Can A Sex Worker Be A Buddhist?

Since the age of nineteen, I have been in and out of the sex industry in one capacity or another in four different countries – escort; prostitute (for lack of a better word) in two German brothels; erotic masseuse and “hostess” in a French “bar américain”. This last one translates as “American bar” but I’m not sure why the French called it that, as there were never any Americans to be seen. It’s basically a place where men have to buy ridiculously overpriced bottles of champagne to have the honour of your company. In other words, it’s just a front for prostitution, except nobody ever mentions that word.

I could no doubt write countless blog posts analyzing why I decided to take such a path in life at such a tender age, but this is not the time and the place. And, quite frankly, I’m not all that interested in delving into my past. It is what it is. And I honestly don’t regret any of it. I have experienced human nature in a way that only very few other people have. True, I might not always have experienced human nature at its best, but experience is experience, and I relish it all.

I have been attending mediation classes at the local Zen center, and, although I would not be presumptuous enough to call myself a Buddhist at this early stage, I cannot help but wonder whether there is a place for a sex worker – currently I’m a part-time erotic masseuse – in Buddhism. After all, the Noble Eightfold Path clearly stipulates that Buddhists should have “Right Livelihood” i.e. that they should not engage in trades or occupations that harm other people.

I tried googling “Buddhist Sex Worker” and “Buddhist Prostitute” but didn’t find anything particularly interesting. Brad Warner apparently knows one Buddhist sex worker, but he didn’t mention whether she has an online presence.

Does sex work harm other people? Does it harm sex workers themselves? There is no simple to answer way to this. I’m no Andrea Dworkin but I’m also very far from being a gushy sex-positive feminist who believes that every consensual sexual experience a woman has is empowering. All I know is that, at this point in my life, I have very little interest in sleeping with men for money. There was a time as a really young woman when that turned me on, but it no longer does. I would be miserable if I tried that again.

On the other hand, I don’t have any issues whatsoever with being an erotic masseuse. True, there is usually a handjob involved, but, meh, so what? The dude is lying flat on his back at that point, and I’m 100% in control. Sometimes they try to sit back up, but I won’t stand for it. I gently push them back down. The massage and the handjob always go the way I want it to. I can assert with 100% confidence that I do not feel exploited or belittled in any way. I have been doing this for so long that I know exactly what I’m doing. I also screen potential clients very carefully, and this helps weed out any undesirables.

So, I’m not being emotionally or physically hurt by my involvement in the sex industry, but is it hurting me in other ways? I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination, but being a sex worker has encouraged me to be more materialistic perhaps. I don’t make that much money as an erotic masseuse since it’s a part-time gig for me these days, but nonetheless, it’s the kind of industry where you always can make more money, or at least fantasize that you can.  I find it very hard to make a budget and stick to it because, well, why do I have to? For example, if I have $100 left in my bank account that really needs to be spent on food, but I see a dress I want, I can tell myself “Oh, I’ll just get that dress now, and do two handjobs later to afford food”. A “normal” woman could not do this. She would just have to go without the dress. This is not a very sensible way of living, and I don’t like having such a materialistic mentality.

What about the men who are my clients? Am I harming them in some way? The men who come to see me are not sleazebags – not at all, in fact. They are just normal, hard-working, middle-class, middle-aged, (usually) white men. The vast majority of them are married, and – if I can believe what they tell me – they are just not getting very much sex at home. One could argue that I am providing a valuable service for these men; that I am helping couples stay married. I wouldn’t go that far, but, well, yes, I clearly have something to offer these men. But wouldn’t it be better for my clients to find out why their wives don’t want to fuck them, and to work on their marriage instead of coming to see me? Aren’t I stopping them from working on their relationships, and growing in them? Aren’t I helping men lie to their wives and partners?

