I spent my childhood in a quite rural setting. There wasn’t much besides moss-covered hills, half-barren fields, and dusty roads that felt endless to walk before you’d eventually reach a point where the sand would turn to actual asphalt. Growing up in a place like this, one would learn to know every single tree, rock, and abandoned barn before reaching school age. I would also dare to say, it would help one to develop above average curiosity and imagination, at least if compered to some of the same aged peers of city kids.

At the very end of the main sand road, just next to a junction of a pavemented big road, that would take you to the nearest actual town, was a big truck garage. Still is today, I think.

One day of my summer childhood a big car crash happened just in front of the garage at the junction.

“City people don’t know how to drive here, always overtaking on roads they don’t know,” my dad muttered as he threw me and my younger sister into the back of our family’s old Volkswagen Beetle. He wanted to go and see the accident site up close after the neighbour had phoned him about it. The thing was, that that night he happened to be home with us alone. But his curiosity had won over the fact that it was both past our bedtime and past our capacity to witness or understand such a large traffic accident up close.

As we pulled up at the garage, my father drove past the huge main building hall, parked behind it, and hastily told us to stay in the car while he himself eagerly rushed out of the driver’s seat and towards the corner of the large building, where I could see some of the familiar neighbours’ faces painted in the reds and blues of emergency vehicle lights.

As per usual, wherever there were other grown men and talking involved, be it a gas station cafeteria, dairy aisle at a supermarket, or a gruesome traffic accident site, my father lost all concept of time. He used to be a very sociable and well-liked guy, until he met and married my more-than-less-of-so, “city c*nt” of a mother, as some of the neighbouring wives put it. I was still young but even I could see that dad desperately missed having people to talk with around him. He was also a man who grew up as the youngest of a family of seven kids, so for him talking was not just easy, but a necessity - like breathing. My younger sister soon lost her patience in return and was hurried over to the hems of a neighbour woman, the wife of the man who owned the truck garage.

The garage owner couple had a little house at the side of the truck yard and an even smaller little house in its yard that was home to the garage’s guard dogs, a couple of German Shepherds. One of the dogs had passed away in the spring and, after a brief grieving process, they now had a tiny German Shepherd puppy with nail-sharp teeth and a heavy tail that would eventually be trained to take over from its predecessor.

After watching for a while my sister being entertained by the garage owner’s wife and the puppy, I asked for a permission to walk around the junction yard, which I was granted for being slightly older. How old I actually was, I haven’t got the faintest idea. I did some research by trying to google large traffic accidents at the junction around the time it could have been, but as it turns out, there was one at least every two years at that specific terrific spot. And dad isn’t much help either - he doesn’t remember most of the 90s, I think it’s due to the mental trauma of being married to mother.

As I strolled between smaller and larger garage halls, I eventually found myself at the very far end of the yard where there were countless large trucks parked side by side. Some of them were waiting for maintenance and some most likely had truckers inside of them, who were given permission to park and sleep there for free by the garage owner. The trucks captured my attention more than the grey, large hall buildings standing in the dark, and for good reason.

The sides of all the trucks had paintings. Large and colourful paintings of women. Some of them pin-up girls, some in revealing ball gowns or different kinds of outfits. A cowgirl in a stetson with her guns drawn out, a woman in a red and blue superhero outfit, and even a mermaid. I had never seen pictures, or spray paintings actually, of women like that. They were provocative, loud, and vibrant, and somehow exciting to look at glowing from the sides of the trucks in the dark. I stared and studied their voluptuous shapes, winking faces, and shiny red lips, all of them with different kinds of colours and textures of skin and hair.

Behind me somewhere in the dark, many garage halls away, my father had started to yell my name and I hesitantly turned my back on the truck ladies. Already as I walked away, I knew I’d be back soon to see if the ladies would still be there in the daylight.

And so I did. Many times in fact, over the following years. I biked ridiculous distances back and forth on the endless sand road with my little bicycle to reach the garage, and begged the hesitant garage owner’s wife to let me into the deepest part of the garage yard. She eventually always agreeing but still worried that I would either be run over by the big trucks, or perhaps worse, mentally overtaken by my obsession with the “truck ladies.”

