Excerpt: Nothing But My Body by Tilly Lawless
ENLISTING THIS EIGHTY-YEAR- OLD CLIENT TO TAKE PHOTOS of me. I’m surprised he even knows how to use an iPhone. He’s excited, thinking they’re for his benefit. He’s already slipped me his email, even though it’s against the rules – but who am I kidding, everyone does it. He’s wanting to banter with me about it; I want to say, Mate, don’t forget, this is a customer service job. You might be a sweet client, and by that I mean an easy-client-who-tips-well client, but you’re still a client and I don’t bother with photos for clients. Don’t forget, mate, that though you see me as nude, naked of clothes and context, I am in fact crackling with emotion, a cellophane snap clinging to me from my personal life. That’s how I came to be sobbing in this room two weeks ago while a client fucked me in doggy. He hadn’t done anything wrong, mind – he was a sweet client, and by that I mean an easy-client-who-tips-well client – but a Teyana Taylor song came on that got me good, and I pretended I was gagging to be pounded so I could have my private mourn into the massage parlour table. He didn’t know; thought my shoulders shuddered with pleasure, I suppose. Just like you don’t know that my orgasm just then was fake, that I was watching the clock in the reflection to time it out perfectly, that while your head was between my legs I winked at myself in the mirror, as if my reflection was another working girl who was in on the joke. Hey girl, I said to myself, you’re going good, you’re looking good, you’re moaning good, you’ve got a lot to offer the world and with this old man you’re hitting $360 – not bad for a Saturday day shift. And then I counted the money again, realised my moan had turned into a metronome, had a beat like the monologue in my head, and I needed to stop flirting with my reflection and come already. Mate, you wouldn’t even know that last time my orgasm with you was really real, that I was disgusted that I managed to come even through the dusting of dandruff falling on my torso, that I wanted to scrub my clit off with a rock, expunge your saliva from where your mouth had sat like an engorged tick. So, mate, you really have no idea, mate, what is going on in my head at the moment – just take the bloody photo. So I can look hot on my Instagram, coz I’ve already spent enough time playing hot for you.
He takes them. They’re okay. I might post one later, if I’m up for the interactions that follow. I selfie less than I used to. For such a long time it was a part of my daily life. At fifteen I took photos of myself to send to strangers online, sounding out my sexuality and coming to terms with my body as a ‘desired’ object, awkwardly posing in an attempt to be alluring, digital camera on self-timer, background more interesting than me. At eighteen, it was a way for me to reclaim that same body from the touch of men on the street, a way I could assert my control over it and block those who made me feel vulnerable within it, when in the real world you can’t block, you’re so often at the mercy of, scared. Through my uni degree I selfied as a form of procrastination, just as I masturbated far more than I ever have before. In my single early twenties I sent photos to entice, to feel excited and build a flirtation with a person, to feel a thrill of power with the exposure, knowing that they wanted me and I was gifting them with the knowledge that I wanted them too – it was simply foreplay.
In the last few years I’ve stopped taking them. Don’t feel the desire or the need. Why not? Is it because I’m in a relationship and don’t need the validation? But I never thought selfies were about vanity or insecurity; they were a form of self-expression. (I don’t masturbate anymore either, because I use clients to satiate me, close my eyes and come on their cock if it’s an okay shape and they’re not fucking me too badly.)
The irony is that it’s weakened my words, because without a ‘hot’ photo of me to interest people, my posts are less likely to show up in people’s feeds due to the awful algorithm. Instagram deletes a woman for nudity but encourages us to post thirst traps to be seen. I just can’t be bothered with them, though. I see enough of myself reflected in buildings as I walk through the city to a booking, or in the mirrors of a brothel room. I feel sickened by the oversaturation of images, just as I am deadened by compliments after years of being showered with them by men I do not care for. My body has been a tool that I’ve wielded, but it’s also something I just live in every day, that I’m comfortable with and no longer itch to record in order to assert my personhood on the world. I can’t tell if that means I’m missing a curiosity I once had, or if it means I’m feeling satisfied in ways I wasn’t before.
Oh, time’s up! He showers and I ask him about his plans for the rest of the day while I replace the towels and mop up his mess. My wrist aches, that old RSI inflamed from pulling him off – I really need to move back to brothel work, which will mean looking up brothels I haven’t worked at before as I can’t bring myself to go back to any of those other ones, the idea of those fell places now sickens my soul.
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This is an edited extract from Nothing But My Body by Tilly Lawless, Allen & Unwin, RRP $29.99, available now (3rd August). You can get your copy here.
Check out our interview with Tilly here.
Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker who uses her online platform to speak about her personal experiences, to shine a light on the everyday stigma that sex workers come up against. Tilly now lives in Sydney but grew up in rural NSW. Her writing is often a bucolic love letter to the countryside that she comes from, and a deeply intimate insight into queer romance and relationships. You can read her writing in various publications, but it's best going straight to the source and reading it from her Instagram, @tilly_lawless.