Prose & Lore, Issue 3: Memoir Stories About Sex Work

by Audacia Ray

But let’s be real: those conversations often suck, having them takes a toll, and they often don’t accomplish what we hope. People who have power over our lives perpetuate stigma, discrimination, and violence and continue to make things difficult for people in the sex trades and people profiled as trading sex.

We want our stories to shift the culture, change minds, create empathy where there previously was indifference.

an act of resistance and it is an act of resilience.

When we are denied our human rights, telling stories for each other becomes even more important, because in the act of doing so, we say to each other: I hear you, your concerns are real, your stories ring true.

panties. I hadn’t known you could tie someone up through panties before that moment. I carefully filed the information away

for later use.

I had never done anything before that made me feel like anything meaningful was different after I had done

like someone I had grown in a flowerpot to become my best self.

figured that proving love was about the same as proving knowledge, and so I attacked my relationship with the same panic-driven fervor that my statistics final rated, with more or less the same goals.

I couldn’t be present for them and ace my paramour curriculum. I

Anyone would be distrusting over that distance, I thought, even without good cause (which, of course, Samuel had).

Being good meant being ready. Ready to answer for myself, ready to prove that I was good,

would give me all of the things that I needed, as long as I was good enough.

learned to talk about work just the right amount, in just the right way, at just the right time.

we need the money, you can do the gross thing, and I’ll overlook it,

for now.

made time to read news and fiction and anything I had time for—so as to stock myself full of conversation that had nothing to do with work.

His version was sexier—and much, much funnier—than the one I remembered relating.

I was terrified that I would say something wrong and reveal something about my job that I should have kept quiet, and, in doing so, ruin my holiday, and wreck my girlfriend -GPA. I

while my wardrobe, salary, and sexual boundaries were being discussed in microscopic detail, no one looked at me at all.

Once home, I gave up trying to be accurate when I spoke to Samuel, and prioritized being accurate in spirit—I

realized I had no idea just how much of his spin he believed.

scoured my days for little vignettes of human interaction that I could give to him, morsels of stories that would keep Mistress Whatshername sexy and safe for him.

I knew Samuel’s love for me wouldn’t survive that kind of scrutiny.

I figured I would love the stability of an hourly wage, and would revel in the joy of planning my expenses month to month (how silly and misguided that idea was—also

We were done, so done, but Mistress Whatshername kept hanging around, nonchalantly

It took me months to get a job as a waitress, and even then it was just cocktails—twice the aggro for half the tips.

But with every tiresome night and fruitless day, it became clearer that my hard won certifications—academic as well as amorous—weren’t getting me anywhere I wanted to be at all.

had betrayed my love. I turned my back on Mistress Whatshername, and I wondered if it was too late to ever win her forgiveness.

Both times I thought that by sinking into a big anonymous city I could melt into someone different.

I was required only to drink, laugh, entertain, and to suggest, to make customers like me just enough to spend money on me inside the club, but not too much so that they would want more than company.

walls of artifice engineered an ease of fluidity in identity,

in and out of masks.

Me: the shyest, most awkward girl, who’d never even had a boyfriend, went to work in Tokyo’s nightclubs as if it were just a mask I was trying on.

I could smell money on her: money that she’d made by and for herself.

Glamour wasn’t high-class. In fact, it was a hole, but Charlotte brought her gowns there anyway.

The clothes from mama’s closet would be pulled out, worn for a night, and then returned to their hangers, ready for the next girl. They never saw the inside of a washing machine and this didn’t seem to bother any of us. But it bothered Charlotte. She would clean out the closet and take the dresses home to wash and then return them, clean, shaking her head in exasperation. “Just this once,” she’d

say. But then a few weeks later, when she couldn’t bear it any longer, out the dresses would come, into her bag to take home to be washed.

Like an X-rated Mary Poppins, she had a seemingly-bottomless suitcase full of outfits.

Charlotte hadn’t lasted 17 years in the sex industry by throwing around kindness to just anyone.

The question carried such weight that in that moment I caught sight of her deep kindness. A generosity that she kept well hidden beneath tough talk and an air of superiority.

It was a dress I couldn’t have worn three months earlier when I was still pained by the shape of my unloved body, when I used clothes to hide, not highlight, my figure.

Because I deserved to.

by actually ordering it with a statement, not a question.

wasn’t just playing with masks anymore; when I pulled on that dress, I had become a professional.

like a serpent eating its tail, engorged with value.

Something about seeing my aristocratic British colonizer tied to his throne with his own silk soothed my emotional disorder.

What I really needed was to re-assert some dominance over my now-withholding Sugar Daddy.

We started out on my terms, and ended up on his.

Our nights out were a race to the bottom: he tried to get me drunk enough so I’d go to bed with him, and I wanted him to pass out so I could take a cab home.