The queue was not moving anywhere. I had no idea how long I had been staring, lost in thought, at the chipped and radioactive-green manicure of an American teenage girl queuing ahead. She was maybe ten people ahead of me, but in that moment stood almost next to me due to the serpent-like shape of the queue at the Musée d’Orsay ticket office.

My head was pounding, and I was kind of feeling like going to the bathroom, but even glancing at the length of the queue made me push the thought, and the need, deep back into my head. I normally wasn’t this irritable or fragile, but the small hangover from two nights of dinners with wine in Paris was finally catching up with me in the scorching-hot lobby beneath the glass ceiling that Sunday afternoon.

The space around me was loud and somehow painfully bright with the sounds and visual details of the other tourists there with me. I don’t know if it was the hangover or the glass ceiling that made me notice the details of people’s skin on the backs of their necks, the amount of wrinkles or speckles, or how, with some, the skin folded in an unflattering way. Their crooked or stained teeth, the stench of their perfumes, and the unsettling high-pitched voices or distractingly over-nuanced accents. Everyone around me was either loudly talking with their group or ignoring them by staring at their phones to pass the time. I knew I could do the same to ease the experience but simply refused to take on the role of a smartphone zombie. “This is becoming a bit much for me,” I thought as I next fixated my eyes on a very colourful and ornamental phone charm hanging from one of the Chinese tourist ladies’ phones.

Eventually I graduated from the queue of boredom-death and was pleasantly surprised that the actual halls of the art museum were much less crowded. I quickly relieved myself in the bathroom and instantly felt refreshed, the grip of my hangover loosening around my whole being. As I strolled through the great, tall exhibition halls, I passed honest pre-Impressionism, decorative Art Nouveau, massive marble sculptures of men with small penises (which symbolised self-control, intelligence, and a civilised mind at the time), huge oil portraits by Winterhalter, rustic paintings of bridges on the Seine in all of the seasons, and countless faces and details by Renoir before arriving in front of a big old painting of a seemingly young and innocent woman holding a parasol in the middle of a small garden.

Her dress was light-coloured, her face rosy and round, her long copper hair flowing freely down her back, and eyes that somehow showed nothing of her inner world. The kind of eyes that only reflect whatever the person gazing into them might hope to find, her truest thoughts and emotions unreadable, if they even existed at all.

I wasn’t sure what had captivated me about her oil-painted portrait, but as I leaned in to read the little placard, I was surprised to learn that this seemingly innocent and poised woman and I had something in common.

“...born into a modest family, (she) became one of the most famous courtesans in Paris...” I read, and took a step back to investigate the painting with newfound curiosity. She was much older than she looked, and without being an expert, I’d have to assume that to rise through the ranks from a commoner to an aristocrat-level courtesan, she must have been not only beautiful but also intelligent, or, if not that, then an extremely resilient person.

Her name was Émilie-Louise Delabigne, also known as Madame Valtesse de la Bigne, painted by Henri Gervex in 1879. She would have been around my age at the time, in her early thirties. She had had it all: an alcoholic father, a mother pimping her off, being raped as a young girl, and choosing a life of acquiring capital and power over raising her own children. She had influenced other courtesans, writers, painters, businessmen, and aristocrats. I wished there was a bench I could sit on, or that I had a folding chair like I’d seen hanging off the backs of some older French gentlemen, a clear power move of a veteran Musée d’Orsay visitor. I took a quick glance around, and as nobody else seemed interested in the painting, I positioned myself directly in front of the large picture, took a comfortable stance, and let myself sink deep into my thoughts.

As my eyes stared at the innocent, cheerful colours and the seemingly quaint garden she was painted into, my mind was transported to a different scenery. The piss-covered cobblestone streets she must have crossed, chamber pots in the corners of small rooms during cold winters, the discomfort in her body and mind that other people must have caused her. When I later researched her, I discovered that when she had been raped as a young girl, she had quoted the event in her biography as follows:

“The illusions, naive aspirations, hopes and dreams of my childhood, it was all gone in an instant because a brutal passerby had taken advantage of my gullibility, and society became my cruelest enemy.”

