Please Call Me Beautiful

On sex work, male shame, and the violence of being seen too late

Photo of author. Belong to author.

“You’re beautiful. You’re so fucking beautiful. Wow. I’ve never seen a woman like you before.”

I almost stopped fucking him. I almost stopped bouncing up and down. I almost stopped the fake, performative moaning.

I wanted to pick him up by his collar, slap him, then kiss him until neither of us could breathe.

I wanted to ask him: why now? Why fucking say it like that? Why say it like you fucking mean it?

There is an incandescent rage that comes from being fed when you have been starving. Why feed me now?

To be seen is to be known to have existed beautifully.

Most men do not say that. Most men hardly say anything at all, or, if they do, it is purely about the mechanics. How much? Where? Turn around? Like this.

Most men come through that door already somewhere else, miles away, already back in some office next to some banana plant. Already home at dinner, already forgetting me before they have even finished.

I am a hole, a pair of hands, a mouth, a pornographic performance of simulated desire.

I moan simply because it ends faster when I moan. I put my hands through my hair because it ends faster when I do that and let my tits bounce free.

I have serviced men who didn’t look at my face once. Not once. I have fucked men who came and then checked their phones before I had even moved off them.

Nobody asks how I am.

I stand behind a window, and men walk past and stare at my body, knock on my door and hand me money, put themselves inside me, and leave.

They ask what I do. They ask if I do this or that. They ask if it feels good for me, but they are not asking because they care; they are asking because the answer is part of what they paid for.

My wellness is not the deal. My body is the transaction. I have learned to leave myself somewhere else while it happens, somewhere quiet, somewhere that is just mine.

So when he said, “You’re beautiful. I’ve never seen a woman like you,” I did not know what to do with it. My body kept moving out of muscle memory while my chest cracked open.

Kindness in this room is almost unbearable when it should be native. You build walls specifically so that moments like this cannot reach you, and then one sentence from a stranger destroys fucking everything, and you are furious at him for it, furious at yourself for even wanting it, furious at every man who came before him and said fuck all.

This is not about sex work. Sex work did not make men selfish. Sex work is simply the space where their selfishness has nowhere left to hide.

Strip away the social contract, the dinner table manners, the performance of being a fairly decent person that most men put on for the world, hand them something they want badly enough, and what is left is exactly what they show you.

I have seen what is left. I see it every day. And the version of a man who walks through my door is not some aberration. It is not some dark alter ego that only I get to witness. That is just him. That is the texture of him when nobody he is trying to impress is watching.

The loneliness of this work is not what people think it is. It is not the sex. Sex is neutral, almost irrelevant. I feel nothing from the sex.

The loneliness is in the relentless erasure of personhood that happens in this room, over and over, with the reliability of the tide. It gathers, not dramatically, not all at once, but in small deposits. The man who couldn’t look at my face. The man who came all in my asshole and checked his phone. The man who said thank you to the wall as he was already pulling the door closed.

Each one is nothing. Collectively, they are a damning indictment. A verdict delivered without malice, which almost makes it worse. I am so completely a service that the question of my inner life simply does not arise.

What I am describing is not unique to this industry, and that is exactly the point. Every cleaner, every carer, every person whose labour is intimate, invisible and taken for granted the second it is rendered, they know this feeling.

The difference is that my work is stigmatised enough that my humanity becomes doubly easy to set aside. Men feel entitled to leave their manners outside my door, as they would not leave them outside an office, a restaurant, or a home.

It is as if the exchange of money for something this personal is a reason to be less human, rather than more. As if I am owed less consideration because of what I have agreed to do, and not more, because of how much of myself I am giving in order to do it.

And so when a man looks at me, actually looks at me, sees my face, says something that costs him nothing but a moment of genuine attention, I do not know what to do with it. I am not built for it in this room. I have specifically unbuilt myself for it.

There is still a deep part of me, younger than I would like, that feels it every single time: the standing under the light while the door is still closed, the waiting for an approach, the moment he looks over and I know I have less than a second before his verdict.

It is not fear. It is something more humiliating than fear. The wish to be touched like something that could break at any moment. I know what room I am in. But the body does not always understand what the mind has already agreed to. Some animal, stupid, immortal part of me still wants to be handled gently.

I hate that it is still there.

That is the cruellest part. Not that kindness is rare here, though from clients, it is. But its rarity has made me so undefended against it. He said one sentence. One true, unscripted, unasked-for sentence, and I nearly fell apart on top of him.

