Best Sex Writing 2009

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  “We opened for business in July this year,” said Hajime Kimura, owner of Doll no Mori. “Originally, we were going to run a regular call girl service, but one day while we were surfing the Net we found this business offering love doll deliveries. We decided the labor costs would be cheaper and changed our line of business.”

  Outlays are low, with the doll’s initial cost the major investment and wages never a problem for employers. “We’ve got four dolls working for us at the moment.We get at least one job a day, even on weekdays, so we made back our initial investment in the first month,” Kimura says. “Unlike employing people, everything we make becomes a profit and we never have to worry about the girls not turning up for work.”

  Doll no Mori charges start at 13,000 yen (around $110) for a 70-minute session with the dolls, which is about the same price as a regular call girl service. The company boasts of many repeat customers and a membership clientele topping 200.“Nearly all our customers choose our two-hour option.”

  Within little more than a year after the doll-for-hire idea took root in Japan, sex entrepreneurs in South Korea also started to cash in. Upmarket sex dolls were introduced to the Korean public at the Sexpo exhibition, held in the Seoul Trade Exhibition Center in August 2005.They were seen as a possible antidote to Korea’s Special Law on Prostitution that had been placed on the statute books in 2004, and before long, Korean hotels were hiring out “doll experience rooms” for around 25,000 won per hour (around $25), a fee that included a bed, a computer to enable the customer to visit pornographic sites, and the use of a doll.This initiative quickly became so successful at plugging the gap created by the antiprostitution law that soon some establishments opened that were devoted solely to the use of sex dolls, including at least four in the city of Suwon. The owners of these hotels assumed, quite reasonably, that there was no question of their running foul of the law, since the dolls were not human. But the Korean police were not so sure. The news website Chosun.com reported, in October 2006, that the police in Gyeonggi province had confirmed that they were “looking into whether these businesses violate the law…Since the sex acts are occurring with a doll and not a human being, it is unclear whether the Special Law on Prostitution applies.”

  Although the idea of hiring out these dolls appears to be attracting interest from entrepreneurs, the sex-doll industry is still in its infancy and still very much catering to the desires of men, as demonstrated by the fact that of the fifteen models offered on the RealDoll website, fourteen are made in the likeness of women and intended for sale to men, while only one is modeled on a man. A likely reason for this disparity—though not the only reason, I’m sure—is that RealDoll’s Charlie typically sells for $7,000, and there are far fewer women than men who have thousands of dollars of readily disposable income. But an alternative explanation that has been put forward for the disparity is one with which I strongly disagree—the suggestion that far fewer women than men are interested in using artificial means for getting some or all of their sexual stimulation and for achieving orgasm. Many women claim that the use of sex dolls is very much a “guy thing,” but surely such a claim is easily refuted by the widespread use of vibrators among modern women.

  NOTES:

  1 A comprehensive line of sex dolls and other sex machines is shown, for example, on www.fuckingmachines.com.

  2 CyberSkin is a natural-feeling material that mimics human flesh. It is formed by combining silicone and latex.

  3 The branch of medicine dealing with the reproductive and excretory organs.

  4 December 11, 2003.

  5 Dacapo is a Japanese news digest with a focus on current event feature stories.

  6 April 21, 2004.

  7 The most authoritative explanation for the origin of the term “Dutch wives” is found in Alan Pate’s 2005 book Ningyo: The Art of the Japanese Doll. They were originally leather dolls carried aboard Dutch merchant ships, beginning in the seventeenth century; and through their interaction with the Dutch on the trade island of Deshima, established by the Dutch East India company in 1641, the Japanese became familiar with the practice. Pate’s own source for this origin was Mitamura Engyo’s book Takeda Hachidai—Eight Generations of the Takeda Family.

  Dear John

  Susannah Breslin

  As a journalist I’ve covered the sex beat for over a decade. I’ve interviewed call girls and johns, adult film stars and dominatrices, strippers and pimps. I’ve seen a side of America that most Americans don’t see. In the movies there are heart-of-gold hookers like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, falling in love with a john who happens to be a sensitive guy capable of overlooking her profession. But in reality we don’t know much about johns or the complicated reasons they pay for sex. So when New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, a zealous former prosecutor of prostitution rings, was accused of using one himself, many people questioned how such a smart man could have put his family and his career on the line.

  A research project I’m working on may yield some answers to that perplexing question. Earlier this year I posted an online call for letters from johns, asking men to send me anonymous letters about their experiences soliciting sex. In most cases the johns came across Letters from Johns while surfing the Internet. I’d considered soliciting johns from sites like Craigslist, but I decided to let them seek me out. Most of the letters, I believe, are real; in some cases the men sent them from their personal email accounts, signed their real names, and included links to their professional websites. The fake letters are for the most part easy to identify; they lack detail—and frequently end with scenes in which the sex worker returns the money because the sex was so good.

