I was listening to queer icon TS Madison’s podcast last week. She spoke about how, as a sex worker, she saw men stripped of the pretensions and performance they put on for other women. “I don’t meet the representative, I meet the man—and because I’m trans I meet the dark, dark man,” she said. This stayed with me because it rang true; men often aren’t trying to impress us in the way they are with civilian women; we see their insecurities and fetishes and compulsions and vices. They feel free to expose themselves, partly because we are not respectable and not of marriageable quality.
This can be a beautiful thing—that my clients feel able to drop the façade and relax with me. It can also be a terrible thing, because there are men who perceive us as worthless and therefore expendable, which is heightened by another axis of marginalisation, as TS Madison speaks to. That view is what leads to us being targeted by violent men, who benefit from society’s disregard and the idea that we have brought mistreatment upon ourselves because of the nature of our work.
Sex workers, because of the way we fall outside of society’s mores, exist on the fringes. We are not seen as arbiters of morality by our clients, and so they are able to drop any charade with us. Because of this, I can tell a man’s attitude to women generally from how respectful he is to me. I can also see red flags that other women don’t. Often when a friend has started dating a man I have warned her against him, because I noticed something in his behaviour that to her seemed trivial but to me is revealing of a pattern. I can cut through the performance because of how regularly I see beneath it. I am like the protagonist’s aunt in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall who sees warning signs in the suitor that the protagonist does not.
Recently, I read a 1921 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera, that is said to have inspired Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca while also being partially based on the author’s own life. It is a chilling gothic read, where a young girl is trapped into a suffocating marriage by a domineering man who wishes to both break and train all the women in his life, from servants to spouses. He is able to do this because he hides his true self behind a constructed front of romance and etiquette for the courtship. This kind of deliberate creation is why I am wary of any person who comes on strong in initial interactions. For me romance is something that should build organically over time rather than being a conscious and calculated display.
Last year I saw a client who was a very successful real estate agent. He was married with children. To the outside world he was a responsible businessman, devoted to his wife and kids. To his inner world, his family, he was also that. However, I saw his shadow self, the secret side only seen by those escorts paid to accompany him. To me he was a coke head and a gambling addict, erratic and unreliable. I saw a dark, dark man, made darker by the disparity between what he showed me and what he showed other people. How could he ever hope to reconcile his shadow self with his outer self?
I couldn’t help thinking of Tony Soprano, and the Nathaniel Hawthorne quote that appears in one episode of The Sopranos: “No man, for any considerable period of time, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the truth.” On the off-chance that a client views me individually, as dateable, I get the wooing treatment that all other women get. Otherwise, as sex workers, with us clients wear the face they wear with themselves.
