by Dan Savage
It isn’t just religious fanaticism that drives young Islamic males to become suicide bombers. It’s also sex—or the want of it.
“In the sight of Allah, the ones who died are the lucky ones,” a Pakistani Muslim told the New York Times in reference to the September 11 terrorists. “They have gone to paradise now, with all the pleasures they have been promised in the Koran. Now they will have girls, and wine, and music, and all the things forbidden to them here on earth. Now they will be happy, as we who remain can never be on earth.”
One of the unexamined aspects of the September 11 attacks was the role that sexual deprivation played in turning young men into mass murderers. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on September 11 came from Saudi Arabia, “a theocratic kingdom that bans dating, cinemas, concert halls, discotheques, clubs, theaters, and political organizations,” the New York Times reported. In Saudi Arabia, “religion and tradition prohibit unmarried men and women from mixing.” Is it any wonder that a certain number of young men in places like Saudi Arabia—where all educational system is all Islam, all the time—will resent people who enjoy all the things that their religion and government forbid?
Like the puritan haunted by the fear that somewhere, someone is happy, the Islamo-fascist is haunted by the fear that somewhere, someone is enjoying the lap dances and the dates and the discos and everything else that his religion forbids him—at least until he gets to heaven. Once he gets to heaven, then he can have all the lap dances and dates and black-eyed virgins he can handle, on just one little condition: He has to die a martyr, which he can do by blowing himself up in an Israeli pizza parlor or flying a plane into the World Trade Center.
“The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings,” Salman Rushdie wrote in The Washington Post on October 2, 2001. “Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult sufferage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. . . .” The Islamic fundamentalists, Rushdie continued, don’t think Westerners believe in anything. “To prove him wrong, we must first know he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreements, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons.”
Reading Rushdie’s comments after September 11 inspired me. Fuck Falwell, fuck Coulter, fuck bin Laden, fuck Walker, fuck fundamentalism, fuck Islamo-Fascism, and fuck plain ol’ Fascism. Committing the sin of anger in New York City would be easy—much easier than it had been in Texas. Blasting away at paper targets at the Bullet Trap in Plano didn’t make me feel angry; if I committed a single sin at the Bullet Trap it was probably the sin of pride. I couldn’t wait to get home and show my friends what a good shot I was, or to indulge my newfound skill at a slightly closer-to-home shooting range. (Have I mentioned what a good shot Paul, my instructor, thought I was?) In New York City, however, I had anger down.
“Why, I wondered, were not more of us angry [after the attacks on September 11]?” William Bennett asked in his quickie post-9/11 book, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. “Why did so many, especially the county’s elite, seem to back away from any hint of righteous anger?”
Huh? Why weren’t more of us angry? Everyone I knew was angry, and everywhere I went I met angry people. But according to Bennett, only a small number of right-thinking conservatives could see that the War on Terrorism was necessary and just. In the same essay in which he dubbed Bennett, Bork, and Buchanan “scolds,” Andrew Sullivan expressed frustration with the right’s inability to take yes for an answer. “As the country becomes more conservative,” Sullivan wrote, “the right sees liberalism everywhere.”
In Why We Fight, William J. Bennett can’t bring himself to take yes for an answer. There’s a reason peace rallies after September 11 were sparsely attended. The overwhelming majority of Americans agreed with Bill Bennett. We said yes. But Bennett and his fellow scolds could only see a resolve-sapping pacifism stoked by leftie cultural critics. Admittedly, some of what the left pumped out immediately after September 11 was idiotic, just as the comments of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were idiotic. Americans were not, however, led down the primrose path by Susan Sontag, Katha Pollitt, and Edward Said. Thoughtful, angry lefties were marching in lockstep with Christopher Hitchens, not Noam Chomsky. We wanted to bomb bin Laden with bombs, and not, as Toni Morrison suggested, love.
“Little schoolchildren in our country are routinely taught to believe that America represents but one of many cultures [and] that there is no such thing as a better or worse society,” Bennett fumes at the end of Why We Fight. Even Americans who believe Western society and culture is superior to that of, say, Saudi Arabia are afraid to speak up, “[because] saying so can get you into trouble.”
