Confessions of a Fat Sex Worker
by Drew K. Campbell
"Oh my god, what are you doing?" Shit, I think, I'm going to lose this call.
Somewhere in Arkansas, an angry wife has caught her husband on the phone with me. He's jacking off while I tell him about my first blow job, my first woman. I am safely curled up in an office in downtown San Francisco. All around me, women cradle phones against their shoulders and murmur sweet nothings--at $3.99 a minute--to horny men across the nation. "Are you talking on that filthy line again, you pig?!" I hear him laugh at her, and realize that they are both drunk. It's 4 a.m. in Arkansas.
"YOU HOME-WRECKING WHORE!" she shouts into the phone. I get called bitchcuntslutwhore all night. This does not faze me.
But what she says next stops me cold.
"You know, all those phone sex girls weigh about 500 lbs!"
"How much do you weigh, honey?" he asks, chuckling.
"135," I purr.
That night Tara, my phone sex persona, gained 2 inches in her bust, 3 in her hips, and got 4 inches shorter.
Still nothing like me, of course. Well, we both have red hair. But I'm not a 22-year-old co-ed from Berkeley, and I sure as hell don't measure 36D-28-36. Most of the men who call phone sex lines know the woman they're talking to probably isn't prancing around her apartment in 6" heels and a G-string. She probably isn't a Playboy bunny, either, or she wouldn't be working for $8.00 an hour. The success of the call depends on my abilities as a storyteller, not on my dress size.
But after telling hundreds of men, night after night, that you look like Jessica Rabbit, it starts to get to you.
Because Ms. Arkansas wasn't exactly wrong. Sure, she may have exaggerated a little, but most of the women in the office aren't fashion models. Most are straight and married. Many have children. And most are what the Metropolitan Life height-weight charts would call overweight or obese.
I've done lots of different jobs in the sex industry. I've been a phone ho off and on for two years. I've written reams of porn and publish a zine about erotic submission. I starred in a fat fetish porn video called "Big Thighs and High Heels," or something like that. Men I've never met have written me letters about how they tie up their dicks, put on lacy red panties and masturbate, thinking about me standing over them with a whip. (They've even sent pictures.) A lesbian S/M magazine published photos of me licking boots and dripping wax on my own tits. Men have paid $120 an hour to beat my ass with a riding crop.
But nothing ever made me feel quite as dirty as that woman's voice, with its Arkansas drawl.
Because I've heard it all my life. That fat=ugly=undesirable. What I do for money on the phone, on video or in a San Francisco bondage house is like writing fiction: an artful lie that still manages to tell the truth. I've told the real story of my first girl-girl fuckfest over and over: a college dorm room in Westchester County; Elvis Costello on the stereo; my best friend and her boyfriend and a bottle of Southern Comfort. I like giving blow jobs--but only to my dyke Daddies, and I like getting fucked in the ass--but only by women with really small hands who know how to say bitchcuntslutwhore. I like watching submissives eat out of dog bowls and I like kneeling at the feet of a woman who's just put six perfectly-spaced cane stripes down the front of my thighs. Sex work is like real life. Only straighter. And thinner.
Sure sometimes I worry about the political implications of what I do. Are the divorce courts in Arkansas that much busier because of me? Am I oppressing my sisters by perpetuating myths of feminine beauty? What about the men I've seen in person? Have I shifted their perceptions of what a hot woman looks like? And is there anything so bad about American dollars making their way from the pockets of rich white straight men into the pockets of fat leatherdykes?
Sex work has taught me that I own my body. It has taught me that sex is a choice. That work is a choice. That what is attractive about me is not a lie. That telling stories gives me power. That people don't always hang up when they know the truth about me.
The First Woman Who Broke My Heart fell in love with me when I weighed over 200 lbs. She left me when I had starved myself down to 143. Love and desire did not depend on my weight. I had to sit down and do the math: if I think so-and-so is gorgeous and fuckable and everything I ever wanted in a woman, and she's fat, and I'm fat, then...then... (Say it: I might just be gorgeous and fuckable and everything she ever wanted in a woman, too.) Math never was my best subject. But I always liked word problems.
Sex work is the place where the great powers of our culture -- sex and money -- come together. And like the high school prom, it's one party I never thought I'd be invited to. So I went and threw my own. And everybody came. And came. And came.
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