nightmare. Olivia wanted to pay them, but it's not the easiest proposition. Then there was the question of paying off her debts. Some were simple enough, but then there were loans co-signed by her parents, and there was no way she could make any headway on those loans without talking to her parents... so Olivia had to maintain the fiction that she couldn't pay.
That was nothing compared to the complexities of feelings and communication, though. I've already shown you how hard it was, sometimes, for Olivia to talk about money with her clients. There are other, subtler problems that are hard to handle with empathy: for example, creating the Girlfriend Experience persona.
I've talked to sex workers who enjoy creating a "sexy dreamgirl shell" on behalf of their clients. One of them said to me: "I create that persona for my boyfriends anyway. It's nice to be paid for it." But as a feminist sex writer who's spent years working to understand my own sexual authenticity, this freaks me out a bit. I think it would feel terribly toxic and inauthentic for me.
It often felt inauthentic to Olivia, for sure, and that got harder and harder. "These men are very invested in believing that I'm super into this," she told me once. "I have to keep up the front, and make them feel like I'm interested all the time. It's literally my job to do that. When they tell me how happy I am, or when they inform me that I'm enjoying myself, I can't really contradict them, even if it's not true. Some of them use words like ‘magical’ to describe me, but the person they're describing is not really me. Sometimes I think these guys pay me because in a non-professional relationship, a woman might push back when he says those things. She might contradict his idea of her too much."
In fairness, Olivia naturally fits one glam stereotype of the middle-class sex worker: the sexually adventurous young student. It's such a widely-promoted stereotype that experienced sex worker activists speak derisively about it, and some escorts lie and say that they fit the profile when they don't. Presumably, clients enjoy believing that a girl is a sexually adventurous college student because it capitalizes on images of "sexy coeds” -- and convinces the client that she's not being emotionally harmed by the work. (I've often thought that it's way past time for "fair trade prostitution," where sex trade ethics are made into a competitive advantage. I've also thought that the most feminist thing I could ever do would be to open a brothel where all the sex workers are treated well. Too bad it's illegal.)
Of course, SeekingArrangement.com actively encourages the idea that a "real relationship" can emerge from these arrangements. (In our previous interview, Olivia pointed out the SeekingArrangement blog post "Sugar Baby & Sugar Daddy: The Modern Day Princess & Prince?" Another interesting one is called "Sugar Babies Do Fall In Love.") While some guys on the site really do just want to pay for straight-up sex, some become emotionally invested in the women whose company they buy. And we can tell from Olivia's experiences negotiating payment that a lot of guys don't like thinking about how they're paying for it.
Bottom line: more than one of Olivia's clients were into her for real, and she felt more and more uncomfortable about it as time passed. One man took a surreptitious photo of her and hung it on the center of his otherwise-bare refrigerator. Another client made faux-
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