Laura,
Your post was really brave and honest. Honest in that way you can even feel, experience in its call to memory. I read it and those moments I’m always either pushing away or subjecting to re-telling after re-telling, trying to make the wound at the center of the story disappear, those moments swim back to me.
My experiences, as we’ve noted often, were very different from yours in some ways, and all too similar in others. This only drives home the likelihood that while there are different cultural manifestations of misogyny, some undoubtedly preferable to others in a lesser-of-two-evils kind of way, the fact of its impact on the bodies of women is undeniable. I’m surprised by how close to the surface some of my memories are, how vividly they come back, though whether their color is inflected by the meaning I discover there or the meaning I create, who can say.
I’ve worn the hell out of the story (which you’ve certainly heard before) about my experience driving the family van home from Minneapolis when I was 15. Well, here it is, one more time, in all its glory, and perhaps in greater detail: I’d been in Minneapolis with my sisters, my mother, and my grandmother. We drove down to visit my great-aunt, who lived in Rodgers at the time. Friday night we stayed at my aunt’s house (she lived, at the time, on a hobby-farm with her husband, who’d worked in some kind of engineering-related corporate-relations kind of job that had him travelling much of his life, spending a fair amount of time in Japan). I think it was that first night that we drove into Minneapolis (my aunt driving her high-end car very aggressively and very fast, at least according to the standards of out-state Minnesota). We ate at Jerusalem’s (which is blissfully rehabilitated in my mind as the place you and I had Christmas lunch this year), where we saw belly dancers. Pretty big stuff for small town girls. The next day we visited the Mall of America. Need I say more? I, a very mature fifteen, was allowed to shop on my own and meet up with the group later. In the course of my shopping (gawking, really), I met a man (probably 30 years old, though it’s hard to say, and African-American) who claimed to be a member of Prince’s band. I don’t know if he was or not, but he did later write to me and offer to fly me out to Philadelphia, where he lived. I was totally energized by the experience—I had no idea I had so much power! My mother, understandably (from my 34 year old vantage point), was less thrilled.
So, the stage is set for the fateful ride home. I am driving this god-awful champagne-colored van with wood-panel striping. I am wearing, I clearly remember, a red tank-top—boxy across the shoulders, in a way that flatters my adolescent frame—and those short-shorts with a wide belt that were in fashion briefly in the early nineties. (I think they came from “The Limited” or “Express.”) I’m nervous. I haven’t driven on the interstate before, haven’t driven this fast before, and have limited faith in my innate capabilities. (To this day, I’m not wild about driving.) A truck, hauling sod, pulls up alongside me in the passing lane. I don’t pay attention at first. But, about the time the continued presence of the truck has started to make me nervous, I notice that the two men in the truck, both, at least in memory, wearing baseball caps, were flirting with me. Here’s the thing: I’m flattered. I’m excited by the attention. But I’m also god-awful scared. I feel absolutely out-of-control. I can only deal with one thing at a time. And I start to slow down. My mother, seated next to me through all of this—and maybe more deeply fearing the consequences of this development on all kinds of levels—starts to get angry with me. She gets so frustrated, and so emotional, that my grandmother insists on sitting next to me, because my mother is freaking me out. I have a clear recollection of the enormous relief I felt when she replaced my mother in the passenger seat.
I think, probably, this is a different version of the story than I’ve ever told you, though I imagine you were always able to read between the lines. That’s the remarkable thing about really being in conversation with somebody. The point is, your post prompted me to think about all of this in a way I maybe haven’t before, at least not publicly and openly, and that makes me enormously grateful. Because despite all the stuff that’s happening there—despite my own uncomfortable imbrication in my objectification, despite the trauma which couldn’t be spoken between three generations of women—my conversations with you make me feel like something else, something new, is really possible. Love,
Lisa
P.S. It still sucks.
Showing posts with label sexsexsexsexsex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sexsexsexsexsex. Show all posts
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
I Want Candy?
Lisa,
What do I know about my own sexual desire?
Today I know that it is still, and I refuse to worry about that. This seems to be a core piece of the discussion: worry. I (loosely) remember lines from a Woody Allen movie:
Girl: I was telling my psychiatrist that I had an orgasm last week. He told me it wasn’t the right kind.
Woody: Really? Not the right kind? Funny… every one of mine is always right on the money…
In my day women could still be frigid, and even though I was too young to deeply understand this notion, it was pervasive and real, especially within some of the books from which I was getting my information about sex: “The Group”. Later on I read “Candy” which, while assuring me that the young and beautiful were not prone to frigidity, they were expected to put out or be called frigid. What a wide Sargasso Sea that is.
I was coming of age sexually in a time where women were beginning to refuse to assimilate any further in the land of the patriarchy, and were looking to revolt, or find a new land entirely. Patriarchy: it was a word I was hearing early and often, while all the neighbors in my building in Queens talked excitedly with a kind of awe about the daughter of the people who lived in 2D who was now a Playboy bunny. But frigid was still there, hanging about like the forbidding wraith the word invoked.
