Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (8 page)

The shame I felt came from sex work. There it is, as barefaced as it can be. Don’t get me wrong, I still wear my feminist-slut badge. This isn’t some dubious argument over the merits of waiting tables for minimum wage versus the formidable moneymaking potential of prostitution. Morals are not being reexamined here. I’m not moving from “camp empowerment” to “camp victim”—such dichotomies are far too short-sighted to sum up sex workers. What I’m coming out about is that sex work changed my relationship with being a working-class femme and, in turn, my relationship with you, my butch lovers.

Sometimes you tried to talk about it. I want to thank you for being brave enough to speak up, even though you didn’t always say the right thing. I remember waking up one morning to your big green eyes. You had been watching me sleep since sunrise, adoringly at first, the way smitten lovers do, then your thoughts took a turn and you began to wonder, How the heck is this my girlfriend? Fake tan, synthetic hair weave, fake, long airbrushed fingernails; you said that lying beside me felt “surreal.” I suppose I looked like a poster child for the beauty myth we had been warned about in our early 90s feminist education. I looked like the kind of femme who is dubbed “high maintenance” or “a princess”—indeed these labels were used to describe me—though the reality was that sex work had only made me tougher and more fiercely independent. Still, there wasn’t anything punk rock or edgy, humble, or even queer about my exterior femme persona. I pretty much looked like I belonged in a commercial for a chat line or a diet pill. The familiar fit of you and me (your butch and my femme) had been disrupted. Had I sold out our butch-femme codes? Had I snuck the bourgeois “other” into our bed?

“I make more money when I look like this.” How frequently I used this disclaimer. It was the fractured thinking I employed as a sex worker: there was the persona and then there was the real me. But, as I’ve already mentioned, easy dichotomies fall short. As with my appearance, sex work began to shape my life. Prostitution money paid for my liberal arts degree, an MFA in creative writing. If I was going to be the college-student-by-day, working-girl-by-night cliché, I was determined to average at least a 4.0—even if it meant turning a date with a dental student during lunch break so I could pay for my biology tutor that same afternoon. I was raised with the principle of sacrifice; if I was going to obtain the things that my class background hadn’t afforded me, I figured I was bound to suffer at least a little.

While I’d grown somewhat accustomed to grappling with the personal sacrifices that came with sex work, witnessing your inner conflict was an entirely different challenge. Although we both agreed in theory that my job ought to be treated like any other line of work, if your boss called to offer you an extra shift, our biggest dilemma was whether the overtime would cut into our upcoming scheduled dates. “Baby, you don’t mind, do you?” was all you needed to say, conversation closed. In contrast, entire nights seemed to be ruined when my madam called to ask me to take a last-minute client. As I’d whisper into my cell phone, I witnessed your face stiffen. Eventually, the sound of my ringtone alone was cause for pause.

I never had to lie to my friends about what you did for a living. “She’s a carpenter” or a “welder-in-training,” I boasted. These were strong, rugged, and proudly butch professions. For you, telling people your girlfriend was a sex worker was a crapshoot, at best. Of course, I was out to our close mutual friends. Others were told a half-truth: that I was a stripper rather than a full-fledged, blow job–performing prostitute. This explanation spared you from uttering an outright lie and also from making your buddies uncomfortable or concerned. What kind of man dates a prostitute? A tyrant, a pimp, or a broken man who can’t take care of his woman. Our radical queer values didn’t protect us from these stigmas. “I wish I could protect you” was another brave thing that you frequently said to me. I took what comfort I could in this sentiment and let you wrap your arms around me a little tighter. This tender statement, however, affirmed how truly uncomfortable you were with sex work and, worse still, how uncomfortable you were that my work made you feel powerless. Butches aren’t supposed to feel powerless. I was inadvertently de-butching you. And, as a femme who believes (and celebrates) that her role as a femme is to make her butch feel like one hell of a butch, I was de-femming myself, too.

Confessions don’t come any harder than this one: sex work changed the way I fucked.

