When my wife Marley and I started dating, I felt like a toxic man. I warned her as much. Any little tiff or disagreement and I’d remind her, “I don’t know what to tell you, I’m bad news.” “I’m a jerk.” I was two years off a horrible divorce and had internalized the deep confusion and pain and rejection of that experience. Shame, anger, the whole sadboi shebang.
When Marley re-entered my life after a decade-long hiatus, I had recently resigned myself to not being capable of being in a long-term relationship. I said I’d have one wild-sex girlfriend, one travel girlfriend, and one art girlfriend. My grand plan was that they would each be fulfilled and fulfill me in particular ways and that this made sense for me. That was how I would stay the same and never change and also be happy and make three women 1/3 happy. I even wrote a book on how to be an ethical player.
I really wanted Marley to engage with this story and believe me. Actually, when I first made contact with Marley, it was because I had found out through the grapevine that she was a tantric healer and I wanted to hire her to do a session with me and my chosen travel girlfriend to work through some blockages so we could be a bit more harmonious in the bedroom. At the time, I didn't know anything about the wide range and depth of erotic work but I knew it was something I wanted to know more about.
It started with dinner. I didn’t bring my travel girlfriend because Marley and I knew each other in high school, and it felt like a little reunion. We were always flirty, but nothing too romantic ever happened. We went to lunch once when she was a sophomore and I was a junior, but she was turned off because I drove too fast and aggressively. Several years later, we went on a little walk-date while I was home visiting from college. We ended up fighting about God and didn’t speak to one another for almost a decade. This time was different. On June 7th, 2019, after our dinner at Elf in Silverlake, and just 6 months before the COVID-19 debacle, Marley and I made out in the 1989 Jaguar that her ex-boyfriend bought her.
I felt a deep kind of turned-on that pulsed through every inch of my body. She came over the next day to drop off her dog for me to dogsit while she went to work.
We had sex I will never forget. Loving and sweet.
We took this photo after:
“I’m not ready for a commitment.” “What is this?” “What are your expectations?” These were the sorts of things I was saying and thinking, on top of, “Do I have to pay for this time with her? How does this work? Does she have STDs?” Fear pulsed through me alongside love and excitement.
Thankfully, she really didn’t really pay attention to my words. Instead, she noticed my well-appointed house, and my joy in cooking and cleaning. She often remembers a linchpin of her falling in love with me when she watched me stuffing my pillows into the washing machine just to freshen them up.
Agreements
Months before our date, I had watched a Vice special featuring interviews with sex workers. There was one John who was socially awkward and had been seeing the same sex worker for several years. I remember watching them side by side talking about their relationship. They loved each other so much. Yes, even though he paid her every single time.
I began to unravel America’s confusing relationship with sex and money. Two strangers can’t have sex for money legally, but if someone is capturing it on the video to sell the recording, it’s legal. Capitalism requires a middleman. That’s why middlemen always promise to cut out the middle man. This principle exposes multiple not-so-secret secrets about how and why the heterosexual capitalist patriarchy operates the way it does. On the one hand, money is the goal. Money is power, and this power allows you to protect and feed your family. In order to get that money, you have to operate as the middleman or alongside a middleman in some scheme to collect (or hoard) that power.
Females are not-so secretly the embodied power centers of our entire civilization. Think Helen of Troy, think of the importance of population growth for an economy, think, think, think of how a woman’s body is policed like the SEC polices the stock market. Everything policed is policed because it is incredibly valuable, and powers that be want to keep that power in check. In Marley’s own words, taboos are often taboo not because they are destructive to participants and communities, but because they are so powerful they uproot existing power structures in a way that scares those who feed on power for their own self-worth.
Now, paired with this money-making game is also the idea that getting rich taints someone forever: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.”
So, which one is it, Christian America? “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, hustle, make it big, and live happily ever after,” or “if you hoard money, you’re going to burn in hell.” It makes my head spin.
Within this confusion, women are told they are not allowed to sell access to their bodies directly. We can sell fucking square pillows, poisonous products and toxic food, ocean-polluting plastics, bee-killing chemicals. We can blow up the planet with dynamite to make kitchen tables, we can chop down the rain forest, but a woman can’t touch your dick for a few hundred dollars. Why?
