Twice today I took off my clothes: once at the dungeon, and once in a painting studio.

Near the end of the evening’s painting class, I strolled the room in my robe and looked from easel to easel. My favorites are the short gesture studies — they capture movement. I love seeing my poses turned each into a glorious squiggle of ink. If my body could talk, these symbols are what it would say. Each would be a new punctuation mark, its own variety of exclamation point, encompassing its own world of meanings.

A couple of the women came up to me to tell me how brave I was, how beautiful, and to apologize for not “doing me justice” in their paintings. None of the men said anything.

It was well-meant, and appreciated as such, but perhaps misinformed. I thought the women were projecting. All sorts of people do art modeling, people of all ages and shapes and from all walks of life. At an art class I never expect my shape (besides some presence thereof) to be commented upon. The affirmation was downright weird. You must be scared, it said to me; let me reassure you.

Being naked on its own doesn’t make me feel vulnerable. My deepest fear is the humiliation of nodding off during a 45-minute pose — no joke, if you know the soporific effect of quiet and warm lights. Though I suppose there’s also the willingness to self-deprecation required to invent and strike a bunch of idiotic theatrical poses.

Bravery? That’s every time you are alone in a room with a man. Odds are that he is larger than you, and it matters very little who’s dominant, or whether you plan to fuck him, or how: your safety is still, in a very real way, in his oversized hands.

Bravery is when you hear your mother’s voice saying “I told you not to!” and instead you listen to the voice of reason saying, “No one asks to be raped.” And you go out there, dressed like that, and you drink and you laugh and stay out til then, and let yourself fucking live.

Bravery is handing over your physical safety, trusting your top to do terrifying and painful things with your body, but not ever to harm you.

Bravery is telling a complete stranger that it’ll be a thousand dollars to fuck you for the hour, never knowing how he’ll react.

Bravery is fucking, or dancing for, or playing with someone you don’t really like — with compassion and kindness and respect.

Bravery is hearing strangers’ opinions about you every day — your appearance, your intelligence, your life choices, your education — taking none of it to heart, thanking them all graciously, and trying to mean it.

Bravery is being good to the people who don’t deserve it, as well as the people who do. It’s sharing intimate things: your body, your caring, your closeness.

Bravery is assuming that everyone deserves it. It stops before foolhardiness by amending, “as you reasonably can”. Definitions of reasonable will, of course, vary.

It would be so easy to be cruel to these men. They always assume I will be (which stings, but what can you do?); sometimes they even ask for it, to call them pathetic and make fun of their kinks. I can’t. That kind of bitterness lingers, even if it was summoned in play, and it eats at the soul.

Maybe it would be easier, when they are cruel to me, if I could hate them. When clients ask if I’m “lifestyle” I always say yes and cringe on the inside, knowing they hear something entirely absent from my definition. Being a perv doesn’t make me bigger and badder and meaner. I’m crippled in cruelty by my own desires. Like them, I want this — more than they’ll ever know.

Bravery is acting on the extraordinary, radical proposition that people are people. In the face of their own insufferability, of sex-work stigma, of fear, of feminist criticism — to treat clients like people takes balls.

Taking off my clothes to be an art model? Not even fucking close.

That’s just being naked.

Posted in feminism, sex work, whores, activism, shame, rape, stereotypes