"Just Whoreable" by Will Rockwel

"You're JUST a fucking WHORE." Could my boyfriend say that—mean that—my Guy, a former hustler himself? I had to face it—I was holding a dustpan full of broken glass and crumbled drywall, and I'd lived the American Nightmare before. My partner of one year had just left me, violently, for being a working boy.

"You're a whore, whores don't love ANYONE, and you never loved ME." His slapdash logic nonetheless cut deep. After a year of foreplay and pillow talk, hard core fucking and excruciating honesty, all our love had been reduced to a single tautological falsity.

It's an ancient school that teaches Harlots are callous and unloving, more, as Blake phrased it, the prostitute "blights with plague the marriage-hearse," bringing pain to the young and unsuspecting ensnared in his or her Devil's trap. But I didn't think my boyfriend, a former modern-day hustler, ascribed to the thought—despite heaps of evidence to the contrary, of an almost all-American regularity to tricking as well as the relatively low STI transmission rates in most sex-trading "populations," the belief persists that sex workers are immoral, disease-spreading predators. And don't forget innocent victims.

I identify with les immoralistes myself. "Many are the victims she has brought down." Proverbs 7:26

While I feel at a distance from other "normal" relationship-goers at dysfunctional moments like these, I have never felt so close to my moralizing Baptist mother as I scrubbed cakes of drywall off the floors—just like she used to, on her knees, crying with Comet® powder scraping the red off her fingernails. She wasn't a card-carrying "whore" like I am, but it was my step-father's word for her and she was never one to DEN-Y that Devil, as we say on Sunday. While I, on the other hand, have listened to too much Tina Turner, too many motherly shrieks of "You're traumatizing the children!" from behind closet doors, to take this particular abuse from anyone ever, and I mean ever, again.

I called the NYPD.*

And now we're over . . . but, I guess, it's our beginnings I wonder about. If I've always been a "whore," and he's known it, I need a reason why he didn't end it at the start, obsta principii. I need a reason why, after all our careful conversations, naïve theories—polyamory, free love—I couldn't see the undercurrent of disaster.

Is it possible to love and be loved while whoring?

On more dramatic, by no means characteristic, days like today, I wonder if I'll end like Zola's stigmatizing portrait of the prostitute Nana, diseased, French and unloved. I don't know which fate is worse ... In the meantime, I'll try to answer the unanswerable question, is it possible? by patching up the fist-sized hole in the drywall and sweeping the glass shards off the floors. Every dysfunctional, melodramatic and, of course, normal relationship needs its drywaller, I say, the partner who's left alone, sweeping up the dust we inevitably kick up, punch up, in our all-too-human "love."

*I called the Police Dept., but it was my friend M— who really saved me, my house mate, who came home that night and surveyed the damage and tried to force my flailing partner out the door—"Get Out! Get OUT!" He left, however, only when the officers arrived. No charges were pressed..

Read more from Will Rockwell at Sex!Work?

Bondage Pornstar Madison Young's Take on Work and Relationships

Madison Young recently posted about her own experience with work and love on her blog: Making Waves in Feminism One Anal Scene at a Time, in a piece about having a partner who also works in the sex industry.

Comment on the First Poll

Karly Kirchner said:

I had to vote for four of them:

Work makes me Insatiable for my lovers!
Being in love is so distracting, I can't Work!
I can't work unless I'm getting some at home, or at the bar, or in the park..somewhere on my free time!
Work is Work and Love is Love, they don't affect each other, it's so different.

I can't separate all of this. I've felt all or some of them at one point or another. Most importantly, I feel very solid with my emotional and physical boundaries which allows me to float between all of these different emotions. Feeling like I'm able to be up front and frank with my lovers and partners is the best way for me to feel confident in all of my many relationships, regardless of whether they're personal or professional.

And I LOVE that this blog exists! Thanks for making it happen!

Welcome to Working Heart

Think of the types of people who love sex workers, and what comes to mind?

In my mental line-up of archetypes I see:
-young children unaware of their mother's profession
-a clueless, well-meaning older relative
-a sad-sack client, obsessive and out of touch with reality
-a poor boy, tormented by his love, unable to "afford" her

These images are in my mind, but they don't originate there, nor do they look like the host of real-life examples I know of the myriads of kinds of people who love sex workers.

A clue is that all of the S.W.s beloved by those in my line-up are women, and straight, and either down on their luck or incapable of un-paid love. These archetypes do not come from my imagination, though they do live there. They come from images, stories, ideas that I've collected out in the world; from media and jokes and 'common sense'. I didn't realize I was collecting characters that would live in my head at the time, but I looked inside and there they were.

When I think of the people I actually *know* who love sex workers, the line-up looks much different: more numbers, more diverse, and definitely more interesting and colorful.

The clueless relative is still there (my best friend's parents); as well as the children (young son of a former Lusty Lady employee); but so are a husband with a shared bank accounts who painted his wives FBSM studio; a best friend computer geek that acts as occasional safe-call for outcall sessions; a girlfriend who picks up her sweetie from all her jobs: bartender, clinic worker, escort; a mother who paid for her daughter's jewelry and implants to aid her stripping career; a boyfriend who schedules his work as a performer around his boyfriends in-house tricks; a personal submissive both obedient and independent who helps her Dominatrix Mistress pack for work; quite a few boyfriends and girlfriends that turned a trick or two or stepped in for a double with the aid and encouragement of their sex worker partners;....

The list goes on and on. It includes people of every race, class and gender; those with full disclosure of their beloveds work and those who have no idea; people who love loving sex workers and people for whom it's a constant struggle. The unifying factor, the only thing I can think of that almost all these people have in common is this:
All of these people greet each other with affection when they enter a room. A hug, a kiss, an old joke or boot kiss; whatever it is, there is genuine, reciprocal love and affection there.

This topic has been on my mind for about eight years now. Realistic sex worker visibility is very limited; realistic representation and insights from people who love sex workers seems practically non-existent. I'd like that to change. I'm interested in changing the stigma against sex workers, but I'm also interested in doing what I can to help make the day-to-day work of connecting, relating and sharing intimacy with each other a little bit easier. I want to create a place for a conversation to happen, one I've needed; one my partners have needed.

I hope, with your help, to make Working Heart a place for thoughts, observation, conversation and support for sex workers and their partners. After all, we've all got a strong, hard, Working Heart.