Sunday, February 17, 2008
I found myself reading the blogged recollections of a college-aged prostitute
I couldn't tell you how I went from reading through BoingBoing, but somehow I ended up at the front door, so to speak, of Confessions of a College Call Girl. It wasn't direct, though I later stumbled across a post (the most poignant I've read on her site) that BoingBoing did link to directly, but somehow, some way, there I was. The strange part is, this is the type of material I usually avoid, because it seems to deepen the sense of hopelessness that comes over me when I consider Humanity as a collective whole. When I think about people, I genuinely feel any sense of optimism draining from my mind. When I think about female people, it often seems like someone has accelerated the process by attaching a pump to the drain line, but I realize that is as much about my perceptions as it is about anything resembling reality. The bottom line is, people do not understand me and I do not understand them.
Most people who know me know that I have some fairly straightforward feelings about sex. In short, sex is something to be valued and held above being trivialized. My thinking has always been that trivializing sex can only take us nowhere as individuals and as a people. Of course, opinions vary and are indeed much like assholes. That said, reading the anecdotes and reminisces published on a site like Confessions does nothing to dispel the sensation that things are in fact, hopeless. Many of the posts describe the encounters and lifestyles of a college-aged prostitute in a non-chalant, even witty manner, giving one the impression that the author is "someone who seems to have played with fire and barely singed her fingertips", which makes her "Price" post all the more poignant. By giving her readers that glance into her inner world, she reveals her awareness of the toll the life she has lived took upon her.
That is a fascinating revelation to me, as it simultaneously makes the author seem more human, less synthetic, and reaffirms my belief that cheapening the things we do only serves to erode us in fundamental ways. What time does with every passing moment, cheapening accelerates by several orders of magnitude. Selling our physical, sexual selves, seems a fate worse than death to me. At least in death the physical self is put to rest and the spirit is freed to do whatever it is our spirits do when these fragile containers finally falter and give up their essence. In a post explaining that hardly anyone, if anyone knew of her work as a prostitute, the author includes this passage:
"When I reason it out I don't feel guilty about what I've done. I was having lots of casual sex before anyway. I would go out on a date and hook up with some guy and not even enjoy it that much. So why not get paid for what I was doing anyway? And I do feel like it's an honest living like any other, a service provided. The only thing that bothers me, when I think about it, is that now I have a secret so deep that I can never tell anyone. That someday I may have a lover or a soulmate, someone I want to share my life with. And I will never, ever be able to tell him."
My secrets really aren't secrets at all, as just about everyone I know has some idea or understanding of what I have and haven't done in this life. There's not much to tell, so most people don't particularly care. Reading blogs like CCG make me feel something akin to appreciation for my relative banality. I can't relate to that sort of emotional encumbrance and I'm thankful for it. Strangely, I also fail to relate to worries about finding someone I might want to share my life with. At my age, I have more or less surrendered that sort of optimism up to the realization that I am growing progressively more out of touch with my fellow human beings. Somehow, even with all of this woman's sexual exploits, she seems to have held onto a strangely mutated hopefulness. It seems almost unimaginable to me, but there it is. Assuming the blog's many posts are legit and genuine, that might be the most compelling and perplexing bit of truth to be found there.
I'm left wondering, how many other CallGirls are active out there today and, were I to meet one, would I ever know it? The implications are troubling, when you start considering the possibilities. Keeping that sort of past a secret would seem like a necessity, particularly if someone is looking for genuine love (as I understand it, anyway) but eventually, that burden would have to become massively heavy. Perhaps just as amazing that a sex worker still holds fast to an idea of romantic love is that she will almost certainly meet someone who is accepting of her past, if not willing to embrace her history as a prostitute. People are incredibly diverse and while I can't imagine myself ever being able to work through that much history, someone out there can and probably will someday. She may even have children someday. She certainly wouldn't be the first.
Labels: blogging
Read or Post a Comment
<< Home