Sex and money

Last weekend saw my first paid-for BDSM client, and it's taken me a little while to gather my thoughts on the subject. That, together with a rather hectic schedule has meant less time for the blog - admittedly part of this lack of time has been doing an awful lot of wonderful kinky things, so I can't complain.

I'm going to try to track my thoughts on what I've been loosely couching as a kind of temple prostitution, though frankly I'm unsure why I need to make that distinction. The decision on what to name things creates a framework for how they are viewed. Think of porn versus erotica, or whore versus courtesan. And so we have here, a delicacy of language covering a simple transaction. I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with that, even though I am using the income to pay for my own personal ritual. I don't want to be seen as deliberately, disdainfully distancing myself from other kinds of sex work, whilst at the same time I feel a little awkward about placing myself in that category. I don't want to be snobbish. I don't want to appear to be cloaking myself in a mantle of "trendy" feigned disrepute to garner some sort of kudos.

I am in a qaundary, and I still haven't resolved that. Ultimately, I have a day job, with a reasonable salary. I did not need to do this. But I chose to for my own, somewhat selfish desires. And yes, I wanted to do it to see if I could do it, to see whether my skills were valuable in the market, whether I could professionalise what I did for pleasure, and to see how it felt. I was an experiment, in many ways one of the last, great things undone in my own sexual exploration - to tick the box marked "has had sex for money."

Even that doesn't quite ring true, because what I actually did (what I may continue to do every now and then, time and clients permitting) was performing service dominance for money. There was no sex in the vanilla traditional sense, no "penis-vagina fucking" as I often put it when drawing the line in the sand. And no kissing.

I didn't do much of a fanfare - I used personal contacts, this blog and twitter to source a few people who might be interested. After a pleasingly short time I had three offers, one from a close friend, one from a (mostly) stranger who I had met at the strap on party and one from someone who had been following this blog for a very, very long time. An apt mix, I felt. After a few email exchanges back and forth I booked in one person, another decided my rates were too expensive and another booking is still to come.

I decided that I would try to tailor each session specifically to the client, essentially the service I was offering was fantasy fulfillment. We met twice for lunch, and discussed what he wanted. I spent a lot of time emailing backwards and forwards, we developed a two week long orgasm control / denial routine with detailed reports sent through to me. It was quite a power rush, aside from the intellectual thrill of control and the realisation that what I had to offer was creating such feelings and responses. It was also somewhat strange. There were clear, formal boundaries that I would not have had with my partners. Boundaries that actual became very important to me in maintaining my professional and personal self.

As the day of the session approached, I started to get nervous. Some of this was performance anxiety, after all, aside from the fact that this was not an insubstantial amount of money, I also had the responsibility of delivering to someone a very intimate, sexual fantasy. Something that clearly cut deep and was very dear to them. Money aside, I really didn't want to fuck that up for them. Finally, as I made my journey over to the wonderful Murder Mile Studios, I had a twinge of not-quite-guilt. Specifically, I wondered whether I should feel guilty, whether I should be perhaps ashamed or feel bad for doing something "wrong". The latter thought was brief, and vanished quickly - though I did wonder whether I might feel bad afterwards.

I was right to pick the space that I did. The professional and well kitted out dungeon space does wonders for any last traces of nerves, it's strange perhaps that these gothic settings, with their cages and leather straps meant to terrify actual reassure me. But then, I am going to be the one on top. I'm not going to describe the session in any particular detail, but comment briefly on my surprise by quite how into the experience I got. I had imagined that, given this was a transactional exchange, and that I really did not know or have a "relationship" with the client aside from professional that I might have been abstract, cool and removed. Far from it. Once he was stripped, naked and tied down, under my control, his flesh became mine and I developed a focused possession of it - enjoying using, abusing and discovering all the little tweaks and twists.

At the end I was tired, it was a two hour session with a fair amount of physical activity from my part, and I was pleased that I'd timed it to allow for a close embrace and space for him to come down. I handed over a little "goody bag" with some fruit and lollipops, for sugar, then let him out of the building.

Then I was done. Just like that.

I had a strange light-headed feeling, the kind I sometimes get after a rather intense session, a feeling of invulnerability, of having overcome and pride in my achievements. I swaggered on my walk back home. Later there was also had this sense of benevolence - I'm not quite sure what else to call it. I had given him something no-one else ever had. I've received a couple of very beautifully worded and positive feedback, which make me smile when I read them, another powerful head rush to see the impact I have had in someone else's life.