With this underlying fear of being cold, of not “liking” sex, came this revolt or response from women older than me that demanded sexual freedom and placed the responsibility for “good” (not frigid) sex not on women, but on the idea that perhaps some women had shitty, uncaring, inexperienced, or frightened sexual partners. Suddenly the Kinsey report was not shocking, but helpful. There was talk about the clitoris, masturbation, and orgasm without having to hide and read about them in “those” books.
But this is really back story.
My first sexual experience was rape, and since only bad girls who deserved it, wanted it, were raped, that occurrence is what offered me the palette from which I could choose to color my desire.
Right after that night, I had a series of sexual encounters (I should mention that I was just barely 14) that I initiated with boys I knew had been trying to break me down. They were awkward unsatisfying comminglings that took place in the bedroom where friends were babysitting, the 50’s classic back seat of a car, and standing in alleys. Once there were back to back encounters. It was always fucking. I would never call it anything else.
I was, like you, looking for something. In my case, along with the love, I was trying somehow to reclaim my choice. Rape had a way of removing that in my mind, and my fantasies still included that lack of choice, often to my chagrin. Yet, why should I feel embarrassed or uncomfortable with my fantasies and desires? Most likely because they did not come from me but from the culture around me, and I could not own them.
Still, as time passed things did change and I remember coming into a time when I did not have that shame. I was encouraged, almost charged, to have sex as often, freely and openly (this also meant out in the open) as possible. The small culture in which I participated and toward which I gravitated, let me try to find my desires by experimentation, accident, and design. But I will say that as the times changed, so did my feelings about my desire. As the world became chilly, as the pandemic broke over us, as youth retreated, so did my desire.
Today, as I have said, my libido is quiet. I know it isn’t dead, and the stillness may be my own doing, but that is exactly the point: it is mine. I would be lying if I didn’t say that once in a while I wonder if I am finally frigid, but then I laugh and say, “Oh fercrissakes, let’s believe in Santa while we’re at it!”
Remind me to talk about the recent realizations around vibrators that I had via others responses to my having said I never used one. That was very interesting…
L
What do I know about my own sexual desire?
Today I know that it is still, and I refuse to worry about that. This seems to be a core piece of the discussion: worry. I (loosely) remember lines from a Woody Allen movie:
Girl: I was telling my psychiatrist that I had an orgasm last week. He told me it wasn’t the right kind.
Woody: Really? Not the right kind? Funny… every one of mine is always right on the money…
In my day women could still be frigid, and even though I was too young to deeply understand this notion, it was pervasive and real, especially within some of the books from which I was getting my information about sex: “The Group”. Later on I read “Candy” which, while assuring me that the young and beautiful were not prone to frigidity, they were expected to put out or be called frigid. What a wide Sargasso Sea that is.
I was coming of age sexually in a time where women were beginning to refuse to assimilate any further in the land of the patriarchy, and were looking to revolt, or find a new land entirely. Patriarchy: it was a word I was hearing early and often, while all the neighbors in my building in Queens talked excitedly with a kind of awe about the daughter of the people who lived in 2D who was now a Playboy bunny. But frigid was still there, hanging about like the forbidding wraith the word invoked.
With this underlying fear of being cold, of not “liking” sex, came this revolt or response from women older than me that demanded sexual freedom and placed the responsibility for “good” (not frigid) sex not on women, but on the idea that perhaps some women had shitty, uncaring, inexperienced, or frightened sexual partners. Suddenly the Kinsey report was not shocking, but helpful. There was talk about the clitoris, masturbation, and orgasm without having to hide and read about them in “those” books.
But this is really back story.
My first sexual experience was rape, and since only bad girls who deserved it, wanted it, were raped, that occurrence is what offered me the palette from which I could choose to color my desire.
Right after that night, I had a series of sexual encounters (I should mention that I was just barely 14) that I initiated with boys I knew had been trying to break me down. They were awkward unsatisfying comminglings that took place in the bedroom where friends were babysitting, the 50’s classic back seat of a car, and standing in alleys. Once there were back to back encounters. It was always fucking. I would never call it anything else.
I was, like you, looking for something. In my case, along with the love, I was trying somehow to reclaim my choice. Rape had a way of removing that in my mind, and my fantasies still included that lack of choice, often to my chagrin. Yet, why should I feel embarrassed or uncomfortable with my fantasies and desires? Most likely because they did not come from me but from the culture around me, and I could not own them.
Still, as time passed things did change and I remember coming into a time when I did not have that shame. I was encouraged, almost charged, to have sex as often, freely and openly (this also meant out in the open) as possible. The small culture in which I participated and toward which I gravitated, let me try to find my desires by experimentation, accident, and design. But I will say that as the times changed, so did my feelings about my desire. As the world became chilly, as the pandemic broke over us, as youth retreated, so did my desire.