  Thus far I’ve received letters from nearly two dozen johns about why they did it.The men come from all walks of life, ranging in age and across socioeconomic classes. In many cases, like Spitzer, they’re married. Many report they are in relationships with women who are no longer interested in sex. Some of the men are in long-term relationships; some are single. Some seek out streetwalkers, while others solicit high-end escorts as Spitzer is alleged to have done. The men find the women in bars, on Craigslist, in adult ads in the backs of their local weeklies.

  Often these guys aren’t just looking for sex. Many are depressed or stressed, lonely or bored, looking for intimacy or a connection, no matter how transient, no matter the cost. One john who was rejected on a regular basis in the dating scene wrote that, in contrast to the women he met at bars, prostitutes saw him as “a normal and charming guy.” Other men recalled youthful sexcapades in the military while deployed overseas, from a German brothel called Crazy Sexy to a barbershop in Asia where women performed oral sex on men getting haircuts. An “overeducated” twenty-eight-year-old went through a bad breakup, a death in the family, and the loss of his job. Online he found a “courtesan” who taught him what he wanted in a relationship and gave him his confidence back. “I’m really grateful to her,” he reported.

  One letter in particular may offer a window into the mind-set of a man like Spitzer. It came in the form of an encrypted email from a state investigator. Professionally, he was dedicated to enforcing the law. Personally, he was in a relationship with a woman with whom he hadn’t had sex in years. He’d been seeing prostitutes since 1991. In his encoded diary he recorded his encounters. “1 dot is oral, 2 dots is vaginal sex, and 2 connected dots is anal sex. In the event that someone questions the dots, they are associated with good or bad days: no dots are normal days, 1 dot is a good day, 2 dots is a great day, and 2 connected dots is the best day for that week.” For him, sex for money was sex without strings, attachment, or guilt—a transaction.

  But for some it’s the financial transaction itself that is alluring. In the first letter I received I heard from a successful twentysomething who described himself as “attractive and ambitious.” He had a girlfriend—“a wonderful woman”—but there was something about the act of paying for sex, he confessed, that turned him on. “I find the idea of paying for sexual acts to be ero
tic,” he confided. For some men, especially those who are seen as particularly moral or righteous in their public lives (think of all those fallen preachers), part of the appeal is the fact that it is illegal and a moral transgression in their eyes.

  What do the women think about why men come to them? As a companion project to Letters from Johns, I created Letters from Working Girls. While johns are eager to confess, letters from working girls are few and far between. But one high-end call girl I spoke to about the Spitzer affair said there are lots of reasons a man in such a prominent position might seek high-stakes sex with a prostitute. Why not just have an affair, which probably wouldn’t have destroyed his career? She said that Spitzer, if he did use prostitutes, was probably one of those men for whom the payoff was the excitement of doing something really taboo.“What could be more taboo than going to an agency when you’re a crusader for all that is moral and good?” she theorized. “It’s only natural,” this call girl asserted,“that they’d hire a girl to get off.” She speculates that there was probably a “midlife crisis element” there too.

  Of course, Spitzer was no ordinary middle-aged shlub. Agencies like the Emperors Club screen workers and clients alike, and discretion was part of what he’d have been paying for. Followers of Spitzergate have speculated as to what Client 9’s date, Kristen, knew when the club’s booker said that her famous client, who had been described by other girls as a “difficult” customer, “would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe.” The wording might imply something kinky, but it’s more likely that Client 9 was attempting to get Kristen to have sex without a condom—a common and unwelcome request, according to many sex workers. As one self-described twentysomething redhead I heard from (who solicited men on Craigslist to pay off her college loans) asked rhetorically, “How can someone even consider not using a condom with a woman who does it for a living?” That added risk factor may heighten the sexual excitement. For some guys the lure of that particular thrill can obscure any worries about long-term repercussions.

  Over these last months I have seen one common thread in the johns’ stories: many remain conflicted about paying for sex. Was it right? Was it wrong? Is there more going on than just a need for sex? With his career a shambles, Spitzer may soon have more time than he’d like to contemplate those very questions.

  Oldest Profession 2.0: A New Generation of Local “Providers” and “Hobbyists” Create a Virtual Red-Light District

  Keegan Hamilton

  If you’re researching auto repair on the Internet and stumble across www.stlasp.com, you might well hit your web browser’s back button before noticing anything amiss.

  Read on, though, and you’ll raise an eyebrow. “This site is for entertainment purposes only. It is a place where users can post fantasies or stories for other members to view…The information on this site is intended for adult audiences only, by definition, in the state of Missouri, you must be 18 or older to view the information on this site….”

  These folks must really love their cars!

  Beyond the homepage, it quickly becomes evident that “STLASP” stands for “St. Louis Adult Service Providers”—an entirely different kind of body work. Here the “providers” are prostitutes—or, if you like your euphemisms, escorts—and their customers are “hobbyists.” STLASP is the virtual forum in which they discuss everything from gardening to philosophy to how they prefer one another’s pubic hair to be groomed. They alert each other to possible police stings and scam artists in the “Erotic Services” section of Craigslist. And customers—seemingly all of them men—write and post lengthy reviews of their experiences with the call girls.

