Transactions
I want to start with the word boundary, because it will appear in what follows and I want to put it at a slight distance from the beginning. The word has been used so much, in so many contexts, for so many purposes, that it now arrives pre-loaded with implications it didn’t always carry.
It suggests a defensive perimeter, a wall, something erected to keep things out. I find I prefer a different image, and I’ll come to it. For now, I’ll say that what I mean by boundary, when I use it at all, is something closer to the shape of an offering—the definition of what is here and what is not, which is a form of clarity rather than a form of defence.
Sex work is work. This sounds obvious stated plainly, but the obvious has a way of disappearing under the layers of narrative that attach themselves to almost any subject connected to sex, and so the plainness is worth restating. Work involves a transaction, and the transaction is not incidental to the work—it is part of the structure of the work, doing something functional that neither goodwill nor desire can do on its own. I came to understand this clearly, and the understanding changed how I thought about the financial aspect of what I did, which I had initially treated as the practical dimension of the thing rather than as something with its own meaning.
I started in massage in a remedial form, moved to erotic work after a year, and over the following decade introduced greater levels of intimacy as the shape of what I offered developed. Throughout that development I maintained what I preferred to describe not as limits but as the definition of the offering: certain activities were not available, at any price, because they fell outside the shape of what the work was. This was not primarily about safety or ethics, though neither was absent from the thinking. It was about integrity in the original sense—the work had a particular coherence, and activities that would have compromised that coherence were not part of it. A man could offer considerably more money and receive the same answer. The answer was not about the money.
Money was not, in truth, the driving force for me in the way that it might have been. I am sure that many people working in this field make a good living from it. My own earnings tended to hover not far above what I would call a living wage, and I made peace with that early because I recognised where my interest actually lay. The interest lay in the work itself—in the quality of attention I could give and the quality of encounter that sometimes resulted. The income funded the work rather than the other way around. I held my fees at a level I considered significant, not because I was maximising revenue but because the fee was doing something that generosity could not do and that I came to think of as essential.
I found this out through the free sessions. On a once-a-month basis, for a period, I offered a session without charge on the understanding that the work had value for men who couldn’t easily meet my fees, and that the value of the work didn’t diminish because the financial transaction had been removed. What I found was that the transaction’s absence changed something I hadn’t anticipated. The session without a fee was, in practical terms, the same session. I brought the same attention, the same skill, the same quality of presence. What changed was how the session was received by some—not all, but a pattern clear enough to notice—of the men who took it up.
When a fee defines the offering, it tells both people in the room something that no amount of goodwill can substitute for: that the thing has a defined value, that the value has been agreed, and that the agreement contains within it the shape of what will happen. The man who pays a fee knows what he has purchased and what he hasn’t. He also knows, implicitly, that expanding what he has purchased would require a different arrangement—and that no such different arrangement is on the table, because the offering is what it is, and the fee reflects the offering as defined, not as renegotiated. The transaction is the architecture. It holds the shape of the thing.
Without it, I noticed that some men treated the absence of the fee as the absence of a definition. What was on offer became, in their reading, more open than it had been. They tested the edges. They asked for more than the session contained. They were not, in the main, cynical about this—I don’t think it was calculated. I think the removal of the financial structure removed the signal that a structure existed at all, and in its absence the session became, for them, something more amorphous and therefore more negotiable. I had offered something for nothing, and they had heard something closer to: the usual rules don’t apply here.
I found this clarifying in a way I hadn’t expected. The fee was not a commercial instrument in the simple sense. It was a form of communication—about what the offering was, what it was worth by my own reckoning, and what both of us were agreeing to when the arrangement was made. That communication couldn’t be replicated by goodwill or generosity or a careful verbal explanation of what was and wasn’t available. The financial transaction said it in a language that other languages couldn’t match, because it required a concrete and immediate response. The man who pays a fee has already said yes to the thing as defined. The man who pays nothing has said yes to something, but the something is less precisely bounded.
I no longer work as a masseur in the formal sense. My interests have changed, and I retired from the massage work not from incapacity but from genuine shift of direction—I have drawn from that work the parts that seem most essential and most alive, and I now offer those. The nudity remains available, as the particular quality of physical ease it creates has always struck me as inseparable from the kind of conversation that interests me most. The intimacy remains, in the forms that now suit what I do. And the conversation itself—the extended, unhurried conversation about the topics that men rarely get to discuss because the right context for them almost never exists—remains the centre of what I offer.
The fee remains too. I maintain it, at whatever the current level happens to be, because I found that removing it changed the quality of what happened in ways I didn’t want. A man who understands that an hour in my company will cost him a specific amount knows something essential before he arrives: that this is a defined thing with a defined value. He knows how much he needs to invest. He knows what yes means in this context, because the context has been described in terms precise enough to say yes to. If he gains more from the time than he loses from the cost of it, he values the transaction. The value is produced by the encounter, but the encounter is made possible by the transaction, and the transaction is not merely the method of payment. It is part of the structure that makes the quality of the encounter available.
The image I prefer to the word boundary is, as I mentioned I would eventually say, a fence. More specifically: a fence with a gate in it. The fence defines a field. It tells you where the field is and where it isn’t. It tells you what you’re inside when you’re inside it. Without the fence, the field is still there but it has no edges, which means it has no particular character—it blurs into the surrounding territory and loses the quality that makes it distinctly itself. The gate in the fence is not a weakness in the fence. It is how you get from one field to another, from the first hour into the extended time that costs nothing more, from the defined offering into whatever else the afternoon becomes. The gate opens from inside. The fence remains.
I have been asked, occasionally, whether the fee creates a distance—whether there is something in the financial transaction that introduces a quality of the commercial into what might otherwise be entirely personal. I understand the concern and I don’t dismiss it. But I notice that the encounters I found most genuine, most present, most fully themselves, occurred within a framework that included the transaction. The transaction didn’t produce the quality. But it created the conditions in which the quality could exist without ambiguity—in which both men in the room knew clearly what they were there for, and that clarity left them free to be fully in the thing rather than partly in it and partly in a negotiation about its edges.
What I offered was always, at its best, genuinely itself. The transaction was what allowed it to be offered as such: clearly, without apology, with the confidence that comes from knowing the shape of the thing matches the description of it. That confidence, I found, was contagious. A man who arrived knowing what he had paid for could let go of the part of himself that monitors for ambiguity and give his attention to what was actually in the room. That was the point of the fence. Not to keep things out. To make it possible to be fully inside.
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