Today, as I have said, my libido is quiet. I know it isn’t dead, and the stillness may be my own doing, but that is exactly the point: it is mine. I would be lying if I didn’t say that once in a while I wonder if I am finally frigid, but then I laugh and say, “Oh fercrissakes, let’s believe in Santa while we’re at it!”
Remind me to talk about the recent realizations around vibrators that I had via others responses to my having said I never used one. That was very interesting…
L
Friday, January 14, 2011
Is This Desire?
Laura,
For the second time in as many weeks, I have encountered a truism which may in fact be true, but which I would honestly prefer not to think about that deeply: namely, women too often fail to appreciate the reality of male sexual desire. My second run-in with that notion occurred via an article recently published in The Atlantic: Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s piece “Hard Core,” which uses a discussion of the extreme nature of online pornography as a jumping off point for considering the impossibility of the sexual relationship, at least as conceived by a somewhat naïve feminism:
Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression.
What internet porn in fact reveals, at least according to Vargas-Cooper, is the “uncomfortable truth that the women’s-liberation movement has successfully suppressed: men and women have conflicting sexual agendas.” It’s not clear to me what Vargas-Cooper believes to be the unified female agenda (though she seems to tie it closely to that above utopian egalitarianism, in principle if not in practice, where she acknowledges a more complex picture), but the male agenda—as much sex as possible, as often as possible, and preferably involving some display of aggression intended to make women feel uncomfortable, debased, or degraded, seems fairly clear.
Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all of this. My befuddlement is further complicated by having just read another recent contribution to The Atlantic, a piece by Caitlin Flanagan entitled “The Hazards of Duke” that undertakes a rather bizarrely unsubstantiated, though weirdly plausible, reading of the infamous “Duke Fuck List” composed, in PowerPoint format, by the woman a Slate Double-X commentator recently referred to as “poor Karen Owen.” Essentially, Flanagan suggests that reading between the lines of Karen Owen’s bravado-inflected prose (her list recounts sexual escapades and ranks the performance of sexual partners according to a somewhat ridiculous set of criteria) one might discover “a vulnerable creature whose desire for sex with campus big shots was at least partly motivated by a powerful and unmet desire for affection.” Does this suggestion bear any relationship to the truth of Karen Owen’s life? Who the hell knows? Maybe she was hoping for long-term relationships with one or more of these men, or maybe she just wanted a roll in the hay. What was striking, though, was how often her own sexual pleasure (and yes, I read the damn presentation) seemed to take a back seat—many of the encounters detailed were with men who lasted somewhere around the five-minute range, and happened sans substantial foreplay, making it somewhat unlikely that she was getting much sexual enjoyment along the way to the inevitable end of such transactions—the moment the guy came, and more or less (with some exceptions) lost interest in her existence.
Having no moral investment in the frequency, spontaneity, or variety of other people’s sex lives, I’m not really interested in condemning the Karen Owen’s model of female sexuality (or weighing in on whether she has brought about her “ruin” as Flanagan suggests). My only concern is that, somehow, the discussion around sexuality, male and female, still seems to be so ill-conducted as to prohibit meaningful conversation about the kinds of issues that we (all of us, but perhaps particularly women) would benefit from exploring. I know that I wish a public discussion of such issues had been possible when I affected my own style of bravado to re-narrativize my own sexual experimentation during college. Not to say that I had no positive sexual experiences at that time—I did. But I also had a great deal of confusion regarding what I actually wanted—from sex, from relationships, from the culture. And so, at various times, I was the tough girl who slept around and didn’t want to hear from you the morning after. I was as likely to escape without saying goodbye as any of my male counterparts. But I was, often simultaneously, the sad and lonely girl who wanted, well, something. A relationship? Maybe. To feel attractive and desired? Maybe. To get off? Sometimes. To feel loved and accepted? Probably, desperately, all the time. I can’t really make full sense of my sexual ramblings during college, though I certainly don’t feel devalued or ruined by them. I only wish, for my then-self, and for women, perhaps women like Karen Owen (but then again, who knows), that there was somewhere to go with all the sadness, loneliness, and confusion. So, what I suppose I’m proposing, by way of awfully long prologue, is that we spend some time, you and I, here and now, talking about this problematic question of sexual desire. Our experiences, our questions, our hopes. What do you say? I know this post began with questions concerning male desire, and I do suppose I want to return to those questions, or continue to touch on them in our correspondence. But perhaps it makes most sense to start with what we know (or don’t) concerning our own desire?
Lisa
For the second time in as many weeks, I have encountered a truism which may in fact be true, but which I would honestly prefer not to think about that deeply: namely, women too often fail to appreciate the reality of male sexual desire. My second run-in with that notion occurred via an article recently published in The Atlantic: Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s piece “Hard Core,” which uses a discussion of the extreme nature of online pornography as a jumping off point for considering the impossibility of the sexual relationship, at least as conceived by a somewhat naïve feminism:
Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression.