I remember the first time I refused to kneel for you. We were making out at one of our fuck spots, between a row of highschool portables a few blocks from your house. You took out your cock, ran your thumb along my bottom lip, and yanked my hair as you did when you wanted me on the ground. It was Friday night. The next day was my regular Saturday shift, when all the big-tipping clients visited the massage parlor, and I couldn’t risk having my knees scraped like a “cheap whore.” It might have messed with my money. Moreover, I refused to reveal the real me at work. My work persona didn’t have scraped knees (or welts or hickeys, etc.).

The simplest, sexiest diversion would have been to spit on your cock and lift my skirt. Instead, I stood there frozen in that inciting moment when I realized that keeping my real life and work neatly separated was impossible; it was failing at every opportunity. Sex work was not simply coating the surface of my body like a topcoat of glitter nail polish. It had sunk in.

We could playfully liken my appearance to a drag queen’s. My money financed more than a few good times together. But we met an impasse when the impact of sex work entered our bedroom. Setting boundaries around scraped knees was only a preview to long and recurring phases when I couldn’t be touched at all. Contrary to your fantasies and my own, I wasn’t an inexhaustible source of amorous coos and sighs. My pussy was not an eternal femme spring, always wet and ready. The image of the coquette was critical to our relationship. It was critical to who I was as a femme. I hadn’t chosen the saccharine country classic “Touch Your Woman” by Dolly Parton (my working-class femme role model) as a mantra for nothing! Who was I, as a femme, if I couldn’t offer my body to you, my butch lovers, as a touchstone, a safe haven of hotness, a soft-skinned, sweet-mouthed reminder that who we were was right and good?

A bigger question: what the heck did sex between us look like if I wasn’t going to spread my legs anymore? Most of you had your own set of complex raw spots—as our generation of butches with hard-knock pasts often do. I’d spent my younger femme years devotedly learning about and responding to the nuanced body language and boundaries of butches. Suddenly, it was all I could do to keep up with my own changing limits and body issues.

For a while I tried on “stone femme” as an identity. In many ways, this label protected me and made me feel powerful. It also became a regular topic for dissection in our small community. “A stone femme, meaning a femme who loves stone butches?” I was asked repeatedly.

“No, I mean I myself am stone.” I’d say. “I don’t let lovers touch me.”

“Hmm.” I got a lot of doubtful “hmms” in response, as if I were speaking in riddles.

Ultimately, changes to the way I fucked meant we both had to reinvent the codes and traditions of the butch-femme bedroom as we knew them, which under different circumstances might have been a fun task, but the possibilities weren’t as discernible as the losses. We didn’t ask “Could we…?” as often as we asked “Why can’t we…?”

Let’s just skip the berating part, where I say, “I admit I wasn’t always an easy woman to stand beside.” Let’s move right to the part where I simply thank you for doing so. If you’ve hung on and heard me this far, then please let me finish this letter by explaining exactly what it is I am thanking you for.

You were adaptable. You tried really darn hard to be adaptable. Most of the time this only made you about as flexible as a flagpole, but I noticed you bend and knew that you did it for me. I remember the time you let me strap it on and be the first femme to fuck you. It ranks quite high up in my list of all-time favorite memories. Later, you gloated to your butch buddies, “She’s more ‘butch’ than me between the sheets.” To my surprise, comradely arm punching and shared stupid grins followed this admission. It made me wonder if you needed that fuck (and those that followed) as desperately as I did. Maybe you needed a damaged-goods, stone femme like me to ask you to become something besides the ever-infallible butch top you were accustomed to being.

Likewise, maybe you needed to cry with me during those rare times when you resisted the urge to take up the emotional reins and say “Baby, don’t cry” or “It will be okay.” This was a delicate and extraordinary space, where we both unabashedly cried together. For me, it was the emotional antithesis of the wordless reactive shame I often felt but lacked the guts or words to talk about. Thank you for sharing this space with me.

