The Trade

There are any number of things which can distinguish someone from the crowd, but they can still be ranked by regularity. The most common is beauty. The second is raw charisma.

The most successful escorts, prostitutes, strippers and grifters all have the latter in common. The former, though not worthless, can often be immaterial. Some of the most attractive men I have ever known haven’t been sell themselves based on that fact alone, and we’re not just talking about sex.

I will not suggest that I haven’t been dealt a favorable hand. I have, but I’m not drop dead; I’m not stop in your tracks and look at that guy kind of attractive. I’m more second take kind of attractive.

“Who was that?”

Me. It was just me.

Just me gets harder and harder to define under a workable heading, and the "me" that’s for sale is a curiosity. How much of myself goes into that transaction? If I was just a prostitute, that would be one thing; or even if it were the first thing -- before I found that something else, before I managed to seek out some other defining factor -- but escort is such a small crest: the tip of an iceberg’s finger. The sex-trade does not define the best and brightest of its participants, by any means, on either side of the bed, even though cultural onus tries to do that for us. You sell sex for money. Or (not to leave strippers out), you sell the suggestion of sex for money.

Either way, Culture doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

Let’s be honest: people sell far worse things for money: arms, for one; debt, for another; and those individuals get off with a lot less disgust and moralizing thrown in their direction, and considerably less legal trouble.

What really sticks in peoples craw, what brings them to such retrogradation of their usual tempers and demeanors, is that some of us can put a dollar value on intimate activity.

“Quelle horror!” They exclaim.

It is horrifying.

Not the act itself, but the fuss, this interminable palaver over sex and paying for it. Something we should all be asking is: why? World’s Oldest Profession, the title reads. Why is that? Why is it that every culture has a reference point for it, a strata of society, whether dirty, pitiful, regular or sublime?

Has human history been paying for beauty, or charisma?

And how can it be considered morally horrifying? After all the taboos, the false starts, the superstitious interpretations, it still remains: prostitution, an individual compensating another individual for their intimate attention.

But that may be it: outside of procreation, sexual expression remains a mystery, and completely unexplained. Commonly, it is something that occurs between individuals, in private; but it has no express purpose, and that (especially to Western minds) is where it all falls down. Collectively, collectiveness is something that we have required, as a species, to grant authenticity. Sexuality doesn’t have a cultural value, by itself. It needs a function. It needs to be interpreted, and defined, by communal effort. There is the fact that we need to make babies, and the reasoning that’s the whole purpose behind attraction and erotic play, but that doesn’t hold because all of the mammals on the planet busy themselves with sexual pleasure when they can find it, procreational or not. Climbing into bed with someone, uncovering another person’s modesty, has been confused by so much misinformation and mystification that it’s been locked down. Even in this day and age, no one really wants to talk about it.

Stigma is the only thing that has given sex the power of the dollar.

Which is why the prejudice against its trade is a farce. You can’t make something which is relatively innocuous, yet completely ubiquitous, hard to archive and not expect there to be demand for it. The sex trade is a service, nothing more. And it would be a safer one, if it weren’t for the fact that culture defines it as invalid.

So what am I vending, really? And am I diminishing my distinctions from the crowd by putting whatever they are, out there on the market? Am I better served as a person to save up my youth and my erections, and lend both on the value of merit, rather than cash? When a masseuse charges sixty dollars an hour, a pedicure costs twenty a pop, and a psychiatrist can take hundreds at a go?

Now, I know I haven’t had training per se, but I am good at what I do, and I have a certain amount of charisma, which I’m certain is what has gained me regulars, more than my physical appearance. Selling a version of an ideal is really what the sex trade is about: having immediate access the semblance of a fantasy; and when it all comes down to it, perhaps the opprobrium against the trade is initially produced out of fear: that the regular partners (the wives, the girlfriends and boyfriends) won’t be able to measure up, or compete with a buffed professional object of desire.

They needn’t worry. Paying for a fille or garcon de joie is simply a digression, it’s not the everyday. No illusion is proof of being dispelled, and no matter what glamour any of us put on, we still all wake up with sleep in our eyes, leave dirty dishes in the sink, and fail to pay enough attention to our loved ones. Our flaws still show through, if you spend enough time staring. God knows, we still have our bad days.

We’ve just decided to auction the better ones.

Comments

[The Venial Sinner]

I have no real problem with selling intimacy (so long as the seller has not been coerced into doing so). All the same, I know that, personally, I could never do it for the very fact you highlighted in your previous post: namely that such procurement is almost exclusively the pursuit of the agèd.

[Note]

I like to think of focusing on inner beauty as a trade skill.

[El Diablo De Verde]

What a fucking good writer you are!

[The Venial Sinner]

Oh, honey now! don't you go making me blush like that!

Oh you mean _he's_ a good writer.

Oh.

;o)

[El Diablo De Verde]

Well he is, but you look so fetching when you blush.

[jane]

I have to agree with all of the above: the fucking, the goodness, the writing.

I love this post of yours, Note. I'd like to transcribe it on the insides of my wrists so that I can have something insightful to read during that post-coital stillness. They always sleep, and I never do.

[marcus]

"we still all wake up with sleep in our eyes"

perfect.

thanks for this blog.