What internet porn in fact reveals, at least according to Vargas-Cooper, is the “uncomfortable truth that the women’s-liberation movement has successfully suppressed: men and women have conflicting sexual agendas.” It’s not clear to me what Vargas-Cooper believes to be the unified female agenda (though she seems to tie it closely to that above utopian egalitarianism, in principle if not in practice, where she acknowledges a more complex picture), but the male agenda—as much sex as possible, as often as possible, and preferably involving some display of aggression intended to make women feel uncomfortable, debased, or degraded, seems fairly clear.
Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all of this. My befuddlement is further complicated by having just read another recent contribution to The Atlantic, a piece by Caitlin Flanagan entitled “The Hazards of Duke” that undertakes a rather bizarrely unsubstantiated, though weirdly plausible, reading of the infamous “Duke Fuck List” composed, in PowerPoint format, by the woman a Slate Double-X commentator recently referred to as “poor Karen Owen.” Essentially, Flanagan suggests that reading between the lines of Karen Owen’s bravado-inflected prose (her list recounts sexual escapades and ranks the performance of sexual partners according to a somewhat ridiculous set of criteria) one might discover “a vulnerable creature whose desire for sex with campus big shots was at least partly motivated by a powerful and unmet desire for affection.” Does this suggestion bear any relationship to the truth of Karen Owen’s life? Who the hell knows? Maybe she was hoping for long-term relationships with one or more of these men, or maybe she just wanted a roll in the hay. What was striking, though, was how often her own sexual pleasure (and yes, I read the damn presentation) seemed to take a back seat—many of the encounters detailed were with men who lasted somewhere around the five-minute range, and happened sans substantial foreplay, making it somewhat unlikely that she was getting much sexual enjoyment along the way to the inevitable end of such transactions—the moment the guy came, and more or less (with some exceptions) lost interest in her existence.
Having no moral investment in the frequency, spontaneity, or variety of other people’s sex lives, I’m not really interested in condemning the Karen Owen’s model of female sexuality (or weighing in on whether she has brought about her “ruin” as Flanagan suggests). My only concern is that, somehow, the discussion around sexuality, male and female, still seems to be so ill-conducted as to prohibit meaningful conversation about the kinds of issues that we (all of us, but perhaps particularly women) would benefit from exploring. I know that I wish a public discussion of such issues had been possible when I affected my own style of bravado to re-narrativize my own sexual experimentation during college. Not to say that I had no positive sexual experiences at that time—I did. But I also had a great deal of confusion regarding what I actually wanted—from sex, from relationships, from the culture. And so, at various times, I was the tough girl who slept around and didn’t want to hear from you the morning after. I was as likely to escape without saying goodbye as any of my male counterparts. But I was, often simultaneously, the sad and lonely girl who wanted, well, something. A relationship? Maybe. To feel attractive and desired? Maybe. To get off? Sometimes. To feel loved and accepted? Probably, desperately, all the time. I can’t really make full sense of my sexual ramblings during college, though I certainly don’t feel devalued or ruined by them. I only wish, for my then-self, and for women, perhaps women like Karen Owen (but then again, who knows), that there was somewhere to go with all the sadness, loneliness, and confusion. So, what I suppose I’m proposing, by way of awfully long prologue, is that we spend some time, you and I, here and now, talking about this problematic question of sexual desire. Our experiences, our questions, our hopes. What do you say? I know this post began with questions concerning male desire, and I do suppose I want to return to those questions, or continue to touch on them in our correspondence. But perhaps it makes most sense to start with what we know (or don’t) concerning our own desire?
Lisa
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Phone Girl
Sex work isn’t only blow-jobs; not all the work is physical. I worked in the sex industry and I never fucked anyone except by proxy-- as the pimp.
I can’t tell you where the building was. I can tell you that it was in a tony neighborhood in mid-town. The woman I worked for had six apartments in different buildings in different parts of town. Not all the houses are swank, some are just terrible closets full of sad desperate people one step away from madness and death. This was not one of those places. This place, this house, was where the financial district crowd came for lunch, at dinner time, or after hours when the neighborhood was deafly quiet.
These guys wore suits by designers that I wouldn’t know the name of but I knew they were very expensive. You can tell by the way a man wears a suit that it costs more money than most shmucks every see in one place. These men had Rolex watches. I knew this because after they would leave the girls would say, “Did you see the Rolex?” I never saw their watches; I never got that close to them.
“Are you white, black, or Hispanic?” I asked this every call, every two to five minutes, for twelve hours a day.
“How did you hear about us? How is…”fill in the name they give.