I felt silly for connecting so much with a strange woman who had lived a completely different life, born 146 years before I was. I had never heard the word demi-mondaine before, but as I googled it, it made a lot of sense. A demi-monde, literally translated as “half-world”, must have been a hard position to acquire and to keep. The world has always been full of beautiful women, but only a few of those women could take the power and access their beauty gave them and turn it into something that would not waver or wither in the face of the next season’s fresh batch of new, young, and hungry women. Living as a half-worldling, you’d always remember where you had climbed out of, having seen and been given a taste of the better life in the shadows of the grand rooms and drunk the wine and attention of the men, and surely other women, in them. A life in the shadows must have been a life in itself better than a life on the streets, but it must also have been a stressful existence, as what you gain in the shadows might not belong to you the next day, the power lost as quickly as it was found.

I decided that this time travel exercise had better come to an end before my powerful imagination and empathy would mix with my hangover and intensified into a full-blown delusional spiral. So I left the conversation with a woman who had been dead for over a century and started heading towards the exit of the museum.
Moments later, as I clumsily treaded down the bumpy riverbed of the River Seine, I still found myself wondering if she had walked the same streets and seen any of the same view as I did, and whether she had also crossed paths with a man with no legs and just one arm living under a bridge.

Thank you for reading! See you back for part 2/3 :-)

If you liked what you read, support your (online) local Trollop and subscribe.

I really liked this new client. He had been so human and transparent just a few moments before when telling me about himself and his life, and what had brought him from a different city in a different country, straight from the airport and through the bustling daytime traffic, to now be sitting on my couch. I had made us both coffee with my piece of shit Nespresso machine. He had his black and mine was with warm oat milk. He seemed a bit nervous and maybe, understandably, disoriented to be suddenly face to face with the faceless woman and deep in the intimate territory of my cosy little apartment.

I felt the urge to climb over and give him the biggest hug, to force his body and nervous system to the same level of calm that I already was at. A kind of body to body energy transference gimmick, if you may, that had worked with some overstimulated people before. But I diminished the urge as I knew it was an empathy reflex, wanting to extend myself instantly to ease his discomfort, and my own as I was breathing it in from him. He seemed smart and fully capable of getting there himself, so I decided it was better to practise patience and respect instead. So I sat quietly and observed. He hadn’t glanced at me much because he was busy staying focused in his story.

Twenty years together, shared challenges and triumphs, kids, some sickness, and how the marital bed, first time seized eight years prior by the youngest, had more or less become a permanent enemy occupation. Words that reflected patience and love, that someday the kids would be bigger and the time for them would arrive again, until he had googled about perimenopause and wondered what if it was too late.
“It’s not just about getting sex,” he says. If it was, he would not be sitting here with me, I think, and decide to share it out loud to him as well. He sighs in relief, almost like I’d pardoned him.

As he’s starting to relax into the situation, I’m momentarily lost in an independent thought of my own concoction. What’s going to happen to us all if we don’t start doing better when it comes to our sexuality and relationships, I find myself thinking while I briefly stare out of the window and follow a stranger’s walk down the street with my eyes. I turn back to him and he seems much more in the space than just a moment before, and he’s meeting my gaze now and seemingly checking me out. “I just want to say that I appreciate all that you’re sharing and bringing with you, but that today is about you,” I say to him as I get up and show him the way to my shower.

Bringing our focus back to each other from the admiration worthy disco ball, he looks at me, takes my hand and lifts it up in front of the both of us and compliments my nails. “I’ve looked at all the pictures you have of yourself on your advert so many times and was wondering what kind of colour you would have on when I meet you today.” I smile. It makes sense and I would probably do the same in his position.
I get up to lower the music. It’s a bit too loud in the background. While I’m standing up anyway, I decide to strip naked and save him the trouble. He had not asked me to wear anything specific nor specified any preferences. I had gone to the gym eager and early that morning, 7am to 9am, for my weekly double yoga and mobility class. Eager, as I have just reactivated my membership from a month long pause due to my spinal surgery recovery.
I was still wearing my black gym romper that was so skin tight there was no elegant way of wiggling out of it, so even less chance for him to remove it. “You’re beautiful,” an authentic and non-performative statement, as my trained ears registered it. I share with him that I usually don’t wear make up, do my hair. That I like to wear gym outfits, or a simple dress shirt with panties and socks. What I don’t share are my complex feelings and thoughts around the flashy lingerie and high heels aesthetic, “the Porno Aesthetic” as me and my friends have quoted it. Always coming out of people’s mouths meant as a compliment, “you’re not like the other sex workers”. Yeah, sure. Let me feel better about myself at the expense of other sex workers, like that’s not going to be circling in my conscience later on.