There were many moments when I doubted myself during those years—hazardous moments, like brushes with bad clients, when yours were the strong arms in which I sought respite. There were also many instances when I lacked the confidence to walk with dignity into a university classroom or a square job interview, moments when I was tempted to blow my ho money by going on benders because climbing the class ladder was terrifying. Thank you for loving me the way you knew best. Your big calloused hands held me strong to this life. You still took me dancing until our clothes were soaked through with sweat. You popped Heart’s
Greatest Hits
in your car stereo, and we drove the back roads singing “Crazy on You” in comically awful disharmony. You called me “old lady” and “beautiful” and “your girl.” You taught me that butch-femme wasn’t about dress codes, the gendered skills we’d acquired, or jobs we held, or even about who bent over in the bedroom. At the crux of it all, our butch-femme traditions were about creating a place that was distinctly ours. Again and again you brought me to this home, this shelter from external pressures, this asylum from troubled pasts and uncertain futures. Thank you for assuring me that I always had a remarkable, shameless place.

I Want You to Want Me

Hugo Schwyzer

Like countless American children, I grew up hearing the nursery rhyme in which little boys are characterized as “snips and snails and puppy-dog tails” while girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice.” As a small boy very attached to our pet dachshund, I thought puppy-dog tails were a fine thing indeed, but the point of the rhyme wasn’t lost on me. Boys were dirty, girls were clean and pure.

We’re raised in a culture that both celebrates and pathologizes male “dirtiness.” On the one hand, boys were and are given license to be louder, rowdier, and more sexual. We’re expected to get our hands dirty, to rip our pants, and get covered in stains. We enjoy a freedom to be dirty that goes hand in hand with the expectation that we are in a state of perpetual craving for women’s bodies. Even now, too many girls grow up shamed for wanting to be dirty. And if men’s bodies are dirty, then to lust after them is to be dirty as well.

For many guys, growing up with the right to be dirty is accompanied by the realization that many people find the male body repulsive. In sixth grade, the same year that puberty hit me with irrevocable force, I had an art teacher, Mr. Blake. (This dates me: few public middle schools have art teachers anymore.) I’ll never forget his solemn declaration that great artists all acknowledged that the female form was more beautiful than the male. He made a passing crack that “no one wants to see naked men, anyway”—and the whole class laughed. “Ewwww,” a girl sitting next to me said, evidently disgusted at the thought of a naked boy.

In time, I discovered that Mr. Blake was wrong about this so-called artistic consensus. But it took me a lot longer to unlearn the damage done by remarks like his and by the conventional wisdom of my childhood. I came into puberty convinced both that my male body was repulsive and that the girls for whom I longed were flawless. (I still remember how floored I was at 16, when the lovely classmate on whom I had a crush farted while I was sitting next to her in German class. I had sincerely believed until that moment that women didn’t pass gas.)

A year later, in my first sexual relationship, I was convinced that my girlfriend found my body physically repellent. I could accept that girls liked and wanted sex, but I figured that what my girlfriend liked was how I made her feel in spite of how my body must have appeared to her. Though I trusted that she cared for me, the idea that she—or any other woman—could want this sweaty, smelly, fumbling flesh was still unthinkable. What made her want to have sex with me, I assumed, was a combination of two things: her love for me (which trumped her “natural” disgust), and my own skill.

Not long after that first relationship broke up, I went through what would be the first of many periods of promiscuity. I had sex with a series of women and men. I knew I wasn’t gay, but I wasn’t inflexibly straight either; though I could only experience romantic feelings for women, I was turned on by both sexes. Count me in the camp of those who believe that sexual fluidity isn’t just for women; authentic male bisexuality is far from a myth. But my own bisexuality seemed to mirror the “Mr. Blake problem”—though I was physically drawn to both sexes, I found women more sexually alluring. Whether that was because I wasn’t really bi or because I bought into what I’d been taught about the comparative undesirability of the male body, I wasn’t sure.

I established a pattern in high school that would stay with me for years. While the women I had sex with were always within a year or two of my own age, almost all the men I slept with were a decade or two my senior. With women, I was usually the pursuer; with men, I was the pursued. And while I often liked the actual sex with women better, I loved the way my male lovers made me feel wanted.

I grew up on the Monterey Peninsula in the 1980s, home to the now-shuttered Fort Ord and a number of other military installations. Most of the guys I slept with when I was in high school were soldiers or sailors or airmen. One Friday night, a few weeks before my 18th birthday, an older man picked me up on a street corner. I think his name was James; he was a master sergeant. He was certainly one of the oldest guys I ever fucked during my teens, perhaps in his mid-forties.