Sex & language
My high school teacher called the other day. I hadn’t spoken to him in like forever. Well, since high school. He was a unique type, largely misunderstood and laughed at by the high school community of teachers and students. He talked about how emotional energies and vibrations could change the molecular structure of water and brought photographs of his aura to class. Of course, nobody took him seriously and his classes were considered snooze-time in between real education. I liked him a lot. I liked the ideas he attempted to discuss with us, despite being on the fringes of woo woo and cuckoo. I appreciated his effort to introduce soul and softness into the rational rigid curriculum and for that accepting to be branded as a lone loony.
Students who sat in the same camp as me were very few and far between but they existed. We were a handful of curious kids and he offered to run an extracurricular weekly meet-up for us. He called it 'philosophy workshop' and we met every Monday afternoon in the school’s tiny library, I hadn’t even known existed, to talk about Sufism and Rumi or discuss intuition and the energetics of emotion.
We usually began the workshop with meditation. It was simple and I am not even sure we ever used the term meditation. Meditation was not a thing at that time in rural Germany and for all I knew nobody but my out-there uncle in Switzerland meditated. My uncle was an award-winning physicist and artist and a passionate meditator - still is. One of my earliest childhood memories is observing him sit cross-legged and still on a patch of grass. There, but absent, not accessible, tuned in someplace else. I have always felt a little intimidated by his presence since then, not measuring up to his grandness.
My teacher was different. He made spirituality seem like a simple everyman’s thing. What I now understand was meditation he introduced as nothing but a few minutes of breathing, slowing down, and checking in with ourselves with closed eyes.
I liked him a lot. While other teachers were amused by his quirkiness and didn’t respect him as a professional equal, I thought his classes were the most important ones. He taught me things I remembered and gave me access to knowledge that actually mattered.
So that’s what I told him when I wrote him an email last spring after finally getting hold of his address. My phone rang the very next day and when I heard his voice, which hadn’t changed in all these years, I was thrown right back into the intimacy of Monday school library meet-ups.
“So get this,” he said, “the week right before I got your email I thought of you! A couple of times actually! How much I enjoyed teaching you!”
“Wow, that is crazy!” I said but was it really? He and I had a connection back then and maybe connections don’t do timelines. We chatted a bit about those absurd times we are in, what retirement life was like for him and what Berlin life was like for me.
When he finally asked the inevitable “so, what are you doing now?!” question I hesitated for a moment, scanning thoughts, possibilities, and outcomes. I hadn't really expected this call. I hadn’t prepared. My heart began beating faster and I tried to keep my voice calm and confident.
“Well, I used to work in advertising”, I began. This is always how I begin when someone holding authority asks the “what do you do?” question, which really is code for how do you spend your life, which really is code for are you successfulwhich really is code for are you monetizing yourself and your time on earth in a way that pleases society and/or capitalism? Okay, maybe he would not judge so harshly. He was an outsider too after all. Still. I was nervous.
I differentiate between authority figures and people I have assigned authority to. I have always struggled with subordinating due to titles only. Bosses, celebrities, other high-power people - I am not impressed by status if it isn’t backed up by substance. My teacher held authority because he was wise. I looked up to him and I wanted him to be proud. Pleased at least. How do you tell a person you look up to that you are an escort now? How do you tell someone who was once impressed by your potential that you have chosen sex work? How do you do that in a world that is so unaware of the layers of heteronymous bias around it? Around sex in general?
I do it by using traditional achievements as a trojan horse.
It goes something like this:
Them: “So, what do you do now?”
Me: “I went to university overseas and studied art and then I worked in advertising and then I wrote a book that got published and the book is about stripping because I also did that and now I am an escort, so that’s what I do now, I am an escort.”
My hope is that by entering the chat with mainstream successes I lay the soil for what’s about to come and establish the fact that I chose sex work despite having access to other options. I did that and still chose this. Not sure if it makes any difference. I'm holding on to straws.
And it sounds easy enough in English, doesn’t it, but I am German and my teacher is German and while I tend to work almost exclusively in the English-speaking (sex work) world I live in a German world and I struggle to communicate one to the other.
Language translates our soul so others may understand us some. So we are a little less alone.
When our language sounds like we feel this is beautiful. But every language has its own soul and when the two don’t match it becomes alienating.
I have always struggled to express my thoughts and feelings about sex and sex work in my mother tongue, which is odd considering I have much more vocabulary to chose from in German. But German is heavy and the German language around sex is even heavier. Words are covered in thick dusty layers of shame and judgment, like old grease, so sticky it’s almost impossible to scrub off. Like scruffy old tools, too filthy to fix, dirt too sticky to even bother cleaning. I would much prefer to just throw all these words in the trash and get new ones.
In English, I find it easy to talk about what I do. I enjoy sharing my take on sexuality and the work. In German, I feel I already failed to get my point across before I have even started. The judgment I have to talk against is so sticky already, I need clean words to work with at least.
Speaking about sex(work) in German feels like doing open-heart surgery with rusty old knives.
How can we communicate against shame if the words we use carry it all?
My teacher asked for the title of my book and said he would definitely read it. When he said his phone might die soon and that I should just call again in a little while I was relieved and lied that I had to go anyway. We said goodbye and said that was great and said yes, we should definitely do that again very soon, like how about in the next few days? I said for sure and that I’d call again soon.
I hung up and felt funny. Did I overshare? Did I overwhelm? Was it tmi? The gifted young student now a hooker? He said he was going to read my book. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Does everybody need to know all of your Yous? He was an old man now. I was no longer a young girl.
I didn’t dare to call back and when I did after almost a month, his wife answered, said he wasn’t home but that she’d tell him I called. We never talked again.