Hooker content!

Here’s a query for you: When streetwalking hookers are out there on the track, waving at cars and sticking their asses in the street and all that, what’s the endgame in terms of job satisfaction? Presumably, they’re out there to make money and in order to make money they need to have a lot of customers. Equally presumably, the customers are probably not the most pleasant people to be around for several reasons including any combination of the following: they’re sociopaths, they’re ugly, they’re mean, they have zero respect for women, they’re extremely fucked up on drugs, they’re filthy, they smell like shit, they want to do something that is extremely gross, they’re the kinds of guys who cut up women and dump their corpses on the beach, they have rotten teeth, they have a feeling of creepy ownership towards the women that they’re paying for their services/time, they refuse to wear rubbers, they blow nasty loads on the girls’ last clean bikini top, they’re racist, they’re violent, they have leaky sores on their faces/dicks, etc.

Now, I’d like to pause here to point out that I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with prostitution and it’s a no brainer that it should be legal. I further think that in a safe, sane environment where prostitutes and sex work in general isn’t highly stigmatized (like what exists in Germany and Holland and probably a lot of other places in the world), that the exchange can often be much less fucked up than what I’m proposing is going on above on my theoretical hooker track. I mean, to fully digress here, there are lots of totally valid reasons to visit a prostitute, and once you take notions like deistic morality out of the equation, being a sex worker is really not all that different from being a masseuse (in fact, in the Thai spa down the street from my house they’re exactly the same, but that’s another story entirely). If you’re the kind of person that rejects puritanical sexual mores, enjoys (or at least doesn’t despise) sex and you’re comfortable with strangers and not skeeved out by bodies and fluids and shit, it’s really not a stretch to imagine being a happily employed sex worker.

At this point I could go into why that’s the case, but I think you get the idea, right? For someone like a widower, or someone who’s handicapped or cripplingly shy, for someone who’s insanely busy, for someone who’s terribly lonely, for someone with children who can no longer get sex in their marriage but doesn’t want to get a divorce or go through the mess of having an affair, visiting a hooker is probably a fucking lifesaver. I’m not trying to be shocking or gen-x cavalier here. Being a sex worker is a compassionate profession on the level of being a nurse and really should be treated as such. Now, that being said, we live in a world where we talk about god on our money and treat sex like it’s the domain of perverts, junkies and felons, so it’s unlikely that we’re gonna see a huge attitudinal shift towards hooker compassion any time in the near future.

So anyway, back to my hypothetical hooker on her hypothetical track. The people that an American streetwalker is going to attract are not, as a rule going to be the compassionate widower or the shy, wheelchair bound sufferer of multiple sclerosis. Due to the genuinely sketchy nature of the independent contracting that accompanies street hooking, and the neighborhoods where this business tends to thrive, due to the weird notions about sex that we have in this country and the ways that the shitty conditions of street hooking seem to confirm these weird notions, the kinds of people who visit street hookers probably tend to be pretty depraved and gross. Of course, this is speculation. I’ve never been a streetwalker so I’m basing this mostly on a pretty armchair theory, so let’s get back to my original question before I fly completely off the rails and into a sea of shit I have no authority to talk about.

What’s the hooker want? Does she want the car to stop? When she waves and whistles and the brake lights swell, does she get a feeling in the pit of her stomach like “ah, fuck” or is she stoked because she’s getting an opportunity to, at the very least attempt to make some money? I mean, everyone hates their job at times and I can’t think of a worse job to have to get up the nerve to put on a smile and go do than hooking, but I’m not even talking about the bad days here. I’m talking about the average days and even the good days. What’s that like? Where does the desire REALLY net out on a job by job basis for the average street hooker?

Of course, as the reductive poster in the Sock Drawer is about to point out, the answer is complicated. It’s a mixture of fear, revulsion, and survivalism, potentially sometimes coupled with excitement, thrillseeking, pragmatic acomplihment and/or genuine curiosity. But here’s the thing: I’m not really looking for the answer that some middle-class guy who has nothing better to do than read blogs on his smart phone on the shitter has to say about what he THINKS is going on. For the purposes of the exchange-of-information parameters that we have here at BSC, this is a rhetorical essay, as are most of the posts here. For reasons I’m sure you can fathom, I’ve got the middle class white guy perspective on this issue pretty comfortably in hand, so I don’t need to really have it explained to me, thanks. However, hookers! I’d love to hear from you. I don’t know how many hookers actually read this blog. I’m guessing a ton. Can’t wait to read your insights.

Enjoy your day everyone. I’m heading out to get a massage.