LOLA DAVINA
My client is getting dressed after sex. It’s an ordinary Wednesday afternoon at my downtown San Francisco studio in-call apartment. He’s a typical client—he called from his office to make an appointment to swing by at two p.m. Midfifties, business suit, wedding ring, an envelope stuffed with twenty-dollar bills from the ATM. The sex act and the man blur together—sweaty, meaty, perfunctory.
I have my Sade playlist memorized—he has about five minutes left in the hour. I’d slipped into a robe while he was taking a shower, and now I’m lounging on the bed. Getting a client dressed and out the door is delicate. I need to keep up the illusion that I’m still languid from the sex and not impatient to get rid of him, but I’m fine with seeing him go.
“My wife doesn’t know that I do this.” His confession is unsolicited. It, too, is typical. I say nothing. I’m thirty-four years old, back in the escorting game after a seven-year hiatus. Listening is part of the job.
“She doesn’t have the same needs I do,” he says. I grin widely to override a smirk. After all, this man just paid to have sex with me, so I know a few things about his technique. I’m guessing his wife doesn’t love it any more than I did. I’m guessing she’s had enough.
I’m escorting in order to earn my way out of out of a financial hole it took me ten years to dig. Divorce, personal bankruptcy—I need this man’s money. I need clients to come back again and again, so I’m not here to make trouble for myself. These are the early days of prostitution review boards, and clients are just learning how to flex their collective power to punish sex workers they don’t find sufficiently pliant. I could stay quiet—in fact, I most certainly should. And yet I can’t let this slide.
“Well, I just have to wonder about that …” I drawl, a little too slowly. “We all have needs.” As if dish soap had dropped on the oily surface of our polite postcoital conversation, the goodwill in the room scatters. His posture becomes defiant. He buttons up his dress shirt, radiating displeasure.
“You don’t know my wife. I keep her satisfied.”
There is a pause. I know my role as dutiful whore. Rush in to gush, placate, smooth any misunderstanding over with proclamations of his girth, his prowess, his stamina. I know the script to flatter a man like the back of my hand. I might very well have played the part he was paying me to perform had he not added, “I need variety and excitement. All she needs is me.”
No curiosity, no imagination about the erotic life of the woman he is closest to—again, typical. But this crime I cannot forgive. Complicity had been, up until that point, a standard service included in my fee. But my hostility to providing cover for male entitlement, hypocrisy, and delusion had hit the limit. I could no longer look away. There’s a distinct chill that descends on my limbs when I decide a certain man will never again be allowed back inside me.
“Give her five hundred bucks and an afternoon to fuck the pool boy. I bet she’d take it.”
My client knows he’s been fired and accepts it like he’s been fired before. “This was fun. Got any girlfriends?”
THIS EPISODE WAS not the first time in my life that the adult industry had left me queasy. I grew up in a white, middle-class, educated home, but alcoholism and chaos shaped my upbringing, my parents pitched in a schizophrenic battle. My mother found any sexual image or discussion abhorrent; my father would leave his pornographic magazines strewn throughout the house.
I must have been about ten when I realized I would never look like any of those perfect Playboy bunnies. Their velvety airbrushed perfection left a tight knot in my stomach, a mixture of lust and dread. The notion of ever being treasured as they were, to have the power they exuded—over me, over my father—seemed impossible. A ruthless education: This is what sexy looks like. This is what men desire. Like a cutter’s blade, I’d pick up those magazines when I wanted to punish myself, slowly turning the pages, their beauty burning into my skin.
I left my parents’ house to attend a hippy college in the era of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon and the Meese Report, at the height of the feminist anti-porn wars. Alongside my women’s studies classmates, I protested Miss America pageants, calling them “meat markets.” At the same time, I stepped into my own adult sexuality, which softened some of pornography’s crueler edges. I found myself craving knowledge, a more complex understanding: How did sex work work? Who really was in charge? Curiosity, but also defiance. I knew I was never going to appear in the pages of Playboy, but I wanted to break free of the shame and inadequacy porn invoked in me. I wanted to claim some piece of this electric world of fantasy and pleasure for myself.
Right out of college, I auditioned at a peep show strip club and was hired. It was a revelation. Despite my cellulite and the bump in my nose, mere mortals such as myself could strip. Getting paid a whopping twenty dollars an hour to dance, I found the peep show world captivating. Gorgeous goths and riot grrrls with pixie wigs on their bald heads. Piercings, tattoos, and armpit hair, these women were nothing like the unapproachable beauties of the magazines—inspirational, in the flesh and on fire. I felt like I had stepped through a magic door to become a member of an underground society.
I’ve heard stripping referred to as a gateway drug. Fellow strippers introduced me to professional domination, making lesbian porn, and finally, escorting. I bounced along from call to call, accumulating adventures from the demimonde for my memoirs and enough money to retire with a few thousand dollars in the bank. In my twenties, I’d never considered sex work my calling; it was more like a rebellious detour from reality. Seven years later, in my early thirties, shipwrecked by financial and marital failure, sex work was my salvation.
Escorting gave me the resources to pursue a master’s degree in human sexuality. My intent was to develop skills in order to explain my sex work experiences to the wider world. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, I’d entertain gentlemen callers; Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’d listen to lectures on Foucault and Butler and Derrida. But the semioticians and deconstructionists left me cold—sex and gender were no mere abstractions in my world. Ringing in my ears was Audre Lorde: find uses for the erotic. Petition for survival.
