I swear down the latest think tank report dropped into my inbox this morning and I nearly threw the laptop across the flat. Another thirty seven pages of carefully worded concern about power and vulnerability and the need for more funding streams. They had charts. They had quotes from academics who have never stood in a room with a woman who just paid a man two hundred pounds to make her come until her legs gave out. They talked about patriarchy like it is a set of policies you can tweak with the right legislation. Listen babes it is not. Patriarchy lives in the assumption that a man’s cock is the main character and everything else is supporting cast. When women start paying men to stay in the supporting role for the entire booking that assumption starts looking shaky as fuck.
I have been sitting with this for months now. Not the abstract version. The version where I have actually spoken to women who did it. One of them was a nurse from Chelmsford who hired a bloke off AdultWork after her divorce because she was tired of explaining to dates that she wanted to be touched first and for a long time. She told me he arrived, asked what she needed, and then spent the next two hours with his mouth and hands and nothing else. She said she kept waiting for the moment he would shift position and start hinting. It never came. She paid him, he left, and she sat on her sofa afterwards feeling like she had committed a crime. That is the part no report captures. The guilt that arrives even when you are the one holding the cash. We have been trained so hard to believe our pleasure is extra that receiving it without immediately giving something back feels like theft.
Think tanks love to talk about sex work as exploitation in one direction only. Woman sells, man buys, power imbalance obvious. Fine. That happens. A lot. But they go quiet when the money reverses. Suddenly it is complicated. Suddenly we need more studies. Suddenly it might not count as real feminism. I have heard every version of that argument in comment sections and group chats. If she is paying him is she still oppressed. If he is choosing to give without taking is he still part of the problem. The questions themselves give the game away. We only interrogate the setup when it stops looking like the familiar script. Male desire as unstoppable force, female desire as something that has to be earned or managed or hidden. Flip who pays and the force suddenly looks a lot more optional.
I used to believe the optional part was rare. Like one in a thousand unicorns. Then I started asking around properly. Not official interviews with recorders and consent forms first. The quiet ones. A hairdresser in Romford who went to the same bloke three times and never once had to put her mouth on him. A teacher from Southend who said the session felt more like being looked after than being fucked. She used that word looked after and then laughed because it sounded mental coming out of her mouth. These are not rich women playing at decadence. These are women who work shifts and pay rent and still decided the one thing they wanted to spend money on was a man who would not make the afternoon about him. That choice tells you more about how desire actually works than another literature review ever will.
The shame is the mechanism that keeps the old order running. Even the women who loved it still lowered their voices when they told me. Like they were confessing something dirty instead of describing a service they paid for fairly. One of them said she deleted the number afterwards because she did not want her friends finding out she had been that greedy. Greedy. For wanting to come more than once without reciprocating. We have language for men who want that. We call it normal. We call it healthy male sexuality. When a woman wants the same thing we reach for words that make her sound broken or selfish or tricked. I have done it myself. Caught myself thinking she must have been lonely or damaged to need that. Then I remembered every man I have ever slept with who came first and rolled over and I had to laugh at my own hypocrisy. The system is inside us. It does not need a think tank to keep operating.
I tried pitching this angle to an editor last week. Progressive outlet, the kind that runs pieces about decolonising desire and smashing the male gaze. She liked the hook until I got to the part where women are the clients. Then the emails got shorter. Maybe focus on the exploitation side, she wrote. Maybe find a trafficking angle. The story she wanted was the one that confirms what we already know. Men take, women endure or resist. A story where women take the service and walk away satisfied without giving anything back does not fit the template. It makes the template look incomplete. That is why it matters. Not because male escorts are going to save feminism. Because they prove the script can be rewritten in small rooms for a few hours at a time and the sky does not fall in.
My own history sits right next to all of this and I cannot pretend it does not. Years of saying yes when I meant not yet. Years of finishing myself off in the bathroom afterwards because he was already asleep. I used to call that compromise. Now it just looks like training. We train girls to be grateful for whatever they get. We train boys that their urgency is natural law. Then we act surprised when the women who can afford to opt out of that training for one afternoon still feel like they have broken a rule. I felt it researching this. Not in the dramatic way. In the quiet way. Late at night after another conversation, staring at the ceiling, wondering why the idea of being the only one who comes still felt like I was getting away with something. That feeling is the evidence. You cannot graph it. You can only notice it and decide whether you are going to keep obeying it.
Some of the men who do this work talk about it like a skill they learned rather than a sacrifice. One I spoke to (off record, obviously) said he got more satisfaction from the control of holding back than from finishing himself. That sentence stayed with me. Control. Not repression. Not martyrdom. A choice about where to put his attention. If some men can choose that for money then the idea that they cannot choose it in the rest of their lives starts looking like a convenient story. Convenient for them. Convenient for the system that tells women to expect less and call it realism. I am not saying every man should become a professional giver. I am saying the existence of men who already are should make us ask better questions about what we have accepted as inevitable.
The reports will keep coming. They will recommend better regulation and more support services and awareness campaigns. All useful in their way. None of them will tell you what it feels like to pay a man to ignore his own arousal for the length of a booking and then sit with the aftershock of having been the priority for once. That aftershock is political. It is the body noticing it has been settling. It is the mind trying to decide whether settling was ever necessary. I keep coming back to that nurse from Chelmsford. She said the best part was not the orgasms. It was the hour afterwards when she did not have to perform gratitude or offer a hand job she did not want to give. She just existed in her own skin without immediately making it about him. Imagine if that was not a paid exception. Imagine if it was just one of the ways people could be with each other. The think tanks are not ready for that sentence. Most days I am not sure I am either. But I keep writing it down anyway because pretending the question does not exist is how the old arrangement survives another year. And I am bored of surviving it.