This business is by word of mouth mostly. Sometimes the owner of the house will advertise in magazines. Not the typical sex magazines like Screw. This owner will have a discreet ad for relaxing down-time in a chic atmosphere with beautiful, engaging, intelligent women. It’s an ad. That isn’t to say that some of the girls weren’t beautiful, they were, but engaging and intelligent was stretching it. We did have one girl (the only white girl besides the oldest hooker in New York who at 50 looked fantastic and supposedly was the blow-job queen, hence the corny sobriquet “Lips”) who was intelligent. She was a foreign language major studying for her master’s degree in some related field. I don’t remember well. We aren’t supposed to have real lives; real lives are for the normal people. I heard one girl say that she was engaged. When another girl asked her if her fiancé knew what she did for a living she said, “Yeah, I’m a translator at the United Nations.” Everyone heard it and everyone laughed so hard there was coughing all around. It is about fantasy—for the men, and for us.
We ask a lot of questions, obviously because what we do is illegal and we don’t want to get caught. Me in particular. The house supplies an attorney. The hookers, the girls, if we get busted (if the house is rousted by cops) will go to jail for several hours or up to overnight if things go wrong. They will get out on a ticket to appear in court for a misdemeanor. I on the other hand would not do so well. Being a phone girl is a felony.
When I first told my son about the job he was confused. He asked me if the women were all there in the apartment waiting for the “clients” then where was the pimp. He asked me again, flat out, after I explained again how it all worked, “Okay, so who’s the pimp?”
I thought about it for a minute and then I said, “I guess that would be me.”
You see, answering the phone and asking questions is one thing, but when I got to the part about go to such and such street, there will be a phone booth on the corner, call me from there and I will give you this address, then I was no longer merely answering the phone. I was procuring. I was arranging dates for these girls. In legal eyes I was the pimp.
Men and women get into this business because of the money yes. But there are reasons beyond finance. For some of us it is about the freedom to work without papers, identification, or taxes. We are who we say we are and that’s it. It was 1993, and I was having a nervous breakdown. I was forty-one and just finishing my undergraduate degree. My son was finishing high school and my boyfriend of five years took all the money and left. He had been paying the bills for the last eight months so I could finish my degree. He left for a younger woman, a waitress who had tattoo artist aspirations. I had forty dollars in the bank, a two pack a day cigarette habit, a voracious teenager and a hungry cat. Thank god it was summer and my son was going to stay with friends upstate for a while; that left only me and the cat. I sold some of my favorite clothes, the really cool stuff, on the corner of St. Marks and First Ave., making new friends among the crack heads, but I earned enough for cat food, cigarettes, and toilet paper.
It was hard to find a job right away. I took out another student loan (emergency status of some kind) but that was going to take six weeks to process. I was crying too much to appear sane, at least that’s how I felt, and I was terrified to go on interviews. I had terrible skills, I couldn’t be in an office, and I wasn’t a regular person; that was my whole problem. I tried to be regular but I couldn’t really pull it off, somehow my oddness showed through, despite my fake confident smile.
At about the time I was truly scared for my sanity a friend told me about a job answering phones. I didn’t have to dress up, it wasn’t typical office hours, I could work two or three days a week and make a lot of money. I needed to finish school. I had put off college too long already and I wanted to better myself. This job could be the answer: part time, low maintenance, pay bills, wrap up college. It sounded like a great plan. Yes, of course, too good.
“What’s the catch?”
He filled me in and I said yes. I knew I could handle it. Twelve hours, two-fifty for the shift, five bucks for every call that shows up. The lowest figure would equal out to around twenty dollars an hour if we got no clients at all. But the high end was high, possibly as high as a grand on a good night. Sometimes there were even better nights, it all depended. It was all paid in cash, job title: phone girl.
This was one interview I didn’t worry about. I sat in the kitchen at a long rectangular glass table. On it was a cup with pens and pencils, two large yellow legal pads, folders, ashtrays, cigarette packs, match boxes, and the script that I would need to use until I got used to it, but I was told never to get used to it. I was told to stick to the script, that way it was harder to get busted; you never forget a detail of the questions and you lessen the chances of fucking up and having the cops show up. There were two cordless phones that rang almost constantly. Two phones, two different lines. The washing machine and dryer hummed day and night. Girls came through to put in or take out sheets and towels. They reached into the cabinets to get mouthwash, or glasses, or another box of condoms for one of the rooms. I answered Amber’s (the house owner) questions in between her doing the phones. It rang so often I was there a long time before we settled on days and shifts, because of who recommended me I got the job no problem. I was feeling slightly crazed, what with the girls rushing in and out talking and banging the cabinet doors or slamming the washer lid, the constant ringing of the phones, the crush of papers and ashtrays on the table, and a large Gap tote bag at my feet filled to the handles with money.
The owner, Amber, was rail thin, European, and stylish. Uptown stylish, Kennedy-Onassis stylish. Who knew? And with a name like Amber. I find out later no one here uses a real name, even among ourselves. Some of the more popular names are Tiffany, Amber, Crystal, Desiree, Tammy, Dawn, and Cherie. Names I heard in all the poor rural neighborhoods I had ever lived in-- hooker names. I used my real name never knowing they thought it was a phony; I didn’t know enough to use a different one until I had been there three weeks, and by then who cared?
