One Nine Two: Negotiation

I'm still thinking about "The Girlfriend Experience" and what one might expect from a professional companion. I do remember some years ago--- maybe eight or nine years ago now ---and a blog by a girl who called herself Debauchette.  She had one of the first (and one of the best) escort blogs. She was clever and witty and literary and a fine writer. I miss her blog. Debauchette always called herself a professional companion. I liked the usage--- back to hetaira, of course, back to the idea of providing more services than just sex. Acquiring the services of a professional companion is about being able to afford the fees, but it's also about a certain kind of compatibility. You're paying for high-end services, but you have to be able to let your companion know what those are. You have to be able to provide a script outline that she can work with.

You'd be working with someone who comes with her own talents and background. I'm imagining it as like hiring a name actor.  You give someone like that a basic outline, and then rely on their own talents. If I were to hire someone like Riley Keough's character, I'd be trusting to her interpretation of the film script in my head. That ability is what justifies her fees.

Yet I'd still have to sit and look at her across a table and explain what I wanted. That's an awkward thing, a terrifying thing. It risks being judged boring and jejune--- much worse than being judged perverted. And it requires you to be able to put what you want into words. That involves self-justification--- again, obviously. There's the temptation to explain and over-explain, to try to show that what you want isn't a bad thing, that you aren't a bad person. Any attempt at explaining what you want is all-too-likely to turn into selling yourself, with all the anxiety you'd feel at a job interview. Explanation also requires that you be very sure about what you really want and that you be willing to admit to yourself that you do want these things.

That's likely to be the hard part. This is what I am; this is what I do. That's hard enough to say into a mirror about perfectly ordinary things. Think about admitting that to a high-end professional across a table: This is what I am; this is what I do. She's probably heard it all before, but would you ever believe that? Would you want to believe that? Would you ever fully believe that she wouldn't laugh or recoil in disgust?

It's much easier to get the envelope of cash ready than it is to put together a clear statement of what you want and what you need. I need you to make me feel like this. I need you to do these things. I've always agreed with the old, old saying that if you know someone's sexual fantasies, you know what the person really is. That's one of the more terrifying things I've ever heard.

Sitting across the table in the darkened bar at the four-star hotel, trying to explain what you're looking for from Riley Keough's character--- can you do that and maintain any sense of yourself and your self-worth? And, too, do you know yourself well enough to ask for what you want?

One Zero Two: Transactions

There's a particular writer out there in the gender wars who calls himself "Dr. NerdLove", and whose columns always leave me irritated, dejected, and angry. His tagline at his website is "Helping Nerds Get The Girl", but of course his columns do exactly the opposite. They discourage anyone male from approaching a girl, they discourage romance and flirtation and seduction, and they discourage anyone male from having particular sexual interests or needs. "Dr. NerdLove" (who isn't a PhD or an MD, by the way) claims to be "sex-positive", but of course so many of his columns are devoted to telling his readers not to have sex. His vision of a proper relationship is exactly that of some very stodgy 1950s advice columnist--- the only proper affair is one that begins with the clear intent of becoming a "committed", lifelong relationship and proceeds without involving any sort of passionate sexual interest or sexual engagement. He very much dislikes the idea that anyone--- anyone male ---might be interested in a partner in any way that involves physical desire and any kind of social play. His especial ire is reserved for the idea that sex is "transactional" in any way, or that affairs or dates are tainted with being transactions of any sort.

I've never understood the disdain for the idea that sex is "transactional". I suppose some of that must be based on the idea that sex can only be a good thing if it's based on the pure joining of souls and spirits, and some of it is based on a fear that saying something is "transactional" is yielding ground to the patriarchy and to MRA/PUA types who declare that all women are "whores".  I've never seen anything wrong with the idea that sex and romance have a transactional element; I thought those things were built in from the start.

I've always thought that any kind of social life was about transactions and strategies. Yes, I read Marcel Mauss and his followers when I was at university--- about symbolic exchanges and the role of gifting in tribal and archaic societies. But even before that, I knew that there was something called "transactional analysis" that had its moment in the sun back in the early and mid-1960s. I knew that it involved looking at human interactions in terms of games, of strategies and transactions. I hadn't read any of the works, but I knew from book reviews and review articles that it existed, and basically what it was about. And of course I'd read things like Austen and Henry James. I always thought social life--- personal interactions, romances, marriages, friendships ---were about strategies and transactions. I took that for granted.

The idea of sex and romance as transactional seems quite natural to me--- after all, I grew up in a culture that valorizes the market and the idea of exchange.  I can't see it as degrading to either party, and it seems to me that it's an efficient way to move forward in any kind of developing affair. After all, I've always preferred rituals and procedures. They have the advantage of reducing friction, of reducing the need to agonize over decisions and choices. In terms of a particular social structure, if you do A, then B will follow.  X does this, and Y knows that in terms of the structure, one responds with that.

When I was younger, the point of a date--- of an affair ---was to engage with someone attractive and bright and move towards bed: through hanging out to making out. I always expected that the girl across the table or in the passenger seat of the car knew that and was there for the same thing. We'd each go through the symbolic exchanges that underlay a seduction, and, yes, that did involve taking her to dinner or for drinks and paying. I was signaling that I valued her enough to expend resources; she responded by presenting me with her time and attention.  That seemed, and still seems, straightforward enough.  And both parties knew that we were going through ritual moves to reach a goal both of us understood.

