I just had something of an epiphany.
I’ve been thinking about Margot. A woman about whom I’ve written but not yet posted publicly. Someone who does sex work, whom I met a while ago, with whom I’ve had two encounters, and for whom I’ve been working on a post. I was trying to revise what I’d written — how I understand her, how I relate to her, what I want to say about her — when I found myself asking: how does Margot see me?
When she bites her lower lip, seductively, charmingly, and performs a sort of hungry, horny enthusiasm — how real is that? How authentic? And how much of it is, in fact, a performance?
I can’t know. I’ll never know.
And that’s when it hit me.
My early childhood, my middle childhood, my late childhood, my adolescence — all were characterized by inauthenticity, by performance, by fraud. My parents raised me to believe that my father was straight. That their separation and divorce had been a conventional 1970s story of a couple falling out of love. When I was seventeen, my dad told me the truth: that thirteen years earlier, he had come out to my mother as gay, and she had left.
So my whole childhood took place inside a funhouse of distortion. Things I thought I saw, I was told I didn’t see. Things I should have seen, I missed entirely. There was a slightly psychotic relationship between experience, thought, and reality.
I entered adulthood primed with a psychic template shaped by this. And sex work is, in some ways, an orgasmic strategy — or really a compulsion — toward the repetition of some of these dynamics. In the thirty or thirty-five years in which I’ve intermittently, repeatedly, periodically, compulsively, dissociatedly, shamefully engaged with sex workers, I’ve had just about every kind of emotional experience you might imagine. But running through all of them has been this tension, this question: What’s the relationship between physical and psychic reality? What’s the relationship between performance and truth? What’s a lie? What’s an accurate portrayal of truth? Does she love me? Is she for real? Can I trust what she says? Or is she deceiving me for her own (selfish? mercenary?) purposes?
These are questions I didn’t learn how not to ask as a child.
As an adult, engaging with sex work is a maladaptive but compelling way for me to continually rework, repeat, and revisit this psychic trauma. It didn’t occur to me — until just now — that wondering about Margot’s performativity is, in some way, a repetition of the wondering I must have done about my parents. About what they told me. Whether I could trust my mother. Whether I should believe my father.
Margot and her ilk allow me to repeat the self-destructive living-through of the fantasy that my perceptions reflect reality — that the world is as it appears to me.
Tragically, as with most psychic repetitions, the repetition is launched in hopes of a different outcome. But with alarming, distressing, relentless, predictable certainty, it lands in the same place the original did: in the learning that my fantasies are fantasies. That I was, in fact, deceived. That the love I craved was elsewhere.
That the treat I imagined I saw was a mirage.