Hell, Bill, I’ll speak up: Western culture—liberal democracy, representative government, universal human rights—is superior to Saudi culture. Far superior. Personally, I would rather live in a country where I can buy a drink, kiss a guy, and rent a hooker without risking a public beheading—and like the overwhelming majority of Americans after September 11, I was angry at the people who wanted to take those things away from me, be they Bennett’s enemy bin Laden or Bennett’s buddy Jerry Falwell.
I had never been out on an adult-style date with a woman before. When I was growing up in Chicago, I dated some girls under duress, but those dates didn’t take place in hipster bars and expensive restaurants. We were teenagers on the north side of Chicago in the mid-eighties, so our dates took place in bowling alleys and fast-food restaurants. I felt awkward on those teenage dates because I was dating them only so I could tell my friends and family that I had been on a date with a girl. With Emily I felt awkward because I wasn’t worthy. Even if I had played her particular sport, she was still way out of my league.
It was a little after six o’clock when we arrived at the bar, in a short lull between after-work drinkers and the early evening partiers. Emily and I found a couple of seats together at the bar. There were a lot of men in the bar around my age, and these men looked at me—me in my jeans and T-shirt and tennis shoes—and quickly concluded that I wasn’t worthy. What was an incredibly beautiful woman like Emily doing out on a date with a schmo like me? If I were a few decades older, and wearing a suit, like most of Emily’s customers, they would have assumed she was attracted to older, more powerful men (or attracted to their money), and therefore not a woman they had any chance of getting for themselves. But since she was with me, a poorly dressed guy around their age, the men in the bar assumed they all had a shot. Not only did they have a shot, but I had a woman I clearly didn’t deserve, and they would be doing her a favor by taking her from me.
I could sense the envy emanating from the clumps of youngish men in their business suits, ties loosened or hanging out of their suit jacket pockets. It was fun to be envied, but there was an undercurrent of—well, of violence. Here and there in the bar the men were glaring at me, as if I had something that belonged to them, which in a way I did.
Emily and I were talking about New York—about the attacks, what else?—when one of the other men in the bar decided to do something about his envy. He strolled up to us and stood right behind our bar stools until we turned and looked at him.
“How are you guys doing tonight?” he asked. He was a good-looking guy, bigger than I was. He had a big smile but very small teeth, and his smile exposed two parallel lines of healthy, bright pink gums. He introduced himself and then asked me who I was.
“Are you this lovely lady’s big brother?” Jim said. “Or are you her coworker?”
Jim laughed. Loud. The big brother/coworker question was supposed to be a joke, I guess. Emily laughed, but her laugh began after his did and ended before. She was being polite, deferential, upbeat.
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“No, we’re on a date,” she said, gesturing towards me but—hey!—beaming at Jim!
Jim looked me up and down; then he looked back at Emily. “Where you from?” he said, turning to me.
“Seattle,” I said.
“Shit, I thought all the dot-com boys had gone broke!” He laughed and put his hand on the bar between me and Emily, separating us. Then he turned his back to me. “Those guys didn’t know how to run a business, and they never knew how to dress,” he said, laughing his loud, mean laugh.
“He’s probably spending the last of his stock options to take someone like you out on a date.” Then he handed Emily his card. “Give me a call if things don’t work out with the Microsofty here.”
He stared at me when he called me a softy, smiling his big gummy smile. I think he wanted me to hit him. His gummy smile said, “I’m picking up on your date right in front of you, and what are you going to do about it?” He was clearly an alpha-male type, and I suppose he expected me to challenge him for alpha position, which I refused to do. I like to think of myself as an alpha male—all men do, don’t they?—but I wasn’t up for getting into a fistfight over a woman. Now, if he had attempted to steal my collection of show tune CDs, well, then I would’ve laid him flat. But Emily? He could take her off my hands for fifteen hundred bucks.