We're social animals. We build structures and systems, and we create rituals and procedures to move through them. We deploy strategies to seek social advantage, and we participate in exchanges--- some symbolic, some concrete, often both ---as part of those strategies. I've never seen a problem with that. At the very least, looking at sex and romance as transactional forces both parties to be very clear about what they want and about what they're prepared to give up for that.  It forces us to acknowledge that there's a goal--- a physical goal ---in any affair. The soi-disant "Dr. NerdLove" is very good at chastising and browbeating his readers and anyone seeking his advice, but he's no good at all at admitting what an affair is about or that any relationship occurs within a web of social maneuvers. He doesn't really try to "help the nerd get the girl"--- he really seems to be doing quite the opposite. And he refuses to admit that sex and romance, like pretty much everything else in a social structure, proceeds by strategy and exchange.

Fifteen: Exchanges

A friend in London tells me that she'd dined late with an older admirer at someplace discreet and semi-private and, on the way to her admirer's car, some drunken lager lout staggering by pointed at them and called out, "So how much is he paying you, then?" They ignored him and walked on, but he kept calling after them, demanding to know how much she was being paid and adding the usual epithets. She wrote me about it this morning in a dark mood--- hungover a bit, but also depressed and unable to get the drunken chav's voice out of her head. I told her to remember that the fact was that, there the morning after, she was still fiercely bright and lovely and well-educated and someone who's done academia and the gallery world both, and the guy on the street was still a drunken yobbo.

My friend responded that she was depressed about her life. The man she'd been with had been older and moneyed, and she was angry both about being harangued on the street and about the fact that the insult was dual-pronged--- she'd been called a whore, and her admirer had been mocked as someone who could only attract her because he had cash. She was, she said, more angered by the insult to him and to the relationship  than by being called a whore.

I've never called a girl a "whore" as an insult. That's not something I've ever thought to use as an insult. I've never looked down on girls who are escorts or courtesans or who supplement a deficient income by accepting occasional clients. That never struck me as anything to look down on. But I do very much dislike yobbos (or anyone else) who'll use "whore" as an attack on a girl beacuse of her sex life, her attire, or her partner. There may be self-interest there, true. I'm always the older partner, and while I'm certainly not as moneyed as my friend's admirer, I'm nonetheless vulnerable to the assumptions behind the insult.

I've had friends who did the demi-rep or part-time escort or domme thing while doing university or postgraduate degrees. I've never had any moral objections to any girl who works as "professional companion". I liked the girls before ever they told me what they were doing, and all I've said is that I wanted to hear their stories and that I hoped the money was useful. I can't speak about girls who work the street or who work in brothels; I've never known any. It may be that I'm only supportive of the girls I've known because they shared educational and class and aesthetic backgrounds with me. Or it may be that to some degree I feed off their stories. I recognise that I'm vulnerable to criticisms like that.  All I can say is that the girls I've known who exchanged favours for money were (and are) friends, to be supported as friends.

Someone I knew once upon a time came to me and made a simple enough offer--- she needed money for rent and she was willing to either sell me one of her paintings or spend the night. I wrote her a check and pointed to the bedroom. The next morning at coffee she took the check out of the pocket of one of my shirts and looked at it and asked if we were still friends. Of course, I said. She started to laugh and told me that the one thing that bothered her was the thought that I'd chosen sex instead of the painting because I thought her art was bad. I had to re-assure her--- very honestly ---that I liked her paintings a lot, and that my choice was strictly based on my predatory tastes in much younger girls. We stayed friends, and over the next couple of years I did buy a painting or two. Did I pay for her favours again? A couple of times, yes. Did she ever buy me drinks or dinner? Yes, she did. I've always wondered how initially serious she'd been, and whether she'd only made the offer because she thought I'd never choose sex. Why did she go through with it? And why come by again? I suspect that a fair amount of that was being nineteen and proving to herself that she could do it, about striking a pose. I'd like to think that she found me to be a useful character in the stories she was telling herself. We neither of us ever asked if the sex would've happened if I hadn't written the check. I've always thought that the idea of taking the money was what made the sex work for her.  I never presumed--- I'll note that. I never assumed that the exchange meant that she and I were involved, or that I could count on sex outside of an exchange. We did hang out sometimes, and there was some drunken making out at bars, but we only had sex again the few times when I wrote a check. I don't know if she'd have been interested, or if that would've ruined the story she was creating, or if it would've ruined the friendship we had.

It's Halloween night, and a night for ghost stories. There are ghosts in my past who've been part-time escorts, or been in keeping, or turned the occasional trick to pay rent or pay for airline tickets--- in one case, to pay for a signed first edition. Well, I do want my friend in London to know that she has my support and belief. I have no idea whether her older admirer is paying her rent or offering up envelopes of cash or gifts that can be readily converted to cash. If he is, then...well, fine. I do want her to remember, though, that she has nothing to apologise for, and that whatever she has or hasn't done, she's still far superior to any drunken yobbo.