As graduate school trained me to be critical of power, I found it more difficult to justify my job. It no longer felt radical or daring—it felt more like abetting in crimes I could not rationalize. What would Lorde have thought of my career stroking the egos of clueless businessmen? I suspected I had the answer, her diamond-cut critique from Sister Outsider admonishing me: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” No longer an outsider nor a dilettante, I recognized myself as deep in the belly of the beast, laboring at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy.
Now I would spend my waking hours wrestling with what it meant to be a part of a clearly fucked-up system. I was no longer sure it was possible to navigate the adult industry’s corrosive dynamics and yet still be a conscious sexual being. After all, I was profiting from a racist, misogynist, transphobic, fatphobic, ableist, ageist system perpetuating impossible standards of beauty—hard to call that life-affirming labor. Even as I did sex work out of financial need, I struggled to reconcile accumulating wealth when so many others suffer from not having enough.
If an economic system is structured to keep a subset of the labor force underresourced and disposable, then poverty is the point. Members of the underclasses find it difficult to protest, agitate, organize, or disrupt for change because they struggle to survive. Haves and Have-Nots are not random. Racism and patriarchy define which bodies are full citizens and which are conditional, under threat from cradle to grave. Nowhere is this more blatant than in the sex industry, where the color of skin and the size and shape of body parts regulate marketability. Relentless dictates determine who “gets to” and who “has to”: who gets to screen clients and who has to service everyone who walks through the door. Who gets to charge thousands of dollars, and who has to take what they can get. Who gets to set limits, and who has to do as they’re told. Lorde and other feminist and queer thinkers made it so I could no longer work with one eye open, the other closed, only half-awake.
And so that ordinary Wednesday afternoon, with that utterly ordinary client, marked a turning point in my working life. I vowed to cull the worst offenders and cultivate a more mindful clientele. Whenever a client displayed his entitlement, I’d smile and nod in the moment, then never take his calls again. I poured myself into those who fed me: virgins needing instruction. Trans folks exploring their bodies and desires. Sexual adventurers motivated by generosity and reciprocity and gratitude. I was fortunate enough to be able to take the financial hit, but it kept me from burning out. Two years later, my debts paid and six figures saved in the bank, I retired.
I HAVE HAD a long and fraught relationship with the sex industry, finding it endlessly fascinating and honest, revealing, and repulsive.
I have hated it while needing it desperately. Those motivations have, at times, overlapped and intensified each other. Writing now, I am fifty-one, my sex work career behind me. No longer focused on keeping clients happy, I now have space and scope to see the adult industry more clearly.
As an author focused on sex work and self-care, I spend hours every day following the social media of sex workers: their advertising, their shit-talking, their flirting, their public service announcements, all their gorgeous, raucous humanity. As long as sex work remains work-of-last-resort for women and gay men and queers, I’m committed to promoting harm reduction to make it not just survivable, but thrivable.
Additionally, in the past few years, as a married woman with very different needs than my partner’s, I’ve spent a few lovely afternoons idling with paid-for pool boys with my husband’s blessings. The sex industry certainly looks different when it services the female appetite—especially the aging female—softening its patriarchal imperatives. At the same time, I recognize how extraordinarily fortunate I am to have the health, wealth, free time, and sensibilities to be a client—only a handful of women in history have had the fun I’m having. Realistically, the sex industry caters primarily to men—we’re still a long way off from anything resembling gender parity. But the opportunity is there.
In her essay “The Uses of the Erotic,” Audre Lorde wrote, “The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.” While the crushing prerogatives of the demand side remain deeply ugly, that only tells half the story. It is the supply side—the workers themselves—where I see positive change.
The most gorgeous, raw, authentic emerging sexualities aren’t born out of Hollywood or Madison Avenue or the runways of Paris. It is sex workers who are the embodied erotic, choosing both truth and dare. Our culture’s sexual imagination is no longer top-down, dictated by white, cisgender, heterosexual male tastemakers. Hugh Hefner died an irrelevant relic, Playboy’s supremacy a distant memory. The adult industry has become ferociously do-it-yourself, an explosion of vitality and creativity from the ground up. Workers display their bodies and fantasies to anyone who will look and listen: See me for who I am. Come play. No longer hidden in the shadows, spend any amount of time on sex work Twitter, and you can learn about workers’ daily lives—their families, their hopes and sorrows, their kids entering kindergarten, and cats with ringworm. Unairbrushed, unvarnished, not just the stuff of fantasy.
My bullishness on the current and future state of the industry doesn’t end there. Sex work is a radical redistribution of resources to women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, the disabled, and big beautiful folks for precisely what disenfranchises them—unruly bodies, genders, and identities that cannot be conquered nor contained. These are the uses of the erotic marketplace I can heartily support.
The ethics of the sex industry remain vexing and complex. Now, with both eyes open, I make no apologies for its inequities, hypocrisies, and exploitations. And yet, and yet. The sex industry may well have been built for the master’s pleasure, but he is but a paying guest. Sex workers are the ones who live here. Laboring under crushing cultural forces, finding ways to step into our authentic selves. Tearing the world down to build it anew.
A version of this piece appears in Lola Davina’s Thriving in Sex Work: Sex Work and Money, published by The Erotic as Power Press in September 2020.