Reading Sex

I've always been fascinated by sex work. Something about the idea of getting paid for sex, treated like some sort of professional artiste of the highest caliber, like you were the embodiment of sex, fucking incarnate. It intrigues me and always has.


Somehow my actual experiences with sex workers, strippers and escorts, it never matched up to my expectations. Rather than getting turned on by the experience, instead of being absorbed and transformed by the role she's playing, instead of being in the moment, the sex worker is just this woman there, playing at sex, having sex, sure, but always overwhelmed by the pretense of the situation. Distant and disconnected when sex is supposed to be fucking LIVED.


I don't mean to put down sex workers. I know mine is an expectation that's nearly impossible to fulfill with any sort of consistency, that a decent performance is the best one can reasonably ask for. But the thing is, I can always tell if a girl actually wants to be doing sex things with me. It is obvious to me. Perhaps a facet of intelligence, perhaps simply a matter of paying attention, maybe even some unexplored psychic connection if such a thing really exists, but I just know.


And the fact is that most of the girls I've seen aren't genuinely interested. I wouldn't really expect any more of them. Not every woman can muster lust at a whim for just any young man off the street, not by a long shot. But it's all I really want. It's what I'm looking for in a sexual experience. And so I simply don't like paying for sex. Fucking someone who doesn't really like me and paying for the privilege is not for me, though I lust for just that sort of girl that would do such a thing.


The truth is, it's weird enough for me to have sex with someone who merely tolerates me in my normal sex life; spending money on it just makes me feel pathetic and lonely.


And yet the idea of it still turns me on, the essence of whoredom, imagining the life of some fictional sex worker living inside my head, fucking strange men. A strange fantasy of the women I fuck and that I want to fuck, picturing them with other guys, all becoming incomparable sluts in the comfortable arena of my mind, and me their confidant, their lover. I wonder about the inner lives of these women, the girls who are actually living it, what they go through.


I can't remember not being interested in what makes beautiful women tick. I was always interested in whores. What goes through your mind, to be paid for your attention, for your body? What is it like to have men lusting after you constantly? Sure, I can sit and talk with you, I can have sex with you, be physically inside you, and yet honesty is hopelessly distant, improbable at best, the spectre of consequence looming, impenetrable to true communication. At best there is my own inference, endlessly colored by my simple assumptions, continuously adjusted and expanded but forever imperfect.


And so I read sex blogs. And though some titillate more than inform or reveal, I feel closer to getting some idea, some sense of what it is, that undefinable other. The best of them, the best personal essays, the philosophic, the erotic, there's an actual truth inside, some sort of familiar pathos, a connection that seems to explain myself as much as the person writing. I see that familiar sort of intelligent disconnect from the world around you, seeing the world through the lens of analysis, because simply being is too difficult to manage, except for the momentary escape. It's the world of the actor, playing at roles assigned or assumed.


I came to terms with my masculinity at some point since I became a man. But when I started masturbating, a thirteen year-old kid twiddling his dick in the bathtub, I'd always picture myself transformed into a beautiful woman, fucking my way through hordes of men, cocks often without personality or distinction. And now I am a man, and I have been that cock without conscience, fucked girls I didn't like or barely liked, girls who didn't like me but wanted something, sexual release, money, just someone to pay attention to them. I did it, what, to prove my manhood? Because I could? That's answer enough, I suppose, though it seems hollow. And yet, years later, I remain drawn to the other side of the equation. I am hopelessly fascinated by the woman who sells herself, in love with the idea of her.


I frequently fantasize about dating sex workers, of getting personal insight into their lives, learning who they are inside, gaining the sort of intimacy that's reserved for the very few. Having real sex with a woman who pretends with others. I have to figure that's the dream of many of the men who patronize them, the reason it turns them on. And yet the act of patronization would eliminate the chance of real connection, of truthful being, whether in the sense of becoming a client or just another man with a role for some girl to fill. The simple act of being a customer kills the fantasy for me.


Perhaps I am the equivalent of a woman who is constantly attracted to sociopaths, a person who only seeks a genuine connection with someone who easily forges illusions of meaning-- a pretender in love and sex and life. Or perhaps I myself am a sociopath, and only those like me can make me really feel at home. It could be that their dissociation is a mirror of my own, and I need to look upon it to have any hope of understanding myself.


Yes, perhaps in my vanity and my self-obsession I am compelled to find myself in those I would love. And somehow this mutual comprehension is left undiscovered as of yet. I remain lonely among friends and lovers. I am weary of loneliness, these past few years. And there's no salvation yet but still there's hope for the future. No salvation yet, but still there's faith in myself.