Seen recently on Fesshole:

Online sex chat worker here. All my clients are men. The terms and conditions of the website state we will never meet, but they spend silly amounts of money trying to convince me to. Do men really only think with their penises?

This is the 2020s version of “Dear Penthouse, I never thought it would happen to me…” It’s not so much that the men are only thinking with their penises; it’s more that they’ve been conditioned to believe that if they try hard enough, and somehow do everything “right”, then they’ll be the one guy who breaks through the T&C barrier and gets a chance to meet the sex worker. It’s sort of the reverse version of the “normal woman gets singled out by billionaire” romantic/erotic story trope. Also, guys tend to have a savior complex; they think that, just because a woman is a sex worker, it means there’s something about them that they (the men) can fix.

When she says “silly amounts of money”, that suggests to me they could just as easily be spending that much money on an in-person sex worker, though I suppose they probably think the chat workers are more chaste in general — since, after all, having physical sex isn’t part of their job. To these men, the workers are “good girls” who “just got into a tight spot” and if they press all the right buttons (so to speak) they’ll beat the game and get to date the sex worker, thereby “rescuing” her from this situation.

I used to have the same savior complex; I remember, when I was a junior in high school, this pretty girl (I don’t remember her name now, but in my mind I call her Calico because she had hair like a calico cat’s) seemed to get “passed around” a circle of guys — she’d date one, and then date his friend, and then date his friend, and so on, until she made it all the way back to the original guy, and she’d start it again. To 17-year-old me this seemed to make very little sense; why would Calico do this to herself? She never appeared to be very happy with any of these guys; it was like an obligation to date them so she could remain part of their group. I tried to impress Calico with my politeness, my poetry (bad move; my poetry has always been atrocious at best), and my willingness to just hang out and be her friend. Of course I had an ulterior motive; I thought that, if Calico dated me, she would see what a relationship could be like, one where she wasn’t treated badly. And Calico wasn’t the only girl I felt that way about in high school; there was also Felicia, who lived in North Miami (I’m from southeastern Florida originally), who I thought was in a bad situation and if I could just be the right kind of friend to her I would unlock the secret code and get to date her. Hell, my first marriage started because a friend of mine said he was going to make a move on a girl I was vaguely interested in, and I wanted to “save” her from being just another conquest of his. That led to a 17-year relationship that I should never have allowed to go on that long.

The moral of the story is: don’t try to save other people. Help them if they ask for help, but they can’t be “saved” unless they want and need to be saved. Clearly the writer of this confession doesn’t want or need saving. But I guess if she can make extra money off these guys because they have some sort of savior complex, she might as well, right? Girl’s gotta make a living.

Photo by Karen Kaspar