Jim lingered for a second, looking at me. I grinned at him, playing dumb. If he wanted to have a fistfight, he would have to throw the first punch. He gave me an angry, imploring look. It was as if he thought I was doing something wrong by not holding up my end of the deal. He seemed to think I was obligated to hit him so that he could hit me and win the girl.
“Let’s go get something to eat,” Emily said, taking my hand. Turning to Jim, she said, “It was great to meet you.”
“Give me a call sometime,” Jim said to Emily. “See you around, softy.”
Emily had made reservations at a restaurant a block from the hotel.
“It’s my favorite restaurant,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll love it.”
Emily’s favorite restaurant was also one of New York City’s more expensive restaurants—and it was on me, of course; high-priced call girls don’t go dutch. While we ate, I couldn’t help but contemplate the sinfulness of paying someone five hundred dollars an hour to eat incredibly expensive food in her favorite restaurant. What sin is this? I wondered to myself while we ate small rounds of goat cheese that cost more than twenty-five dollars each. Was it greed on Emily’s part for making reservations in such a pricey place? Was she getting a kickback from the restaurant? Or was it gluttony, even with tiny portions? Later in the evening, the same thoughts would flit through my head as we sat watching a hit show that’s almost impossible to get tickets to—a show I would wind up paying Emily five hundred dollars an hour to watch. What sin is this? Greed on her part? Or stupidity on mine?
During the walk to the restaurant, I confessed everything—writer, doin’ research, not interested in “hitting it off”—because my pride wouldn’t allow me to let Emily think I was a coward. I didn’t want her to think what I’d done in the bar, or hadn’t done in the bar, made me somehow less of a man. I wasn’t afraid of Jim, I lied. I was taking her to dinner and a show to pick her brain, not her booty, and anyway I wasn’t the kind of guy who gets into drunken fistfights over women. Emily nodded. She’d picked up on that the moment we met in the lobby.
“Usually when I meet a man at his hotel the first thing out of his mouth isn’t, ‘Wow, I totally love your jacket.’ ”
While she would normally shoot down any guy who tried to pick her up when she was with a client (“Clients appreciate that”), Emily thought the guy was pretty cute, she liked aggressive men, and she didn’t think it would bother me. After all, I liked her jacket.
The restaurant she took me to was one of those hushed places, where the tables are incredibly close together, making it nearly impossible to have a private conversation; it was the kind of restaurant where white, well-off New Yorkers gather to discuss the cartoons in that week’s issue of The New Yorker. The food was tremendous, and we ordered quite a lot of it; yes, this was definitely gluttony. There were only four other couples in the restaurant the night we went, and we were off in a corner by ourselves, which made it possible for me and Emily to talk shop.
“Business has been way off,” Emily confided. “Not for the twenty-dollar blow-job crowd—their clients are local. But the vast majority of my clients are rich businessmen from out of town or overseas. They haven’t been coming to New York City, obviously, so for me business is way, way down. It’s been hard.”
While Emily’s business may have been down after September 11, PONY’s Quan said that wasn’t necessarily the case for other New York City prostitutes.
“I don’t know very many prostitutes who rely very much on tourists for their income,” said Quan. “Anyone who makes their living as a prostitute is looking to have regular clients, who tend to be local. Tourists are not regular clients. When people are being tourists, they’re often traveling with someone, like their family. That doesn’t make seeing a prostitute very easy.”
Business travelers, however, do make good clients. “Business travel was way off after September 11,” said Quan, “and prostitutes who do most of their trade with business travelers were losing money. Higher-end, three- and four-hundred-dollar-an-hour prostitutes had the most to lose. I also know some people who had clients that died on September 11.”
Emily’s business was gone, she said, because before September 11 she had carved out a niche serving Japanese and Taiwanese businessmen (“They adore—and will pay a lot for—tall blondes!”), and they weren’t coming to town. She had an established group of regular clients, and she had stopped advertising her services. A few weeks after September 11, she was forced to put her Web site back up.
“I needed to get some new clients,” she said, “some men who didn’t have to fly to the city to see me.”
