This week I got wind of another sad and infinitely maddening and yet all too common occurence in the sex work world. A rather well known and long-standing male sex worker was accused of stealthing a client, in this case it was a female sex worker who had hired him for off the clock fun.

I have a long and weary relationship with stealthing. I perfectly understand when men say that sex is uncomfortable, or not as sensitive, when they have to wear a tight latex sheath around their penis. I get it, and it sucks to be you dude. What I don't understand is when they complain so loudly about the lack of sensation, and yet when the condom mysteriously 'falls off,' they claim they didn't feel it happen, or that they couldn't tell the difference. There's been several times when I've been with someone where the condom broke; most of the time it's with a man who is a little bigger down there, and I don't happen to have magnums on hand (keeping magnums in stock is the worst form of wishful thinking) and after years of doing sex work, I much prefer men who are average anyways. But in all of those cases, when it did broke every man knew immediately and instantly, and we would take a break to fetch a new condom. I've never been stealthed during sex, but I've been cajoled and whined at and manipulated and bullied into having sex with a man without a condom on simply because he made himself so annoying that it was less of a hassle to fuck and get the STD test a week later. That I used to do this always bothered me, and I used to think I was better than that, but earlier this year I invited a man over to have sex and while we were in the middle of foreplay he suddenly and forcefully plunged his penis into me. Later on, he told me that he had no intention of doing that, that he had come to my apartment with an entire box of condoms in his bag. As if that would make me feel any better about the situation.

Stealthing is about exploiting trust, about taking the tender intimacy that has been offered to you and ripping it to shreds. It is about someone saying "I want to give you half my piece of cake" and you saying "I'm going to eat your whole cake just because I can." At the same time, I don't think stealthing is a good word to describe it. A lot of the men will stealth a girl in the act; by flipping her over, fucking her from behind, hiding it from her face or obscuring the process of putting a condom on, but more and more I see accounts where afterwards, guys won't bother to hide the fact that they had taken the condom off, or had never bothered to put one on at all. covers this in her incredible show, I May Destroy You, where she plays out a scene with a man who casually mentions to her while he's putting his clothes back on, "oh, I thought you knew," simultaneously putting the blame on her for not policing her own boundaries well enough, and letting himself off the hook by implying that it was therefore a mutual decision. They don't care about getting caught, they want you to know that they overstepped a boundary because it's not just about the sensation of an uncovered dick in a pussy; what makes them feel good is knowing they took something from you that you didn't want to give. It reminds me of a quote in a book I read once. "Men are rarely true voyeurs. They want you to know that they're watching."

The male sex worker who is the center of this weeks scandal wrote in his own words and in screenshotted texts that he took the condom off "because he could see the look in her eye that she wanted it," even though he says that they were fucking doggy style when he took it off, and that her saying that the sex felt good was proof of consent. I won't bother to outline specifically just what is so disgusting about both of those statements, but his behavior afterwards is even more cringy; threatening to out her to her family, sue her for defamation, and to pursue legal charges against her. You told on yourself in this one bro, and just because a girl is calling you out on it doesn't mean that you're the victim here.

I will write more about this later, I'm sure, but for now all I can think about is how tired stories like this make me; that when I thought about it in the context of my personal experience how many times I've been emotionally manipulated to have sex, or to take off a condom, or to not use them at all because they keep breaking, or are uncomfortable, or are ‘unnecessary’ or whatever other bullshit men come up with to get what they want. I also think of the times that I’ve gotten upset about this, when men have tried to minimize my anger or hurt by saying “well, I had condoms I intended to use,” which rephrased can sound a lot like someone saying “if it makes you feel better, I knew that I was going to take advantage of you,” and someone saying “I thought you wanted it,” can sound a lot like “I decided for you what you should want.” I will get angry and they will try to minimize my anger, and then when that doesn’t work, they accuse me of being irrational, they gaslight me into thinking I really did want it, or they say I’m blowing things up out of proportion. That used to scare me, being accused of being a madwoman. That has been trained into us for centuries, from the times of Joan of Arc or to the women who were burned at the stake for witchcraft. What a terrible thing, to be the witch, I used to think. How awful, to be the madwoman locked in the attic. But as I continue to learn and to grow, to see my body as my own, and to see the witchcraft as not being mine but as cruel and evil spells men try to cast upon me, I’m starting to think that being the madwoman isn’t that bad after all.