Sometimes I wonder, too, if I am stopping men from finding love altogether. Last week I had a visit from a surprisingly charming guy who works in the game industry. He wasn’t my type physically although he had a great body (nerdy white guys don’t do it for me usually) but I was bowled over by his intelligence and wit, and so I found him very attractive. But I couldn’t work out why somebody like him was single. He’s forty-seven, and had been married in his late twenties/early thirties, but has been single ever since. He blamed his crazy work schedule (fifteen-hour days apparently) but I can smell someone with a severe case of commitment phobia a mile away. Couldn’t it be argued that women like me allow men like him to continue living an emotionally, physically and spiritually impoverished existence? If I didn’t provide an easy sexual release, and the illusion of intimacy, they would have to get over their fear of commitment sooner rather than later.

It works both ways, too. Aren’t I stopping myself from having any kind of meaningful, loving relationship by being a sex worker? I’m not ready to date anybody right now, but what happens when I am? What man is going to want to get involved with a woman who has her hands on hundreds of other men’s penises every year?

It doesn’t really matter what the answer to any of the above questions is because, for the time being, I have no intention of giving up sex work. That might mean that I’ve “failed” at Buddhism before I even started, but, well, there you go. That’s just the way it has to be for now. Sex work allows me a degree of financial stability I could only dream of otherwise. I can save for the future; afford college courses; travel somewhere occasionally and, hell, sometimes buy myself things that make me feel beautiful and special. I will give it up at some point, but just not yet.

Blind

A few days ago Recovering Love Addict 24 wrote the following:

Something happened yesterday evening which really frustrated me. My bottom lines include not being able to flirt with girls, not asking girls for their numbers etc. But yesterday the first day of my bottom lines and my first day of sobriety I was waiting for a tube to last night’s meeting and a girl approached me on the platform. She was absolutely stunning; tall, slim, dark hair, totally my type. You couldn’t write this as never in my whole time in London has such an attractive girl approached me. She asked if she could stand with me and she tried to make conversation however I remained true to the promises I had made and I told her I was unavailable. Immediately after and for quite a while I was so angry with myself for turning down such an opportunity. A week before I would have jumped on it and totally flirted with her, got her number and pursued her until we had sex. But yesterday I stopped myself. I found myself clouded. First with resentment for god, I was screaming out in my head, “Why are you doing this to me.” Second I was resentful towards myself for not acting out and flirting etc. telling myself I had missed such an amazing opportunity. But then I realised I did the right thing for me. I am not ready for girls. I am not ready for a relationship. I have so much work to do on myself first and I need to concentrate on that.

The interesting thing is that Recovering Love Addict 24’s encounter with this girl might not be as random as you might think. According to the Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous “big book”, there is a “diabolic accuracy” to such “coincidental” meetings which “tended to occur when we were most vulnerable to them” (p110). The book urges SLAA members to accept “the possibility that psychic occurrences can happen, in order to make sense of some of these situations which seemed so uncanny”. (ibid.). On p111, we are told that “perhaps the most important principal here was not to deny to ourselves that we were, indeed, being severely tested”.

I would agree with all of the above based on a random encounter I had on Monday at work with the Arab. You might be thinking “C’mon, girl! You work with the guy. You were bound to bump into him at some point!” Well, this is true, but my company is huge, and we work in entirely separate buildings and, in four months of chatting with him online, I’ve never once seen him – until last week when I was out running, and then this week. Last week’s encounter triggered a new obsession about him, and this week’s sorely tested the resolve I had found over the weekend to ignore him.

I was walking into the main building to grab some lunch in the café when he came out, looking, I might add, every inch my ideal man – tall, dark, handsome and athletic.  This was the first time I’d ever seen him up close, and he really is just so incredibly handsome. I can count on one hand the number of men I’ve found that attractive over all my thirty-odd years on this planet. It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak, too, and his voice was everything I thought it would be – deep, raspy and sexy. He wasn’t exactly in a rush to stop and talk, and I haven’t heard from him at all this week. I haven’t contacted him because, well, princesses don’t beg, goddammit! (although they are apparently allowed to obsess non-stop about douchebags).