“Our girls hug and kiss and you can have as many releases as you want during your time.”
It’s a whole new world. I didn’t know that hugging and kissing, that kind of intimate contact, was unusual. It was a big selling point at our house that the women would do this. Releases, as many as a guy could manage, was also news. I thought it was one hit and you’re out; in this place if you were there for the hour, you were there for the hour. The other big selling point was that the guy got to take a shower with the girl before the session. It was a turn-on and kind to the girls; at least they could be guaranteed a non-offensive date. Also get them naked right away and nothing can be smuggled in like a weapon or a badge.
The hour was mostly how it ran. One-sixty for the hour, ninety for the half. Most of the men took the hour. Out of that the girls got 40%. Not much when you consider the work they did, but the house was upscale, safe, and busy. No one complained, actually they were all pretty close, like a family. Most of them had been working together for years. They went to the beach together, or picnics, things like that. Not too often though because the house would have to be closed and that hardly ever happened. Regular holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving were days off and they often spent them together. Most of the girls were from Brazil and had no family nearby. It was really weird to me. I was the only one who was on the outside. It is fairly traditional for the phone girl to be sort of “off limits”. Unless you have been working in a house for years (I knew one “girl” who was at least sixty and worked with the same “owner” for twenty years) you don’t get familiar with anyone lest you be accused of favoritism while booking sessions. The jealousy in these places is rampant and some of the paybacks are truly a bitch, so a phone girl has to be really careful.
This house was in-call only. The girls stay in the house and the johns come to us. Out-call, like any of the other types of sex work, varies quite a bit. Most of the escort services are extremely upscale. This is where many of the high class hookers who are white work. There isn’t as much racial division as people think. Women (and men) of all colors (and ages—yes) work and make excellent to decent money as escorts. It really depends on the johns of course. Out-call can cost more because sometimes there is elaborate security, not only for the worker (and not as often really) but also for the owner. In one out-call only place I worked (there is a lot of freelance work available and some phone girls will work more than one place for more than one employer) there was a camera at street level. When you rang the first bell the camera came on and one could see who was at the street door. After you were buzzed in you went up an elevator to the second floor where you were buzzed in at another door after camera screening. This was for the girls when they came in and for the phone girls and drivers. The johns never came here. The security was tight, the clients were very high level, and the girls here got driven to their gigs and picked up after unless other arrangements had been made.
Interestingly, I come by this work honestly. It’s in the blood, or the family at any rate. My great aunt was once a rival of Polly Adler’s. While Ms. Adler became famous my aunt tended her very, very, high profile clients in secure secrecy, right up until she got out of the game. I know that she maintained relationships with some of them because when she died there were sympathy cards from some really interesting people. I don’t think my father knew that I was working in this field but my mother did and she laughed saying that it was not surprising.
Not all the men who came to the house were high rollers and not all high rollers go to extreme upscale houses. Like in all things people vary in taste and style; sometimes you shop at Target for housewares and sometimes (if you can afford it) you go to Williams& Sonoma. There are Asian houses, Hispanic, every ethnicity under the sun, and these exclusive houses are for those in the same ethnic group. There are houses that have parties, everyone hangs out in a large living room and get together in two’s or three’s. Most houses only cater to men, but there are some have female clients that want female hookers. This usually carries a high price, it’s a specialty that isn’t often asked for and some of the girls at a “straight” house won’t do it.
I have answered phones at lots of types of places. I worked as a phone girl at a dungeon. At the dungeon I was referred to as the house manager. Same difference. I made the dates and would take the heat if the house was raided.
The dungeon was not as scary as the whore house though. In a dungeon, at least the one I worked in, there is only fantasy sex. That is not to say that men didn’t have orgasms, they did, and often at the “hands” of the mistress. But dungeon sex is not about the old in-out, in-out.
Most of the clients were professional, and they were often very open about what they did—if you believed them. Nothing (and no one) was what it seemed.
These people who own the houses know that this is business. They are sharp; they are shrewd. They are not very sympathetic, but they are philosophical. In the days after the World Trade Center collapsed one of the women who owned several elite houses was complaining about business.
“Ah, business is not so good. Buildings go down, all my clients go up in the sky.”
As she said this she threw her hands violently toward the ceiling.
I can’t tell you where the building was. I can tell you that it was in a tony neighborhood in mid-town. The woman I worked for had six apartments in different buildings in different parts of town. Not all the houses are swank, some are just terrible closets full of sad desperate people one step away from madness and death. This was not one of those places. This place, this house, was where the financial district crowd came for lunch, at dinner time, or after hours when the neighborhood was deafly quiet.
These guys wore suits by designers that I wouldn’t know the name of but I knew they were very expensive. You can tell by the way a man wears a suit that it costs more money than most shmucks every see in one place. These men had Rolex watches. I knew this because after they would leave the girls would say, “Did you see the Rolex?” I never saw their watches; I never got that close to them.