Emily was everything she claimed to be in her Web site—beautiful, fun, charming, sexy. Emily wasn’t a student, however, and this came as a shock to me. I was so invested in the paying-my-way-through-college-escort stereotype that I assumed Emily was doing postgraduate work somewhere or other.
“How long do you plan to keep doing this?” I asked. “If you’re not going to school, what do you plan on doing when you get out of this line of work?”
Emily set her spoon down—we were working on desserts by this point—and shot me a disapproving look.
“Why would I get out of this line of work?” she said. “I’m making good money, and I live really well in the greatest city on earth. I work a few hours a night, three or four nights a week, and I have the rest of my time to myself.”
“But you won’t always make good money doing this,” I replied.
“Gravity comes for everyone.”
She shrugged, then cracked her lavender crème brûlée with her spoon. In the first two years she was escorting, Emily sank every cent into a two-bedroom condo, which she now owned outright.
“Whatever happens, I’ll always have a place to live.”
What will she do for income when she gets older?
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll do domination work,” she said. “I’ll set up a dungeon in my extra bedroom. There’s good money in that, and you can do that until you’re fifty.”
“So you’re happy doing what you’re doing indefinitely?”
“I’m a ho. I like being a ho. Are you happy doing what you’re doing indefinitely?”
“Yeah, but I don’t have to see people naked or—”
“Or what?”
“I don’t have to have sex with people I’m not attracted to.”
“You’re beginning to annoy me a little,” Emily said, smiling at me, a singsong lilt in her voice. “I just want to get that on the table. I mean, do you know how many married women have sex with someone they’re not attracted to every time they have sex with the husband? And what makes you think I au
tomatically have sex with people?”
“Uh, the naked pictures? The hints on your Web site?”
“I don’t have sex with anyone I don’t want to have sex with. Men buy my time, that’s all, and what—”
“—what happens between two consenting adults is perfectly legal.”
“If I’m with a man I find attractive, something might happen. If I’m not attracted to him, nothing happens.”
“Don’t the guys expect it, though? Don’t they get angry if you don’t put out?”
“I guess you could say I’m attracted to a lot of different kinds of men. I would do you, for instance, even though you’re not really my type.”
“Well, if you had a dick,” I said, “I’d definitely be into you.”
“Thanks, I wouldn’t be into you in a nonprofessional context,” Emily continued, turning the spoon. She cocked her head to one side and squinted at me, as if she were trying to picture me naked. “No, I’m very much into muscular men, especially men who are at least a few inches taller than I am. That’s what I love, and it’s hard to find.”
How big? How muscular?
“I like that classic V shape, a lot of muscle, no facial hair. Big, ripped guys, without an ounce of fat, but a little rough around the edges. The guy I moved here with looked like Henry Rollins. He thought he was Henry Rollins, too, but he only looked like him. That’s my type. My current boyfriend is six-six and all muscle.”
I asked Emily if her boyfriend minded the line of work she was in. She shrugged as she scooped up the last of her crème brûlée with her spoon.
“Why should he mind?” Emily said. “He’s in the business himself.”
It was almost midnight when the show ended. Emily walked me back to my hotel, and thanked me for dinner and the show. Then she informed me I owed her another fifteen hundred dollars, since we’d been together six hours. We had to leave the hotel to find a cash machine. I had hoped Emily might not charge me for the three hours we spent watching a hit show, but times were tight. (“I promise to put your money into my IRA,” Emily joked, “so that you don’t have to worry about me when I’m old.”) By the time I got back up to my room, I had calculated just how much money I’d dropped into New York City’s battered economy since arriving in the city eight hours earlier: $500 for the hotel room, $200 for theater tickets, $200 for dinner, $40 for drinks in the bar, $30 for a cab from the airport; and $3,000 for Emily—$3,970 total. I didn’t pay any state or local sales taxes on most of the money, since the lion’s share of it went to Emily, and Emily is officially part of the underground economy. But the money I gave her had to surface sooner or later. When Emily spent my $3,000 on food, clothes, and her condo’s monthly dues, she would be paying taxes.