That is not a problem with sex work. That is a problem with how little we have decided other people’s feelings are worth when there is something we want from them.

I am the thing they want that they are not supposed to want. Not just a woman. Not just sex. Specifically this. Specifically me, or the idea of me, which they have been carrying around like a hot coat for as long as they could remember.

I am the thought they have in a meeting, on a train, next to their sleeping wife, that they would deny under oath.

They think about me with hoop earrings, and rings on every finger, and the colour of my thighs and the way my breath smells slightly milky after a cigarette.

And they love it. They love that I am dirty. The dirtiness is the entire point. It is the engine of the whole thing, the reason their hands shake slightly when they pull out a wad of cash or send me a Tikkie. It is the reason they keep coming back.

And I will tell you this for free: I feel it. I feel the charge of it. I know how to use it. I know how to be exactly dirty enough that it feels like a secret they are sharing with their own worst impulse.

I know how to move, how to look, how to let my mouth do things that make them feel like they have crossed a line that they cannot uncross.

I am so fucking good at this. And part of me, the part that is a human being underneath the professional facade, understands the pull of it, because there is power in being the forbidden fruit. There is almost a tenderness in being someone’s absolute limit.

It gets interesting when you realise what the dirtiness costs them. It costs them their image of themselves.

They cannot fuck someone they consider dirty and also consider themselves clean without some deeply uncomfortable internal negotiation.

So they do not negotiate. They do not look at my face. They do not ask my name. They come and they go and they keep me firmly in the category of thing rather than person, because if I am a person then what they just did has a different form entirely, and that shape does not fit into the life they are returning to.

The shame is not about me. The shame is about them. I am just the room it lives in.

This is why small talk is dangerous. This is why the ones who ask how I am, who linger, who say something real and unscripted, this is why they scare themselves.

Because the second I answer, the second I say something funny or tired or specific, the second I am revealed as someone who had a morning before this afternoon, someone who will have an evening after they leave, the fantasy does not just dissolve. It indicts them.

They came here wanting dirty. What they got was a person. A person cannot be slotted back into the category of dirty without feeling, somewhere they would rather not feel, exactly what it says about them.

Some of them simply cannot handle it. That shift in energy when they realise I am funny, or smart, or unexpectedly gentle, or that I remember something they said last time.

They get quieter. They get strange. They leave faster, stay too long, or come back the next week and cannot look at me at first.

What they are experiencing is the collapse of a necessary fiction. They needed me to be only this: the dirty thing that exists outside of the real world and all its obligations.

The moment I become real, they owe me something. Not money. Basic human decency. And that, apparently, is the more difficult of the exchanges.

The cruellest thing is not their shame. I can hold their shame. I have held worse. The cruellest thing is that their shame serves them and not me.

It lets them off the hook. A man who leaves here feeling guilty has, by his own reckoning, settled the debt.

The guilt is the penance. He felt bad about it. He is therefore not a bad man.

But I am still here. I was here before he arrived, and I am here after he leaves, and his guilt does not change how my day will go.

His shame is a little private room he gets to go into and then come back out of.

Mine is the room I work in. And tomorrow he will clear his search history, and I will be behind this window, and we will both know exactly what we are to each other, and only one of us will have to live with what that means.

So I kept fucking him. I kept moaning, cartoonishly. And when he finished, he held my face in his hands for just a second longer than anyone ever does, and he looked at me like I was an actual person, which I was, which I always am, which none of this should need to be written down for anyone to understand.

He left. I cleaned. The next one knocked and said not a single word other than directions.

I am not telling you this story to elicit your pity. Pity is just contempt in a beautiful fur jacket.

I am telling you this because that man who said I was beautiful, that man who asked how I was, that one unguarded, unearned, and unnecessary sentence, that is not the story of an exception.

That is the story of a standard so low that basic acknowledgement felt like being struck by lightning.

That is the story of what we have collectively decided is acceptable.

That is the story of a woman doing the most intimate work there is and being worth less consideration than the taxi that brought him here.

He saw me for ten seconds. It nearly destroyed me. That should scare the shit out of you.

Men will come and go. Most of them will look at my body and see exactly what they came for and nothing else. No heart. No soul. No person. And I will perform, and I will be paid, and I will go home, and I will be a person again in private, where it is safe to be one.

But I will carry every single one of them: all the blank faces and the turned backs and the absent eye contact.

So yes. I am beautiful. I have always been beautiful. And I am so much more than what you came here for.

You already knew that, though, didn’t you?

That is exactly why you didn’t ask.

—x

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