And every day I think about femininity and the male gaze. I honestly cannot remember if I ever truly liked girly, soft, and frilly things, even as a kid. I started to question it all very early, refusing bejewelled jeans and pink strappy tops. I remember they seemed ridiculous and made me feel less of. So much that still these days I cannot decide how I feel about feminine wear. This is a topic I could share about endlessly. I admire and love anything feminine on other people. It makes me want to do sports cheers for them and hit my own chest like a gorilla, no matter if it’s cute and girly feminine or sexy and elegant feminine, if that’s what they like.

Sometimes I think that maybe patriarchy destroyed my deep hidden and natural preference for said things, as society fed me an image that anything feminine (e.g. clothes, style, energy, the essence) was weak and in servitude of masculine things. That maybe if I grew up in a world where feminine things would be equal to masculine things, I would have had a chance to embrace and enjoy a more classic femininity, and a great deal of other things would look very different. But I make do. I have my own femininity now and it feels natural, nurturing, and warm. I’m proud of it and it’s authentic to me. I enjoy slipping into some soft, elegant underwear, but only with people I know and trust, that respect me, and only for that I have my pleasure to please their (male) gaze.

I cannot help but feel slight resentment when someone I’ve never met requests me to wear porn like things or male gaze-y sexy underwear on a first meeting. I don’t like this judgemental reflex, but it’s between me, myself, and my therapist if I’ll ever become one with this particular trigger. And in the end, what even is male gaze anymore in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes it feels like a talk of which came first, the chicken or the egg.

We enjoyed, together. That’s the only way for me really. I would be writing some much more rambley coo-coo things here if I didn’t. I respect people who feel nothing or don’t connect with their clients and take it just as a job. In the end it’s their way and choice. Not everybody has to like their job, and lucky are those who can say that every day they love their work. I only know what works for me and what doesn’t. And for me a good day is if the person I met with felt they were seen and openly welcomed, my shitty companion the Nespresso machine didn’t ruin more than two coffee pods, and that someone somewhere is feeling good and safe wearing some sexy clothes in public despite the male gaze.

Macho mucho machismo,
Trollop

Thank you for reading!
If you liked what you read, support your (online) local Trollop and subscribe.

“Sociosexuality is a term used for an individual’s willingness to engage in sexual activity without emotional commitment or a close relationship. It is measured via SOI-R, the Revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, which evaluates behaviour, attitude and desire.”

The SOI-R itself is actually a fairly short and effective self-report questionnaire of 9 questions that uses a numeric scale between 0-9 in the answers, higher the score the more unrestricted you are and more probable to engage in non-committal sex.

I scored 78 out of 81.

Let’s take a closer look on the three parameters the questionnaire is built on.

Behaviour = actual numbers of casual and changing sex partners (confirmed kills)
Attitude= opinions on uncommitted sex (how hard you judge yourself and others)
Desire= for people you’re not in a romantic relationship with (how hard and often you think “I wanna hit that”)

Now listen, I haven’t been a sex worker for that long. I’m coming to two years on my independent journey. I’ve lived, loved and laughed all over the planet during my 32 full orbital turns. But in these two short years I’ve learnt more about humanity, history, our home the Earth, people’s inner worlds and about myself than during all my years prior.
Including the years when I learned how to read and write, twice by the way. First time with Western letters at 6, the legends say that my father lost all of his hair the year he decided to teach me how. The second time at 26, when I learned to read the hiragana and katakana alphabets, 48 symbols each, and about 300 symbols in kanji. So yeah, sex work has changed my life. But I had a point, let me get back on track.

When studying the results of the SOI-R, men frequently score higher, so more unrestricted, than women, though the overlap is significant. Here it’s important to remember that a high score can be high across all three facets or high only in one or two.
I’ve found some articles claiming that leaning on these numbers is inconclusive because by societal common knowledge, men’s numbers would be higher if they had more access to behavioural numbers (aka confirmed kills) and that women’s numbers would be higher if they had more security across all the three parameters.

