Intimacy, Eroticism, and Fantasy
How sex work occupies a special space that honors and plays with all three, simultaneously.
I’ve been reading You Made A Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi this summer as I was on a very serious and intentional mission to read some truly titillating romance books, and needed some new erotic inspiration. The old stuff doesn’t do it for me anymore. As a seasoned girl in the industry what turns me on more than anything else nowadays is novelty. Bring me your weird turn ons, your balloon fetish or braking kink. Tell me that you want me to braid your hair while licking your ear, or watch me play with myself while you lick cereal milk off the floor and tell me you’ve been a good little boy. While I still love my job and find immense satisfaction in it; its easy to settle into grooves and even the sexiest of clients become old-time bed partners; people I stopped wearing lingerie for ages ago, who know my mom’s name and with whom I wear a ragged t-shirt to bed with. While intimacy is a gorgeous and special thing to build, it is in my opinion, a natural killer of eroticism. Familiarity does not breed excitement in bed. Thus, I sit in bed and order books from my wish list of weirder and weirder romances; from space sex and alien orifice invasion, to extremely detailed doctor’s office visits from the point of view of a Victorian maiden, or cowboys doing butt stuff along the rim of the Grand Canyon. Intimacy is what I work with all day; when I am alone at night what I crave is the unknown, the weird, the alluringly bizarre, the exotic erotic.
This is surprising, because there’s a common joke in the industry that people come for the sex but stay for the connection. It’s such a widespread understanding that it’s even a repeated joke on Arrested Development, where the men of the show will hire an escort in order to reassert their own masculine energy and sexual charisma, but instead spend the session sobbing into her arms. We come for the eroticism, but we stay for the intimacy, with many people straying from long-term marriages or relationships that are still full of love but thoroughly lacking in excitement into the arms of younger, bolder and stranger women. It’s a common pattern in romantic relationships; when they start we can’t keep our hands off of each other, but as lust fades and familiarity creeps in; the excitement of the new relationship is slowly replaced with the comfort and reliability of an intimacy that is slowly built up over time. We miss the lust because the grass is always greener between someone else’s legs. It’s good job security, but sometimes I struggle to keep the fire going in my oldest client relationships. What do we do when the escape we seek become a new form of intimacy and predictability?
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