Preference
The word consent had not yet colonised every conversation about sex when I began the work, but it arrived in the language during the years I was doing it, and I noticed its arrival with a certain ambivalence.
The word does real work in contexts where it matters most, and those contexts are serious and I hold no brief against the word in them. But it was not the word I used about my own practice, and the reason I didn’t use it was that it carried an implication I wanted to avoid—the implication that what I was doing was permitting, that my role was to grant or withhold access, that the operating position was one of defence. I used the word preference instead.
The difference between the two words is the difference between a gate that opens when the right conditions are met and a field that has its own character, its own particular quality, which some men will find interesting and others won’t, and that is not open to renegotiation simply because someone is standing at the fence with more money than he arrived with.
The offering had a shape. I want to say this plainly because the shape mattered, and understanding that a shape existed would have saved some men the trouble of testing whether it did. Some things were inside; some things were not. What was inside the shape was clearly described on the website before a man made his decision: a defined period of time, an erotic massage conducted by someone who had written a book on the subject that had been read widely enough to establish that the expertise was real, the possibility of conversation if the session went that way, and my particular company. Not every man reads what is clearly described before him. I noticed this early and continued to notice it throughout the decades.
What was not inside the field was harder to list in advance, because the exclusions were not arbitrary and not comprehensive and not, as I want to be clear, moral in their orientation. I was not excluding activities because I judged them wrong. I was not running an ethics seminar. I was describing what I wanted to do and what I did not, and the did-not was personal in the way that any preference is personal—grounded in what I found interesting, in what fitted the quality of experience I was trying to offer, in what I could bring genuine attention to and what I could not. The activities outside the shape were not condemned. They were simply elsewhere.
Sex, in the ways that many men arriving at my door seemed to understand the word, was not automatically inside the shape. Whether sex—in whatever definition—would occur in any given session depended on a condition that the transaction could not guarantee: mutual attraction. That was genuine. It was not performed as a quality-control position or deployed as a sophisticated form of pricing. If I found a man attractive, and he and I arrived together at that point in the session, something might happen. If I didn’t, it wouldn’t. The money did not change the arithmetic.
I am aware that this will strike some readers as an unusual position for someone in my line of work to hold. I am also aware that the unusualness is partly a function of what people import into the room before they arrive—the cultural narrative about paid sex, which runs something like: the money purchases the activity, the worker’s preferences are the casualty of the transaction, anything goes if the price is right.
I did not find, visiting other workers in my field, that this narrative was universally true. But I could not investigate the alternative in those visits because I rarely found the workers I visited attractive enough to go further.
What I found was that the men who arrived at my door carrying the anything-goes assumption did not always carry it consciously. It was more like an atmospheric pressure—present, shaping the angle of approach, organising what they expected before they had formed the expectation into a specific request. I noticed the assumption in how a man would expand a request that had been declined. Not aggressively, in most cases. More like testing a surface to see if it really held.
The request would come back slightly reframed, with more money attached, or with a quality of insistence that hadn’t been present the first time, as though the original refusal had been a preliminary negotiating position rather than an answer. I found I could hold the answer without feeling required to explain it at length.
Preference is not a position that requires a defence. It is simply what it is.
The fence analogy has stayed with me across the years because it describes something the word boundary does not. A boundary positions itself against the outside—it is defined by what it keeps out. A fence defines a field—it is defined by what it holds in. What I was offering had a character, a quality, a set of things inside it that gave it its particular nature.
The fence existed to clarify the shape of what was inside it, not to refuse the world. A man who read what was written before he arrived knew the shape. A man who arrived without reading it sometimes discovered the shape on contact. I noticed that the discovery was occasionally a disappointment and occasionally, to my mild surprise, a relief.
Several men told me, at various points across the years, that they had not expected to find limits. The telling was not always a complaint. Sometimes it was something closer to the note a person sounds when they find they are in a different place from where they expected to be, and the place turns out to suit them better. A man who arrived expecting that money would purchase anything encountered instead a negotiation that depended on something else, and the something else was a quality of the encounter rather than a feature of the transaction. I found I couldn’t predict which men would find this surprising and which would not. I found I couldn’t always predict my own response—the sessions in which I found myself genuinely engaged in what was happening between two people in a room, beyond any transaction, beyond anything I could have described in advance on a website.
My repertoire was extensive and I offer this without detail because the detail is not the point. Within what I offered, there was a great deal. Some of what men asked for I had not tried before and was willing to try. Some of what they asked for I had tried and found I had no interest in repeating. Some of what they asked for I declined without having tried it, not from certainty that I wouldn’t enjoy it but from the simpler fact that I didn’t want to find out in that particular session with that particular man.
Preference is not always principled. Sometimes it is just what I felt that afternoon.
The pressed-on-a-refusal situation was the one I found most revealing of the assumption I described earlier. A man who heard no and continued to press it—courteously, in most cases, without threat—was demonstrating something about how he had understood the transaction. He had understood it as an opening position rather than as a description of what was available. The transaction had told him what was on offer and he had heard something else.
When I held the refusal without agitation and without elaborate explanation, I noticed a particular moment—brief, sometimes barely visible—in which he recalibrated. Understood that the shape of the thing was real and that he was now either inside it or he wasn’t.
Most men were inside it. Or found their way inside it, once the shape became apparent. I found that the clarity of the shape, rather than limiting what happened, often freed something—gave the encounter a quality of definition that allowed both men to be fully in what it actually was rather than partly in it and partly in an ongoing negotiation about its edges.
The money was part of the structure: the communication that the transaction carries that no amount of goodwill can replicate. But the money did not purchase what lay inside the fence. It purchased entry to a space in which what lay inside the fence was available to encounter. Whether the encounter went anywhere, and where it went, and how it felt when it got there, was not a function of the transaction. It was a function of what two men in a room brought with them and found between them when they arrived.
I notice that this is difficult to say without it sounding like a distinction I manufactured to feel better about the work. It is not. It is a description of what the work was.
I will leave it to the reader to arrive at whatever the distinction means to them.
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