It’s for the best he hasn’t been in touch, as every fibre of my being tells me that he’s trouble. I can’t begin to fathom why a man would chase and chase and chase me, and then – poof! – blow me off when I finally agree to go out with him. And despite knowing that I shouldn’t get involved with him, it hurts like hell to feel rejected. Logically, I know the issue is that he’s weird, but I still find myself thinking “What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t he want me? Why hasn’t he contacted me?”

I also feel that I have made myself incredibly vulnerable to this man. I opened up too quickly, and told him far too much personal information – most of it unsolicited (I still haven’t worked out what boundaries are!), but on one memorable occasion he asked me whether I had ever cheated on MM when I knew the marriage was on the rocks. Since the dude barely asked me any questions at all, it was very strange that he asked this one. I was kinda put on the spot, and my idiotic brain actually thought: “Oh my God, the poor dear! He’s probably been cheated on before, and wants to know that I wouldn’t do that! Oh, how he must have suffered!”. My response was half-truth/half-lie, as I mentioned my dalliance with Rebound Guy which began one week before MM and I broke up. I, of course, did not tell him the full extent of what happened. I said it was just “kissing”.

I went round to a colleague’s after work, who happens to be gay, and you can always trust a gay man’s opinion about your love life. When I told him about the Arab’s weird question, he said: “Girl, he just wanted to find out if you were easy. If you’d fucked somebody while married, chances are you’d fuck him even more quickly given that you’re now single”. It depressed the hell out of me to think that all I am to this dude (and all I’ve ever been to a lot of men) is a piece of ass. And the two beers I had drunk at my friend’s house certainly didn’t help my mood. I was incredibly sad by the time I finally left. And, oh, did I mention that I’ve also gone cold-turkey on Zoloft?

I went to the ATM afterwards to pay in some of my ill-gotten gains where, out of the corner of my eye, I could see this skinny, icky, middle-aged white dude. I barely looked at him, but I knew (just knew!) that he was this awful guy I had once fucked when I was still an escort. He is for sure on the list of “Shameful, painful sexual experiences I will never talk about to anybody”. He was putting an envelope into the night deposit, and then he walked to his car, and was about to leave when I pointed at him, and yelled “Hey, you! I know you. Your name’s John!”. I knew I should have let him leave, but the alcohol took away all common sense.

The stupid idiot got out of his car, looking all sheepish and pleased, and came back to the ATM to talk to me. “Yes, that is my name! You look familiar. Do I know you?”. I smiled seductively, and cooed “Yes, you do. Now give me your glasses”. I don’t know what the hell he thought I was doing, but he did actually let me take the glasses, and I walked with them into the parking lot, with him feebly protesting that he was blind without them. I set the timer on my iPhone, and said “You have 60 seconds to remember my name or I’ll smash your glasses”.

He failed the test.

I stomped on his glasses.

And, if this was Hollywood, they would have broken into pieces, and I would have driven off into the sunset to start a new life, and find true love.

But it’s not Hollywood, and they didn’t fucking break. I think I only succeeded in bending them badly.

For someone whose glasses had just been nearly demolished by a deranged, drunk woman in a parking lot, I must say that his reaction was somewhat muted. He said words to the effect of “Well, that wasn’t very nice!”.

“It wasn’t very nice what you did to me either!”, I screamed back, and got into my car and drove off.

I’m sober now, and I actually think this story is kinda humorous, but at the time I felt so depressed, angry and out-of-control. Two guys in one day for whom I’m just a piece of ass. Some forgettable vagina.

I came home, and I just wanted somebody to hug me. But there was nobody. All I got were some text messages from MM, which said that I’m “a demon”, “a fucking monster”, “barely human”.

Some people drink to forget, but when I drink I seem to remember all the bad, nasty, abusive stuff that has happened to me, and I feel like a little girl again – so vulnerable, so in pain. Before meeting the guy at the ATM, I was driving home on the highway and the urge for self-destruction was pretty acute. I was doing 80, and I thought momentarily about just crashing the car on purpose.

Where does all that pain go when I’m not drunk? I feel fine now. I’m sad and lonely but I don’t want to harm myself or other people. Is the pain not real, then? Does the alcohol just create something that’s not really there?