The party line is to help stop sex trafficking. Of course, decriminalizing sex work would actually make legitimate sex work businesses more attractive to people and put fewer people at risk because you’d be able to tell what is seedy and what is empowered and above board. Read the room, men. When you meet a sex worker, can you not tell if they are being trafficked and in a dangerous situation? Have you tried looking them in their eyes? If any population needs to be policed in order to counteract sex trafficking, it is men, not women.
It’s worth noting that Marley thinks Sugar Babying is usually exploitative of women, placing disproportionate power in the hands of men, and the term is used in this article as more of a figurative notion (money in relationships) vs. really calling Marley my sugar baby.
So—Marley and I had sex. But I also knew that providing intimacy was more or less her job. I wanted to pay her. But paying her felt weird. But it also made sense. As a book editor, if I were dating someone who suddenly wanted me to be their full-time editor, I’d probably want some financial security in that exchange. Editing is my job.
A few weeks into dating, I ordered an additional credit card on my account with Marley’s name on it. I left it in my office drawer to see how it felt in my hands. One day, when the urge still felt real, I presented a platinum Amex with her name on it. In a stunning show of toxic masculinity and fragility, I immediately became scared of her excitement. I stopped trusting her.
I asked outright, “Are you just with me for my money?”
She answered my question with another question, “Are you just with me for my pussy?”
“Yes and no,” I said.
“Same.”
And from there, we had a good talk about what the money actually meant.
I explained outright that what the credit card meant to me was that I would like to trade her financial stability for some emotional stability in my healing from the divorce.
I asked her what she needed from the agreement. She said, “Yes, financial stability and someone to do mundane things with, like grocery shopping and cooking.”
She asked me what I wanted exactly, and I said, “A lot of blow jobs and as little drama as possible.”
What I meant by as little drama as possible was that I wanted her to give me more leeway than most girlfriends might. I wanted to be free to be toxic momentarily because my heart was intent on getting clean, but it was still hurt. I wanted her help regulating and landing back in my body. I needed her to sift through the quagmire my last relationship left me soaking in and really bring me back to life.
She did. While previous women had made me feel shame for thinking of my ex-wife and lamenting the loss, Marley held space for me while I grieved. Such are the benefits of marrying a tantrika. Little by little, I paid Marley to heal me deeply and truly. Without the use of pharmaceuticals, without any retreats, without requiring some short-term Tinder date to do emotional labor for me in her free time (what most people call dating), and without leaving anyone in my dust.
This is the power that the government polices because they have no role in it. There is not even much to regulate.
Will every sex work use case be as pure and delightful as Marley and mine? No, but it’s the same for every industry. There are well-intentioned car makers, and there is Volkswagon lying to the world while they pollute the planet. There is locally brewed beer, and there is Natty Light. They’re both beers, but they are completely different.
Heterosexual relationships have always been sex work, but they have always been unilateral agreements to benefit men. The women give the dowry to the man’s family. The origin of the word fiancé is financier. The act of having sex and then a woman having a baby months later is quite literally called going into labor. Sex + Work = Being a Mother. And while women weren’t allowed to have power in the man’s world—bank accounts, education, political suffrage—they were paid some penance through jewelry and gifts. You see, the line between sex work and sugar baby and wife has always been really thin. The only difference now is that the agreements are formalized mutually rather than unilaterally. On a recent episode of the podcast “Slumflower Hour,” host Chidera Eggerue (aka Slumflower) calls this new dynamic “a reparations-based relationship.”
Now, I understand this sort of explicit transaction or agreement between Marley and I might strike some of you as bizarre. After all, reparations are usually considered a government program rather than a relational requirement. But I also know that many women reading have done a lot of emotional labor for the men they have dated or married and may have even supported them financially at the same time. But in the words of The Slumflower, “An entry-level sort of revenge against men [aka reparations] is simply choosing to not date men who can’t do anything for you [financially] because a lot of men see that as an act of violence toward them… You having boundaries and standards is seen as you essentially being violent towards men— because they feel entitled to you. And when you really sit with that information…doesn’t that make you see men in a way where you don’t wanna just be willing to just give yourself to them anyhow? And when I say ‘give yourself to them,’ I mean giving them your time, I mean giving them access to your body, [and] I mean giving them resources that are coming out of your own limited resources.”