“Are you white, black, or Hispanic?” I asked this every call, every two to five minutes, for twelve hours a day.
“How did you hear about us? How is…”fill in the name they give.
This business is by word of mouth mostly. Sometimes the owner of the house will advertise in magazines. Not the typical sex magazines like Screw. This owner will have a discreet ad for relaxing down-time in a chic atmosphere with beautiful, engaging, intelligent women. It’s an ad. That isn’t to say that some of the girls weren’t beautiful, they were, but engaging and intelligent was stretching it. We did have one girl (the only white girl besides the oldest hooker in New York who at 50 looked fantastic and supposedly was the blow-job queen, hence the corny sobriquet “Lips”) who was intelligent. She was a foreign language major studying for her master’s degree in some related field. I don’t remember well. We aren’t supposed to have real lives; real lives are for the normal people. I heard one girl say that she was engaged. When another girl asked her if her fiancé knew what she did for a living she said, “Yeah, I’m a translator at the United Nations.” Everyone heard it and everyone laughed so hard there was coughing all around. It is about fantasy—for the men, and for us.
We ask a lot of questions, obviously because what we do is illegal and we don’t want to get caught. Me in particular. The house supplies an attorney. The hookers, the girls, if we get busted (if the house is rousted by cops) will go to jail for several hours or up to overnight if things go wrong. They will get out on a ticket to appear in court for a misdemeanor. I on the other hand would not do so well. Being a phone girl is a felony.
When I first told my son about the job he was confused. He asked me if the women were all there in the apartment waiting for the “clients” then where was the pimp. He asked me again, flat out, after I explained again how it all worked, “Okay, so who’s the pimp?”
I thought about it for a minute and then I said, “I guess that would be me.”
You see, answering the phone and asking questions is one thing, but when I got to the part about go to such and such street, there will be a phone booth on the corner, call me from there and I will give you this address, then I was no longer merely answering the phone. I was procuring. I was arranging dates for these girls. In legal eyes I was the pimp.
Men and women get into this business because of the money yes. But there are reasons beyond finance. For some of us it is about the freedom to work without papers, identification, or taxes. We are who we say we are and that’s it. It was 1993, and I was having a nervous breakdown. I was forty-one and just finishing my undergraduate degree. My son was finishing high school and my boyfriend of five years took all the money and left. He had been paying the bills for the last eight months so I could finish my degree. He left for a younger woman, a waitress who had tattoo artist aspirations. I had forty dollars in the bank, a two pack a day cigarette habit, a voracious teenager and a hungry cat. Thank god it was summer and my son was going to stay with friends upstate for a while; that left only me and the cat. I sold some of my favorite clothes, the really cool stuff, on the corner of St. Marks and First Ave., making new friends among the crack heads, but I earned enough for cat food, cigarettes, and toilet paper.
It was hard to find a job right away. I took out another student loan (emergency status of some kind) but that was going to take six weeks to process. I was crying too much to appear sane, at least that’s how I felt, and I was terrified to go on interviews. I had terrible skills, I couldn’t be in an office, and I wasn’t a regular person; that was my whole problem. I tried to be regular but I couldn’t really pull it off, somehow my oddness showed through, despite my fake confident smile.
At about the time I was truly scared for my sanity a friend told me about a job answering phones. I didn’t have to dress up, it wasn’t typical office hours, I could work two or three days a week and make a lot of money. I needed to finish school. I had put off college too long already and I wanted to better myself. This job could be the answer: part time, low maintenance, pay bills, wrap up college. It sounded like a great plan. Yes, of course, too good.
“What’s the catch?”
He filled me in and I said yes. I knew I could handle it. Twelve hours, two-fifty for the shift, five bucks for every call that shows up. The lowest figure would equal out to around twenty dollars an hour if we got no clients at all. But the high end was high, possibly as high as a grand on a good night. Sometimes there were even better nights, it all depended. It was all paid in cash, job title: phone girl.
This was one interview I didn’t worry about. I sat in the kitchen at a long rectangular glass table. On it was a cup with pens and pencils, two large yellow legal pads, folders, ashtrays, cigarette packs, match boxes, and the script that I would need to use until I got used to it, but I was told never to get used to it. I was told to stick to the script, that way it was harder to get busted; you never forget a detail of the questions and you lessen the chances of fucking up and having the cops show up. There were two cordless phones that rang almost constantly. Two phones, two different lines. The washing machine and dryer hummed day and night. Girls came through to put in or take out sheets and towels. They reached into the cabinets to get mouthwash, or glasses, or another box of condoms for one of the rooms. I answered Amber’s (the house owner) questions in between her doing the phones. It rang so often I was there a long time before we settled on days and shifts, because of who recommended me I got the job no problem. I was feeling slightly crazed, what with the girls rushing in and out talking and banging the cabinet doors or slamming the washer lid, the constant ringing of the phones, the crush of papers and ashtrays on the table, and a large Gap tote bag at my feet filled to the handles with money.
