I have seen over 3,000, and perhaps as many as 6,000, clients in my 13 years of sex work. Statistically, some of these men will have been wife beaters or rapists. I must reckon with the fact that there are clients who treat me well but who have treated other women badly, and vice versa. I only see what is presented to me in the room; I can only speak to whether or not they are a good client, not a good person.
Because of this reality, I don’t interrogate the morality of my clients. I don’t make decisions about whether or not I’ll see them based on the source of their income or if their values align with mine; I only decide based on how respectful they are of me, my time and my boundaries. At the end of the day, they are not a friend, they are a client—being paid to see them is no public, or even, private endorsement of them.
A friend of mine doesn’t see clients who work or have worked for any military in any way. I completely understand this, however I consider that whoever they are in the outside world is none of my business, because if I made it my business it wouldn’t be financially sustainable for me to be in this business. I don’t argue politics with clients; I’m happy to commiserate if, after taking the temperature, I find we are in agreement, but mostly I say “we’ll have to agree to disagree,” or deflect or divert.
This is partly for my own safety, as it’s never a good idea to incite or escalate conflict when you are alone in a room with a man who is much bigger than you. When the gay marriage plebiscite was occurring in Australia, I had many clients go on homophobic rants, and I would always tactfully appease them to a degree, saying “look, I’m personally voting yes, but I get what you’re saying—I too struggle to understand why gay people would want a traditional relationship with the state or religion, it doesn’t mean anything to me.” It’s also for my own sanity, because I fear I would be sickened by my work and my physical proximity to some men if I knew the extent of their opinions.
One of my kindest and most considerate regulars votes for One Nation (a far-right party in Australia that is extremely anti-migrant and anti-Muslim) and loves right-wing politician Peter Dutton (I’ve never ever met anyone else who professes to “love” Peter Dutton, it’s almost an oxymoron to me). There’s no point in saying I don’t like Peter Dutton because he’s racist, as my client obviously shares those same views and either doesn’t care or doesn’t believe that Dutton is racist. So instead, I say, “I don’t like politicians who campaign on traditional Christian values as I don’t think they’re representative of Australia, a majority secular country, and I find that they often are motivated by their religious views to argue against abortion.” That’s not entirely true, as my issue is with misogyny and racism, not religion, however he absorbs that response in a way he wouldn’t the other and says I’ve made him look at it in a way he hasn’t before.
I used to have a regular brothel client, a boy in his early twenties (I call him a boy because, as he was younger and smaller than me, I inevitably thought of him in that way). In the room he was the sweetest, gentlest, shyest person you could imagine, and I always enjoyed my time with him. He found my Instagram though and would DM me the most obscene and rude messages: “SLUT, come fuck me now, you dirty slut, filthy whore,” in an unending stream of vitriol that was at odds with how he spoke to me in person. This reiterated to me that there is who the client shows me in the room, and who he is otherwise. And the latter is impossible for me to properly see from my time in the room with him, as our relationship is forever transactional—we only see the sides we choose to show to each other in that moment.
