. As she completed the massage, my body felt like it could do anything I wanted, something I had never felt before. She went down on me, and we had sex. She made me feel safe and confident in myself. For that portion of time, having sex with her (even if I had to pay for it) made up for a lifetime of rejection.

It was the most enjoyable experience I have ever had in my life. I would put it down to two things. For once I had gained control over my body, and it felt like I was in control of my life. The worst thing about having a physical disability is the lack of control I have in life. Everything is very clinical, get up at this time, eat at this time, have a shower at this time, and go to bed at this time. I have no control over these things. This time, I got to do things on my own terms. Second, it was the first time I felt like I was being treated like a sexual being with desires and needs that were important. All my life I have been viewed as an asexual being whose desires should be avoided or neglected. The trip to the brothel taught me not to be afraid of my sexuality and not to push it into the background.

I am now a regular customer, although not as regular as I’d like to be. This is mostly because my brother has moved overseas, and it is hard to find people who will willingly accompany me. However, each time I go, I no longer feel like a cripple. I feel whole.”

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Is Susannah Breslin a Prostitute?

Recently I noticed that a few years back someone vandalized my Wikipedia page. Instead of the entry stating I was a journalist and writer, it had been revised to state I was a "prostitute, journalist and writer.” (The issue has since been fixed.) Obviously the person who did this is an idiot; they didn’t use the Oxford comma.

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The Dominatrix Question

I’m a big fan of the “Real Housewives” franchise, fashion icon Jenna Lyons, and superchick Julia Fox, so when Bravo mastermind Andy Cohen posted a call on Twitter asking for questions that would be posed to Jenna and / or Julia on an upcoming episode of “Watch What Happens Live,” I shared a question I had for Julia about the time she spent working as a dominatrix. Find out what I asked and what Julia said here.

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The Sex Work Pandemic

For my latest newsletter, I wrote about the sex work pandemic. I spent the week interviewing sex workers, and I learned the landscape is teetering on the verge of an apocalypse, due to the coronavirus crisis.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The first time I ever visited a peep show was in San Francisco. I went to The Lusty Lady by myself. Before I stepped into the booth, the guy working there told me to wait. Then he grabbed a mop and mopped the floor and the walls. Then I stepped inside.”

Read the rest here. Subscribe here.

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Accused

"A woman suspected of engaging in illegal sex trade is held for questioning at a police station."

[World Press Photo]

Worst

The very worst way to write about sex trafficking http://t.co/2f2vEiuIrl

— Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) June 25, 2014

TEACHING SEX

Dr. Jason Winters, a professor at the University of British Columbia, teaches the very popular, sex-focused PSYCH 350: "The Psychological Aspects of Human Sexuality."

The course has a companion blog, which mentions several projects I've done, Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls.

His past research includes a "'boner-measuring' phase," during which "[I measured] sex response in sex offenders." 

[The Ubyssey]

THE HAPPY HOOKER

"Icon Models had interests like classical music and equestrian sports. They hunted pheasant, studied at Oxford, knew the difference between a watch and a timepiece and could participate in a debate over the superiority of Walker Black vs. Laphroaig. They had pedigree, or at least the ability to appear like they did. They also had an expensive wardrobe, the ability to sit up straight, speak proper English and pretend for a couple of hours that they were genuinely interested in the hobbies and fineries of the ruling class."

[Vocativ]