Which made me think about myself. How come a completely average woman, from an average background, has found the incentive to become a sex worker and actually enjoy it, if it’s such a statistical oddity?
In my previous post I talked about the red thread of “why we have sex” and the possible hidden motivations behind that pleasure-fuelled behaviour described in our friend, the Oxford Dictionary.

Sex carries more natural risk factors and stress triggers for women than for men. It’s widely known, but when we actually apply it in practice, it hits differently.
I have been that oversexualised girl who let people tear pieces of me verbally and physically, and thought that the sexual growth journey into womanhood meant losing your autonomy and putting on a face that says you like it.
That dutiful girlfriend having sex even when I was too chafed and sore from the previous night, out of affection and love that turned into prioritising my partner’s satisfaction over my own pain. That young woman with absolutely no clue what she actually enjoys with others, or if there would ever be sexual pleasure outside the safe bubble of me and my small vibrator.
That means that at least the first 10 years of my lived experience as a sexual being with others had no real pleasure in it. And my floozy numbers were already quite stacked back then. The difference now is that I enjoy it, it pays for my humble little life, and I am in charge of my sexuality and pleasure.
What I’ve chosen to do with that is to pay it forward. For what my sexuality and pleasure provide for me, I give back to my community in time, presence and genuine care. I see my clients as a core part of that ecosystem. So in my internal world, it is my sexuality that supports everything, not the capital exchanged. I will talk more about this another time.

Now I ask you, what other reasons have you had to have sex, beyond pure pleasure? Pleasure can be present, but have you ever chosen to have sex also for some other, unspoken reason?

I’ve asked this question in different face to face conversations many times, and I’ll tell you this. The wildest honest answers often come from women, as they tend to be more aware of ‘using their sexuality’, both inside and outside relationships. When you dig deeper, men can have equally complex incentives, but they might not always be as aware of them.

Here are some top reasons divided by the two sexes, based on research and real responses from people around the world.
(I’ve excluded the obvious ones like love, affection and procreation.)

♂= stress release, reducing sexual built up energy, "mate guarding", social status, curiosity, self-esteem, health and mental wellness, emotional regulation, lifestyle

♀= acceptance, duty or pressure, validation, self-esteem, as an apology, relationship security, revenge

Now I know this doesn’t look too good, but wait, there’s hope yet. I’ll save that for another article. Just know I’m on the side of humans, and I believe in men and women. There are bigger things at play here.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s focus on me again.
Not only did I manage to rise from the sexual ruins of my youth, where every grain of ash is a second spent in unfulfilling sex, but I also managed to turn my pleasure into capital. Erotic capital. Was ist das, Schlampe?
It’s a sociological concept developed by Dr. Catherine Hakim. She proposes it as a fourth personal asset alongside economic, cultural and social capital. It includes physical attractiveness, social charm, vivacity and sexual appeal. It is argued to be a powerful and convertible resource for social mobility and career advancement in modern society.

The public narrative is often that sex workers who enjoy their work are damaged, twisted, unhinged or carrying unresolved trauma. I don’t deny all of that, besides the unresolved part. I’ve got a long trail of therapy bills that say otherwise.

I’ve only heard these assumptions directed at me a few times, but I know they exist. I heard them long before I became a trollop myself. These days, fewer people say it to my face as I’m proud, loud and always ready to argue. Side note, if you find that sexy, I dig you and you’ve earned some points on your Frequent Flier card.

But a twisted tart or not, we do see the rise and power of erotic capital affecting everything in our society. As the marriage market used to be women’s safest option in securing a safe life, many women were already then using their erotic capital for survival. Protecting one’s virginity and marrying right, had a high probability of marrying into sexual and emotional labour, or if failed doing the same as an unmarried trollop. Now in the modern time, women have overtaken men in the dating market, by sustaining themselves without the need for romantic, sexual or companionship relations with men. Women more commonly possess emotional intelligence, skills on cultivating and creating supportive communities and for investing in their own erotic capital. That has only been rising up in value over the years, honed by the capitalism money grasping machines that aimed to benefit, harness and enslave the female sexual energy.

