How Sex Workers hold space for their clients

Disclaimer: this post relates to the most common format, female sex worker and male client.  It is not intended to exclude anyone.

I was privy to a conversation between a group of Sex Workers and a client recently (not their client) and I felt that it was an unfettered, gloves off conversation…as in, there was no inkling that either client or SW’s were interested in any kind of transaction taking place.

The client was lamenting about how he had been dropped and ghosted by his favourite SW, and he had hurt feelings about it.  He felt that she should have at least said goodbye.  There was more to it, but this part of the conversation was the most relevant.  The replies were unanimous.

“She doesn’t owe you a thing.  You’re a client, nothing more.  You don’t expect a goodbye letter from the barista you chat up at Starbuck’s do you?” Asked one.

“You sound entitled,” opined another, “no wonder she dropped and blocked.”

“I have affection for any of my regulars, otherwise they wouldn’t be a regular, but the second they overstep the line and become demanding, I’ll drop without a second’s hesitation.”

“You think you buy us when you buy our time, but you don’t.  Clients don’t appreciate the energy it goes into holding space for them, but that’s all we do.”

A consensus emerged around some key concepts.

• The holding of space…that a session, a date, playtime or hanging out GFE-style is all about creating an envelope for the client to live out a fantasy;
• That this envelope is created around a client’s needs, either perceived or articulated;
• That there is an abdication of responsibility that moves from client to provider;
• That ultimately, the provider owns the boundaries, owns the conditions upon which the entire scenario/transaction is based, and that transgression of such, even just the desire to peek behind the veil, is punished [eg. ending the session or the relationship].

There is something very striking about this.  It is very Mother/Child.  Any adult who has spent meaningful time with children, will know how enjoyable and delicious it can be to enter their world, but also how it can turn sour with a spoiled child.  To play as an adult within the realm of a sweet, grateful, well-behaved child is sheer joy.  A child’s fantasy life can be so unbelievably rich as if to rival wakeful dreaming.  To play with that, to interact with it, but to also contribute, to guide, to shape, and to engage, is fun for both.  I think this is what happens with the best interactions between SW and client.  True for the dominatrix, true for the GFE-providing FSSW.

It makes me wonder about agency, and whether in a way the client has surrendered some form of agency.  Is it possible that there is a temporary transfer of agency from client to professional for the necessary suspension of disbelief?  I am not talking about the all-too-frequent stories of clients misbehaving, and how many swaggering men might brag about their exploits with a “whore” even if he is a perfect gentleman in her company.  In a way, this transfer of agency is a requirement.

What am I saying?  The empowered Sex Worker is a professional.  She provides a highly sought after, highly rarefied service.  Despite the price tag, and there are budgets for everyone, she is not bought…She is asked nicely to indulge the client, and the client may express his wishes, but ultimately, she holds the power, for if she does not, then a repeat is unlikely.  An enlightened client knows this, knowing that if he likes her, and wants to keep her, he had best be thinking of her comfort and well-being at all times.  She reigns supreme.  This has to mean that he has temporarily accepted that she holds the agency for both parties during their time together.  It is not she who asks “may I?” but rather he who does so.

I can’t help but think that this is a form of infantilization of the client.  She is holding space for him.  She is nurturing and caring for him, making him feel loved and held, emotionally, physically, sexually.  The seductive pull of this is enormous, which in part explains why so many men fall in love with the providers they see, forgetting that her job is to create that space.

And the uppity client, the one who breaches boundaries, is he not just a brat?  And isn’t the brat sent to his room?  A parallel to being ghosted in the adult world, or cast aside?

The feminist in me reads deeper.  This creation of space that she provides him is a place for him to experience ego caresses in ways that he does not get in real life.  Whatever those caresses might be.  Sexual prowess, feeling too fat or ugly or not funny, feeling down post breakup, feeling inexperienced…so many forms of the fragile male ego.  Not a criticism, and not necessarily deterministic, but most certainly the toxic residue of our society.  Whatever that need is that the man has to make him seek her out, it is ultimately that he is going to feel good after being with her, a kind of good he can’t get from other sources.

But is it not even more fragile-making to buy the false affection of someone to caress your ego?  To tell you or make you feel that whatever was missing from your life, was wrong with you, whatever was lacking that can be satisfied by a few short hours with an SW, is somehow solved for it?  What kind of things we must tell ourselves to bring that about?  Is it that a man’s ability to self-delude is so great that buying compliments makes them feel more real than less real?

