Clients love to ask sex workers:
"What is your real name?".
It is a way to
have power.
"I know you contain multitudes" is what they mean, "and I have a right to see everything."
After all, they paid.
Typically, the clients who asked me this question were the ones who deluded themselves into believing that we were in a personal, romantic, or sexual relationship that they would not have had to pay for if we had met under other circumstances.
When customers insisted, I liked to ask them back.
“John is my real name!” he might say, laughing at the idea that he, unlike me, had something to hide.
"John is also my real name," I'd say with a wink.
For nearly a decade, I was
mistress Natalie,
a professional dominatrix.
A wry sense of humor was an asset on the job.
I wasn't always shy in situations like that.
From time to time, a customer would ask me my real name and I would answer honestly, telling him that my friends called me Chris.
It was a helpless play.
"I contain multitudes," is what he wanted to say, "and I don't want you to think that this is all I am."
I kept telling myself that these clients were different: young, like me, or grad students, like me, or queer women, like me.
I needed to believe they could see me under the corsets, false eyelashes, and thigh-high boots.
That was always a bad reason to tell a client my real name.
There was rarely a good reason.
A fake name is a line, and some clients have no problem
pushing the boundaries
of a sex worker.
I still get emails from a client who started obsessively following me when she learned my first name.
"Dear Chris, Someday I'm going to build a house and I hope you'll live in it with me."
"Dear Chris, you are the love of my life."
"Dear Mistress Natalie, When I first came to you, I was nervous and you made me feel comfortable. As I've had time to reflect, I realize I
overstepped my bounds with you
."
I try to ignore those messages, but it's hard.
I am scared of him.
My girlfriend was also afraid of him.
The client sent gifts from my Amazon wish list, which piled up at our door while I was away.
"Don't worry, honey," I told my girlfriend.
"She doesn't know my last name. She doesn't know how to find us."
But she wasn't sure.
After that girlfriend and I broke up, I was left
alone with my fear
, which was a relief.
Nearly a decade ago, in a hotel room in a southern city, I met a client who was another graduate student.
His name was actually John, and his Ph.D. would be in computer science.
Mine would be in the humanities.
That explains why he had money to hire a dominatrix and I had so little that I needed to play one in my spare time.
When John walked into my room, I thought he was handsome.
.
When he told me that all he wanted was to kiss my leather boots, I thought:
"Easy money".
When he told me he had a girlfriend, I wondered why he couldn't kiss her boots for free.
(Our culture really takes it out on men interested in sexual submission.)
"What is your real name?" John asked me after the session.
I didn't tell him my friends' name, Chris, but my parents' name, Christina.
I told him that I was a doctoral student, like him, and that I was studying English.
I contain multitudes!
Then, with a little research, he was able to find my last name.
When I got home, he texted me:
"So doctor, what if I start to develop feelings for you and I want to see you on another level?"
I ignored it.
A week later, using my full name, he let me know that he had read my scholarly papers, something I couldn't even convince my girlfriend at the time to do.
My cheeks burned as I read the text, knowing that it was my own ego that had led me onto dangerous ground.
I told John to call me "Mama Natalie," but I didn't block his number.
That Christmas she texted me to say she was in Orange County visiting her parents.
When I saw her number flash on my phone, I remembered that she knew my real name and didn't answer.
He left angry voicemails, ranting about how I had fueled his obsession and left him emotional.
"Christina," she begged me, "don't ruin Christmas for me."
I had been working for a few years when I met the woman who still sends me the inappropriate emails, but I could have counted on one hand the number of clients I've seen.
That seemed fine to me.
Clients were more complicated.
It was harder for me to separate the professional from the personal.
I had a harder time saying "no" when asked my real name.
In the practice of sadomasochism, "aftercare" is important, so he would offer hugs to each client at the end of the session.
It seemed the least he could do.
With that woman, I let the hugs drag on.
She could count on four or five breath cycles before I withdrew.
He would take more
if I let him.
After our sessions, he would text me to tell me that the hug was his favorite part.
The last time I saw her, she had shown up in a hotel lobby—barefoot and in withdrawal, with no money for the session she had booked—in a city where police were rumored to be conducting prostitution raids at luxury hotels. .
Professional sadomasochism exists in a gray area of the law: it is not prostitution, the acceptance of money for sex, but only because sex is hard to define.
I didn't think cops running an undercover were going to delve into ambiguities, and I didn't need an erratic client to get me arrested.
I had just defended my thesis and was about to enter the academic job market.
So I gave her money to drive out of the parking lot of the hotel where she had slept, and I swore never to see her again.
By then, I belonged to a self-defense collective of sex workers.
We spent hours each week practicing strategies to
deflect contact.
We practice maneuvers aimed at forcibly pulling our hands out of our lower backs, to break our hands at our wrists.
We were talking about boundaries and how to set them.
It took an hour for the collective to persuade me to stop being involved with this woman.
After that morning in the hotel lobby, she'd threatened to hurt herself if I didn't see her again, but I'd sworn I wouldn't.
“I can no longer have contact with you,” I wrote as my support system looked on.
"I wish you the best, but you have persisted in contacting me against my wishes."
I had a friend hit send.
I turned off my phone for 12 hours, afraid of his response.
All I could think was:
she knows my real name.
Either way, I still hold my breath as I open the mail inbox from my old job, preparing myself for declarations of love or worse: that she might find out where I live, show up at my door, and ask me for another chance at love like never before. He had.
Fear is a weapon wielded by those who want to silence others, and the stigma against sex work makes it easy to scare or blackmail us.
So finally, a few years ago, I declared myself a sex worker.
My name is no longer a secret to anyone.
I didn't come out of the closet because I'm not afraid.
I came out because sometimes I'm still scared and I know I'm not alone.
In general though, I was rarely afraid of my clients, the goofy parents who showed me photos of their kids and dogs on their iPhones, the sweet but clueless guys who asked me for advice on their dating profiles.
Even John, the graduate student who used my real name, called a year later when he was back home for vacation to apologize.
"I'm a sucker when it comes to feelings," he wrote.
"That's why I acted the way I did."
He told me he was in therapy and I agreed to see him again.
He seemed remorseful, I needed the money, and it was Christmas after all.
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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