So if we accept that erotic capital is indeed a form of capital, something that can be built and used, then it can also generate economic, cultural and social value. History shows this, just google how prostitutes and courtesans have affected culture, laws, education, arts and social norms throughout history.

For SWERFs, I would say this. As long as people (changing to gender inclusive, as our world has always had male and non-binary sex workers in it as well) are in control of their own bodies and choices, and we build laws that protect safety and fairness, erotic capital is not a threat to autonomy. It can be an asset.

In the midst of all these big things at large and the more we zoom in, the more we realise how things affect each other. So how does any trollop, rake or the like, find their way back to the joy of pleasure?

Ludus (Latin for "play" or "game") refers to a playful, non-committal, and light hearted approach to affection and sex. It focuses on the thrill of seduction, casual fun, and teasing rather than long-term commitment. It is often described as a "lovers and friends" scenario or a casual dating style. I think that here in some sweet and caring ludus loving, I finally landed my feet on the path of finding my personal pleasure.

Thank you for reading!
If you liked what you read, support your (online) local Trollop and subscribe.

I remember my days of being a girl as alarmingly harmonious. Looking down at my own small, soft hands and short fingers, I felt them as my own. When I saw my little face in the mirror, bright but somewhat crooked eyes, a cute straight nose and a pink mouth with a long white scar across both lips, I saw a face that I felt uncomplicated about and undoubtedly mine.
In the spring that I turned 13, that mirror started to make me disoriented and queasy, like looking into those funny mirrors in the clown houses at summer carnivals. A small but violent crack appeared, right in the middle of the reflection. Already that spring I knew it would grow.

“Sexuality” is the feelings and activities connected with a person's sexual desires, as quoted in the Oxford Dictionary. Reading that stirs as little relation in me now as it did that spring when I started my sexual life. Not because I had sexual desires or concepts of my own, but pretty much just because my chest grew.
To be precise, or crude, up to you, in less than eight months my body grew two of the prettiest, bounciest, impeccably round and perfects breasts I’d ever seen. With no warning or permission, my body grew to this shape that was unfamiliar and stirring curiosity equal in myself as well as others. Other girls, other boys and well, others. In my mind and identity, I had no connection to sexuality, but that spring with the newfound shape of my own flesh turning to meat, I was catapulted to a world that, according to the Oxford Dictionary, was supposed to be my path to my own desire’s and activities.

For a moment I wish to pull you away from my quite typical POV story of a woman becoming, and bring the narrative to a general collective. As a sex worker, I see that the starting point and language of sexuality both hold very relevant roles in an individual’s sex life. Both are often, but not always, learned and framed in the vulnerable years of overall development.
Whenever I meet a new client I always want to ask them, “How do you relate to the word sexuality? What does it mean to you? What place does it hold in the whole of you?”. With these three basic questions we learn enormously about someone’s attitudes, approaches and desires. I meet people from all walks of life, and more often than not I hear different fragments of the same lived experience. Not having the language, or the scope, to understand how we see our sexualities, our desires and our sexual activities, and what role they serve in us by existing.
Which brings me to this article’s red thread, ladies and the sons of ladies, why do we have sex? I’m ready to bet you my pretty titties that it isn’t half as simple, as we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking.

With great boobs comes great responsibility, great burdens and great stories. A few years after the original product launch, I find myself stark naked with all my arms and legs spread to my sides in a desperate balancing act. A man of unknown name and origin lies underneath me on his back, holding me in the air with the bottoms of his feet stacked under my hips while grabbing my flailing hands in his. He is trying to rotate me vertically a full 360°, like a pizza baker tossing and stretching his dough. I don’t remember how this came to be. I am sure the behaviour and activity were supposed to be related to sex and pleasure, but it certainly wasn’t about either for me, pre or post the dough air tossing part.
I often think back on my past sexual behaviour and cross reference it with awareness and pleasure. How much of our sexual behaviour relates to the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of sexuality? Or do we have other intentions inside us that call us to arms, where sexuality becomes a tool, a channel to something else stirring in us?

Sociosexuality is a term used for an individual’s willingness to engage in sexual activity without emotional commitment or a close relationship. It is measured via SOI-R, the Revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, which evaluates behaviour, attitude and desire.

Want to read more?
Support your (online) local sex worker and subscribe for part 2, mwah!