  An escort herself, the site’s creator says she founded STLASP in June of last year after moving to the St. Louis area from Southern California, where she’d been involved in a nearly identical online community. She found that the message board not only made her job safer by allowing her to screen her clients, it also created a tight-knit network of the region’s online escorts, providing a forum for them to share knowledge, including concerns about potentially dangerous johns.

  “I’m trying to educate the women and give them a chance to feel safe and feel a connection with others that are in the same industry,” says the woman, who agreed to be interviewed for this story on the condition that she not reveal her real name and that she be referred to as “Mac.”

  “There’s a lot of power in numbers. I’m trying to educate them to be as independent as they can and make smart choices.”

  The idea of escorts on the Internet is nothing new—the oldest profession has long embraced twenty-first-century technology. But according to Stacey Swimme, cofounder of sex worker-rights organizations the Desiree Alliance and the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) Mac’s site is part of an emerging national trend: prostitutes have turned to the Internet and small, independently operated message boards as a means of empowerment.

  “From what I’ve been researching about the sex industry over the past twenty-five years, that is the biggest change,” Swimme says. “Providers are talking to each other.That is a force to be reckoned with.That is where political power comes from, is that sort of community-building.”

  STLASP’s “Reviews” section contains more than seven thousand posts. Many are based on a review template in which “hobbyists” share their experiences with local providers.

  Examples:

  Did the ASP’s photos accurately portray her?

  Was she punctual?

  Did she pressure you into tipping?

  And, of course: Activities between consenting adults (what did you do)?

  The reviews are peppered with abbreviations and jargon. An escort might be a “FOTC” (fuck of the century) or a DFE (“dead fish experience”). When johns say “CMD” (carpet matches drapes) or “Hardwood Floors,” they’re referring to their date’s body hair, not her taste in interior decorating.

  While phrases like “She spoke French without an interpreter” and “We took a trip to the Mediterranean” carry one meaning in a newspaper travel section, on STLASP they refer to oral sex without a condom and anal sex, respectively.

  Reviewers may wax passionate: “I would advise you to take your vitamins, drink lots of fluids, eat your Wheaties, and get plenty of rest before your date,” one recently wrote. “She will wear you out.”

  Or merely state the obvious: “The massage is not therapeutic, not a professional style, muscle-relaxing type massage. But if you enjoy a very pretty girl spreading lotion all over your body, you will be pleased.”

  The practice of posting online reviews of escorts dates back about ten years. David Elms, creator of the Erotic Review (www.theeroticreview.com), claims his website was one of the first to encourage men to provide feedback about their clandestine encounters. Reached by phone in his Southern California office, Elms explains that he got the idea after being ripped off by a call girl.

  “It was a way that people could be held accountable for their actions in this industry,” Elms says. “Now girls prefer that they find clients on the Erotic Review. It already tells a guy all the juicy details, so he doesn’t have to ask stupid questions.”

  Elms says his website, created in 1999, now attracts more than 300,000 visitors a day, and that half of the site’s users log on more than once a day. He collects information about each person who registers an account and says the average hobbyist is between thirty-five and fifty-five years old with a median income of eighty thousand dollars.

  From the sex worker-rights perspective, Swimme has no qualms about the commodification that is taking place. She suggests that the practice of posting reviews adds legitimacy to an otherwise illicit transaction. “I think that having reviews in the sex industry to some degree makes a lot of sense,” she says.“It brings it into a realm that says: this is a commercial exchange, a profession, a service.”

  Elms goes as far as to compare the john-escort dynamic to the purchase of expensive electronics: “It’s like a consumer-r
eports magazine that has buyer reviews of car-stereo performance.”

  The quest for rave reviews and the booming business that comes with them can be hypercompetitive. One of the oldest and most popular review websites, bigdoggie.net, issues a twice-daily top-100 ranking of escorts from across the nation based on ratings tallied from user reviews.

  The practice does have its critics.Amanda Brooks, author of The Internet Escort’s Handbook, a three-part series first published in 2006 that professes to “address every question that a woman could ask before she becomes a sex worker who advertises through the Internet,” points out that women can be pressured into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t do, for fear of the online backlash.

  “It has turned into, ‘This girl is totally great, she’s going to do this and this and this,’ ” says Brooks, who also contributes to Bound, Not Gagged, a sex worker-rights blog. “That’s a big problem, because girls will do sex activities that push boundaries, but they do them because they could get a good review and make money.”

  At STLASP, Mac says when she first got into the business, the creator of one review site pressured her to have sex with him in exchange for positive reviews.“He said he could make me or break me because his site was national, and if I was smart I would come visit him and have an appointment with him for free,” she recalls. “I told him no way.”

  Despite that experience, Mac remains a strong advocate of posting the critiques “for the sake of quality control.” She admits, however, to having to frequently mediate disputes about authenticity and accuracy. Several times women have been caught creating fake profiles in order to post positive evaluations of themselves. Once, Mac says, a man posted a negative review that an escort later claimed was completely off base.