Andrea Werhun is an author and performer based in Toronto. She is currently a contributing writer for Playboy.com and has had her sex work experience featured by the New York Times, CBC, VICE and Hazlitt. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Modern Whore, which is available for pre-order at that link!
No matter what you call ‘em—clients, johns, philanderers, adulterous scumbags, your dad—the men who pay for sex have a bevy of legitimate reasons to procure the services of an erotic professional. Maybe they’re lonely, stressed about work, or dissatisfied with life. Perhaps they’re not getting what they want in the bedroom, not sure of what they want or are too afraid to ask. Whatever it may be, these men are in desperate need of someone who can sexually alleviate their woes.
Take your traveling businessman, for instance. No wife, no home, no children, he bounces around from airport to hotel to conference room to airport again, selling his wares on behalf of himself or his company. Nothing caps an exhausting day of pitching the next best thing than a good, relaxing, lay-down-and-do-nothing fuck. Then there are the men fresh out of long-term relationships—those vulnerable, hurting men in need of some healing love. And whores, despite their relative anonymity and so-called “non-emotional” relationship to clients, do immense amounts of emotional labor for men with broken hearts. Never discount the value of a little non-judgmental touch. In addition to your traveling salesman and your broken-hearted boy, there’s always your regular, run-of-the-mill dork-a-zoid of any age who couldn’t make a move on a real girl if his internet connection depended on it. The kind of man who trembles and shakes and breathes heavily and cums really fast and shoos you out the door as soon as the stressful ordeal is over. In and out!
The lazy, impatient bachelor is my personal favourite: good looking, mid-thirties to mid-fifties, single, immature, economically-minded, and very horny. The lazy bachelor, in his many forms, has put it to me like this: “Say I meet a woman at the bar I’d like to fuck. I buy her a few drinks and, if I’m lucky, she gives me her number. Then I go on a date with her, and of course I have to buy her dinner. Even after all that, I’m still not guaranteed sex. I don’t want to play games—I just want to fuck! Hiring an escort is definitely cheaper in the long run.” And there you have it. Games aren’t fun if you’re not guaranteed a win. Go for gold. Go for the whore: a guaranteed win.
The most common type of client of all is the married man. Why? Because being a good husband is the hardest job of all! 
My madam used to say, “I think we save marriages. It’s safer for men to see an escort than it is to, say, have an affair with the secretary at the office. There’s a lot less mess,” and thank goodness for that. We wouldn’t want wives divorcing their husbands left and right for unearthing a little infidelity, would we? Since the truth poses such a threat to the holy institution of marriage, let’s all do the acceptable thing and keep our adulterous predilections a secret. Here’s a line I often heard from my married clients: “This isn’t emotional cheating, you know. I’m just paying you for a service. It’s not like we’re having a passionate affair or anything.” Uh huh, then why not tell your wife? Crickets. You know why you won’t tell your wife, married man? Because the status quo serves you, not her, and you know it. Having a wife, whether she’s at home minding the children or at work busting ass for that second income, is too good a deal to fuck up with a truth bomb like, “When I tell you I’m staying late at the office, I’m actually doing lines of coke with an escort in a motel room off the highway.” Spare her the gory details. What’s the harm if she doesn’t know? So ladies, I pose this question to you in all earnestness: what’s the point of getting married anymore? What’s in it for us? I have fucked so many self-serving, outwardly devoted, secretly philandering men in my time that you’ll have to excuse my disillusionment regarding institutionalized monogamy. I know your husband is the exception. I have happily accepted wads of cash from many, many exceptions. Do hard-working, independent women truly need to marry a man?
Last, but not least: the differently abled. These are men who deeply appreciate the loving touch and warmth of a sex worker. I hadn’t seen many in my two years of working; in fact, only two: the first, a sweet young man with cerebral palsy, and the other a man we’ll call Paul. During a particularly nasty cold in his thirties, Paul—a perfectly healthy, able-bodied, athletic man in his prime—woke up with a tingling sensation in his legs. Tingling, the next day, became numbness, and numbness, over the weeks and months and years to follow, became full paralysis below the belt. For someone whose life had been turned upside down by a mysterious and debilitating condition, Paul was an incredibly positive, kind, and resourceful individual. He became a regular of mine with the agency and eventually offered to see me independently at the same rate. Every week, I traveled an hour by subway to a distant station where he would pick me up in his minivan, fully tricked-out with all the knobs and gears that allowed him to drive without using his legs. We took the highway to his suburban home, swiveling the driver’s seat and unfolding his wheelchair, unfurling the ramp from his vehicle to the garage floor, rolling to an elevator that took us into his house. From there, we took another elevator to his bedroom. Paul lived alone and was evidently quite self-sufficient.
Adjacent to his master bedroom was a spacious bathroom suite fitted with a jet stream bathtub. He ran the water and began the ritual as I disrobed in the bedroom. He too would disrobe, and when the water filled to a comfortable level, Paul would muscle his way with impressive upper-body strength into the tub, and I would follow, spooning against him. Here we would soak in the warm water, lightly touching each other, relaxing, talking. Feeling sufficiently prune-like, I would step out first, putting on the plush bathrobe he always provided, and help Paul exit the tub. For the next half hour, we laid naked and clean on his bed wrapped in each other’s arms, kissing. Paul would then wiggle his way down the bed and go head-over-heels into pussy town. To say he was gifted at cunnilingus would be an understatement. His legs may have been paralyzed but lord was that tongue limber! Sometimes it was too much for me to handle, and he’d wiggle his way back up and we’d talk. Paul used a catheter to piss and ate a steady diet of the same foods every day to regulate his shits because he couldn’t feel his genitals or his bowels. Once, I played with his penis out of absent-minded habit and he revealed another escort had made him cum when he hadn’t realized he could. I jerked him off to see what would happen. Within minutes, Paul ejaculated—“Oh!” he said, “Look at it go!” He couldn’t feel a thing. “Still works though!”
Even though it took me an hour to get to Paul, an hour to be with him, and an hour to get home, the one-hour, all-in rate of $250 still seemed worth it to be in his company. I once self-consciously breached the conversation of asking for a little more, considering the travel time. He explained, with light despair, that he didn’t have any more money to offer me. I immediately retracted and told him it was okay. I saw Paul until the very end of my escorting career. Besides the six types of sex work clients I’ve outlined, there are essentially only two types of people: the kind and the unkind. The reason a client hires a sex worker is inconsequential if that person is unkind. And I can say, without a doubt, that Paul was one of the kindest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.