The owner, Amber, was rail thin, European, and stylish. Uptown stylish, Kennedy-Onassis stylish. Who knew? And with a name like Amber. I find out later no one here uses a real name, even among ourselves. Some of the more popular names are Tiffany, Amber, Crystal, Desiree, Tammy, Dawn, and Cherie. Names I heard in all the poor rural neighborhoods I had ever lived in-- hooker names. I used my real name never knowing they thought it was a phony; I didn’t know enough to use a different one until I had been there three weeks, and by then who cared?
“Our girls hug and kiss and you can have as many releases as you want during your time.”
It’s a whole new world. I didn’t know that hugging and kissing, that kind of intimate contact, was unusual. It was a big selling point at our house that the women would do this. Releases, as many as a guy could manage, was also news. I thought it was one hit and you’re out; in this place if you were there for the hour, you were there for the hour. The other big selling point was that the guy got to take a shower with the girl before the session. It was a turn-on and kind to the girls; at least they could be guaranteed a non-offensive date. Also get them naked right away and nothing can be smuggled in like a weapon or a badge.
The hour was mostly how it ran. One-sixty for the hour, ninety for the half. Most of the men took the hour. Out of that the girls got 40%. Not much when you consider the work they did, but the house was upscale, safe, and busy. No one complained, actually they were all pretty close, like a family. Most of them had been working together for years. They went to the beach together, or picnics, things like that. Not too often though because the house would have to be closed and that hardly ever happened. Regular holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving were days off and they often spent them together. Most of the girls were from Brazil and had no family nearby. It was really weird to me. I was the only one who was on the outside. It is fairly traditional for the phone girl to be sort of “off limits”. Unless you have been working in a house for years (I knew one “girl” who was at least sixty and worked with the same “owner” for twenty years) you don’t get familiar with anyone lest you be accused of favoritism while booking sessions. The jealousy in these places is rampant and some of the paybacks are truly a bitch, so a phone girl has to be really careful.
This house was in-call only. The girls stay in the house and the johns come to us. Out-call, like any of the other types of sex work, varies quite a bit. Most of the escort services are extremely upscale. This is where many of the high class hookers who are white work. There isn’t as much racial division as people think. Women (and men) of all colors (and ages—yes) work and make excellent to decent money as escorts. It really depends on the johns of course. Out-call can cost more because sometimes there is elaborate security, not only for the worker (and not as often really) but also for the owner. In one out-call only place I worked (there is a lot of freelance work available and some phone girls will work more than one place for more than one employer) there was a camera at street level. When you rang the first bell the camera came on and one could see who was at the street door. After you were buzzed in you went up an elevator to the second floor where you were buzzed in at another door after camera screening. This was for the girls when they came in and for the phone girls and drivers. The johns never came here. The security was tight, the clients were very high level, and the girls here got driven to their gigs and picked up after unless other arrangements had been made.
Interestingly, I come by this work honestly. It’s in the blood, or the family at any rate. My great aunt was once a rival of Polly Adler’s. While Ms. Adler became famous my aunt tended her very, very, high profile clients in secure secrecy, right up until she got out of the game. I know that she maintained relationships with some of them because when she died there were sympathy cards from some really interesting people. I don’t think my father knew that I was working in this field but my mother did and she laughed saying that it was not surprising.
Not all the men who came to the house were high rollers and not all high rollers go to extreme upscale houses. Like in all things people vary in taste and style; sometimes you shop at Target for housewares and sometimes (if you can afford it) you go to Williams& Sonoma. There are Asian houses, Hispanic, every ethnicity under the sun, and these exclusive houses are for those in the same ethnic group. There are houses that have parties, everyone hangs out in a large living room and get together in two’s or three’s. Most houses only cater to men, but there are some have female clients that want female hookers. This usually carries a high price, it’s a specialty that isn’t often asked for and some of the girls at a “straight” house won’t do it.
I have answered phones at lots of types of places. I worked as a phone girl at a dungeon. At the dungeon I was referred to as the house manager. Same difference. I made the dates and would take the heat if the house was raided.
The dungeon was not as scary as the whore house though. In a dungeon, at least the one I worked in, there is only fantasy sex. That is not to say that men didn’t have orgasms, they did, and often at the “hands” of the mistress. But dungeon sex is not about the old in-out, in-out.
Most of the clients were professional, and they were often very open about what they did—if you believed them. Nothing (and no one) was what it seemed.
These people who own the houses know that this is business. They are sharp; they are shrewd. They are not very sympathetic, but they are philosophical. In the days after the World Trade Center collapsed one of the women who owned several elite houses was complaining about business.
“Ah, business is not so good. Buildings go down, all my clients go up in the sky.”
As she said this she threw her hands violently toward the ceiling.
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