Agreements Change
But now we have kids. I can’t be toxic and demand blowjobs all day for a few grocery trips worth money. And Marley doesn’t have the bandwidth to sex shaman every emotional blockage of mine.
This was a hard transition for us. Four years into our relationship with two kids, the agreement has changed. We’re still navigating it. Our little agreement has turned into real love and more or less traditional marriage (except for the odd threesome occasionally, but I think that’s becoming traditional for our generation). But being a parent while in relationship in a political and financial system that is clearly sick and dying is the most trying of endeavors.
What are our roles? What life do we want? How should we relate to one another, friends, family, the land, and money?
We Can Do It!
While 1st wave feminism did its best to find equality, it just jammed women into masculine roles without ever stopping to think that men made this world and that women playing their stupid games wouldn’t fix anything. It ended up siphoning power away from the feminine even more. If you are a female and you love your job, that’s amazing. But if you hate your job and are splitting the phone bill with your man, you should be pissed at first-wave feminism for that bullshit. In my opinion, traditional marriage was natural and fine, but could just do without domestic abuse, financial domination, lack of suffrage, constant degradation, etc. etc. But instead, it was decided that if women wanted to have babies and stay home and relax and be treated with respect, they better go to work like men. It doesn’t make sense.
“Enter the workforce,” the military men said in the 1940s, while 60,000,000 people were killed globally in a mass expression of male mental illness.
“But,” you might be saying, “doesn’t this way of thinking make it unfair for men with non high-paying jobs who are still deserving of love?” Yep, sucks right? But it sucks not because it is so, but because it is the result of a male-created economic situation where all but a very small sliver of people have jobs that actually pay a living wage (meaning you can happily live a good life and support a family with it). That’s why rich guys (in theory) get all the girls; it’s why the #MeToo movement is even a thing, because the system is tipped against women and against poor people. And today, we live in a giant Rosie the Riveter nightmare with dual-income parents with nice jobs who are still barely scraping by while Dan Bilzerian raids the cookie factory:
But don’t even worry about the rich man / poor man dichotomy because the best way to talk and think about these topics is to strip them of all their cultural baggage. Think about it less in terms of men and women and their rights and expectations and more in terms of the feminine and masculine characteristics in all people. Equality is not the same thing as encouraging women exercise feminine power; that’s something different and more meaningful.
Our society says that masculinity is power and that equality is allowing females to express their masculine characteristics. That’s fine and dandy and an important part of female liberation, but I believe we are witnessing the power of femininity be further degraded and pushed to the sidelines while masculine attributes—in whatever sexed body—are being given more and more value.
In Conclusion
I love my family. I love my wife. I love working to support my wife. I want Marley to relax, get facials, love our children, and keep our house nice. And if she wants to start a company or do something creative with or without a money-making incentive, that’s great too. Because what she is doing now isn’t her job. Being a mom isn’t “the hardest job in the world” because it’s not a job. A job is contrived. A job is men making up a system to move around and wield power. Jobs are necessary for our current system, and they are great, but they are not life. That is why it’s called work/life balance.
I remember the marketing surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline and it was just a battering ram of “JOBS JOBS JOBS.” The message was clear: that jobs are great no matter what. It could be going to war, blowing up the earth—doesn’t matter—jobs are good, no questions asked. This is a distinctly masculine, insensitive, and disconnected way of viewing civilization.
It used to be that your work would benefit your community, but in our globalized world, most people are working for someone or something far removed from their daily life.
No, femininity doesn’t go to work at a job. The ones who “relax” at home with or without babies while their masculine counterparts “work” are in the realm of the living. They represent the feminine reality that the masculine must support, stabilize, and hold space for. It is called a dynamic for a reason—it’s a relationship between two different beings; if all the parts were equal, it wouldn’t actually be balanced.
I’ll leave you with a few questions to ponder:
What percentage masculine are you?
What percentage feminine are you?
How about your partner or ideal partner?
How will you find balance with them in this world?
As always, I end every post with my breakfast and a picture of my sons; you’re welcome:
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