I don’t mean to imply this as a criticism or to look askance at either side of the profession.  I now firmly stand on both sides of the fence, as a sometimes client and lucky client, and as a sometimes provider and lucky provider.  I am finding that doing both makes me “better” at either role.

I cannot deny that this post’s core trope—not tampering with the make believe—is core to the success of the fantasy, and also core to the security and sustainability of the dynamic, but also happens to be the one area that I am least comfortable with.  “What on earth are you thinking?” you might ask.  I am after a kind of emotional connection that I am most probably afraid of, or as yet incapable of in my dating life.

When I hold space for a client, whether male or female, I feel an affectionate bond, very much feel this safe space that I have opened up for them get filled up with their gratitude, and sometimes more.  I love this feeling, and I have affection for the person, so long as it stays within the envelope.  As a client, I bask in this same space created by the providers I see.  But there is a fear that lurks inside of me, the fear of impermanence.

Why on earth would you look for that from a provider?  Knowing that by definition the provider-client relationship is on her terms, is fully one-sided if it is to be sustainable?  To know that insofar as my goal appears to be to make the relationship not one-sided, thereby almost certainly guaranteeing that it will crash and burn.  This is what my first dominatrix meant by my narcissism.

I didn’t see it that way because I had been open and up-front about what I was looking for from our first interactions, and had been consistent.  My bestie had pointed out the absurdity of my desire: “you want it simply because you can’t have it, and trying but knowing you will fail is what makes it safe for you.”  She knows me well.

I needed to fail.  It was only safe to be with her if she would deny me, that I would fail.  Her or anyone else I have seen.  Why?  Because the kind of ‘love’ I feel in session is very different than the kind of hard-fought, worked for love that came with my marriage or other girlfriend relationships.  There is an innocent purity to it.  I want it, want to feel it, but know it is an ideal, and one which I cannot live up to.  I see this and feel this as a provider, and I have a visceral reaction to a client or even just a casual hook-up who starts to bond with me after we’ve spent a night together.  It is an immediate turnoff.

A very dear provider friend of mind voiced to me what many SWs lament about: that their standards in relationships have skyrocketed by having become SWs, and that finding partners who have done the kind of work that they have to do as part of their jobs, makes it frustrating to find a partner who has the emotional maturity to be with them.

In the meantime, I spend my time in session with whomever the provider, in trying to find ways to make them feel good, to take as little as possible, to be as kind and present and generous and attentive as possible, as undemanding as possible.  I say ‘trying’ because I very often fail.  But also trying because you cannot meet someone’s needs unless they make them known.  And of course a great many providers don’t want to do that, for that is itself the kind of destabilizing breach that dooms a dynamic.

It is complex, to be sure.  Having failed at it once in a spectacular way, and not ever wanting such an outcome, I spend a lot of energy in examining myself and my motivations to attempt to purge them of this contaminating influence.  To leave ego out.  To be a slave means to genuinely serve the other.  But what if the other wants to just leave and be somewhere else, or if they want to just read a book while you do something else in the other room.  That’s a tough one.  I probably wouldn’t book again, even if it is what I ‘want’.

And so, I am brought full circle.  Because by putting constraints on how a provider might manifest what I want, I must accept the terms that are philosophically inherent in the dynamic, to temporarily cede my agency to her.

Maybe some providers are more open than others to play in this way, to allow themselves more into a dynamic, to allow a client to genuinely meet some level of their needs.  Or maybe they are just better at creating the illusion.  It is almost certainly the latter.  Rare is it that she would herself want what you are outside of the dynamic.  She’ll let you know.

I don’t need to see providers, especially since I am going through a phase of being willing to sleep with pretty much any woman who expresses an interest in me.  And I am loving this, also because it is teaching me again about having sex with people after so long in an un-physical marriage, but also because how different women connect and love is an endlessly fulfilling magical mystery story of desire and passion and sexiness.  But being a provider and seeing a provider are feeding something in me which has left the building of my own sexual desire, my own ego needs.  It is increasingly about unbridled fun, but it is also more and more about going to the edge and figuring out how to bring about ego death in all the ways it comes up, in all the ways I am forced to confront myself for good and bad.