Sex worker has positive thoughts on masculinity

I thought this article posted on the Good Men Project by a sex worker was very interesting. Excerpt:

People who deeply distrust the sex industrywhove been personally harmed by it or find it threatening or who associate it only with exploitationoften get very angry when escorts (or academics who study sex workers, like Sudhir Venkatesh) claim some clients dont want sexual interaction.

But its true: some dont. Ive been hired by men who never asked me to get naked, never requested that I touch their genitals. Theres always conversation, regardless of the other activities during a date: clients talk to me about their parents (especially their fathers) and about failing marriages or life after divorce. They often show me pictures of their children and, sometimes, spouses.

The longer Ive worked, the more it seems that the sex is often a front. Its an entry point that allows men to make their real request (for affection, understanding, and connection) while still satisfying stereotypical ideas of masculinity. What most men want is a great romance or, at the very least, a great friendship. They want to feel like theyre falling in love. They want to feel loved in return.

The clients who do want to have sexand of course, there are manydont want that sex to be uncomfortable or unpleasant for me. They want to me to take pleasure in the act as well. They want to feel attractive and competent and gentle and attentive. Many of them are all of those things. If they express guilt about paying for sex, I dont try to talk them into feeling otherwise. When one man said he should stop seeing me because the money he spent on our appointments should be going toward his kids college funds, I replied, Well, if it makes you feel any better, its going toward mine. (I never saw him again.)

Yes, Ive met men who didnt respect my boundaries and who harmed me, inadvertently or purposefully. But such men were few and far between, and I refused to see them again.

Not every man who visits a strip club, watches a clip of porn, or pays for sexual companionship wants to commit an act of violence against a woman. Rapists and murderers are the ones who want to rape and strangle people; some of them hire escorts, some dont.

When Melissa Farley [an extremely biased and aggressive anti-prostitution zealot] tells The Economist that men who hire prostitutes are not nice guys looking for a normal date. They regularly attempt to rape and strangle women, shes not talking about my experience. Farleys cloudy thinking rests on the belief that a mans sexual interest in a woman is fundamentally disrespectful, fundamentally abusive, and fundamentally wrong.

The piece is especially interesting when contrasted with the viewpoints of sex workers who really hated their work, such as Michelle Tea, who I quoted in my post "There It Is".

I wish the writer had made more of an effort not to shame different fetishes (for example, she writes disapprovingly of a client who asked her to pretend to be a murderous dominatrix -- and what exactly is wrong with that?). But it's a good article nonetheless.