“This essay is electric. The structure is most appropriate for this kind of narrative arc and the pacing is just right. The writer succinctly demonstrates the parallels between two professional paths, one stigmatized and the other heralded, while delivering sharp and witty sentences.”
—Morgan Jerkins, contest judge and author of This Will Be My Undoing and Wandering In Strange Lands

How Sex Work Prepared Me For a Career In Advertising

by Lu Chekowsky

Winner of the 2020 Essay Contest

Professional Summary. 

I make you want what you are supposed to want: love, clear skin, acceptance, white teeth, redemption, a flat stomach, fame.  

I separate you from your money, time, and the disappointing truth of your life.  

I get you off and get inside you. I sell fantasy as a product.  

I make promises that I know I can’t keep, even while I’m making them. ​You can be happy. You can be wanted. You can have everything. 

I’m invisible and exactly who you want me to be. I have the right face, the right ass, the right words, ready to deploy at any moment. I construct aspiration with the very best lighting. I make ugly things beautiful. I tell stories that let you sleep at night.  

Because of me, you believe the dreams you have are your own.  

I build perfect worlds for magazines and television, tech and the telephone; worlds that sparkle with possibility and make you want to feed the machines that own you with all your money and all your time. 

I am a professional manipulator. I am sadly very good at what I do. 

Experience. 
In my mid-twenties, while friends were marrying off and having babies, I was filing for bankruptcy and working as an internet dominatrix out of my $650 a month apartment, deep in Jersey City. This meant mostly that I talked on the phone to lonely, horny men and bossed them around until they ejaculated and hung up on me.  

In advertising, this is referred to as ​Content On Demand​.  

Sometimes I’d let them pay me a little more to turn on the grainy webcam that sat on top of my dusty Gateway desktop so they could see me sneering at them with disgust while they did it. I always made sure the angle was from high above to give the illusion of having a smaller face and stomach. I also dimmed the lights in the room to hide my acne scars. I rested my chin in my hands so I could pull back the flesh and give the appearance of someone less fat and, to my client, more sexy. I continued to use these same tricks later at places like MTV and Facebook, whenever I had big work-related video conference calls with the Hollywood types I needed to make love me. 

This is called​ Retouching. 

I didn’t mean to get into sex work but I had to earn money and I was too sad for a real job; I’d been suffering from a deep depression after the death of my mother. I was on Paxil and napped for five hours a day. I needed something that could pay me while I was flat on my back in bed; a job that would fund my Entenmann's donuts and Chef Boyardee binges and cover the PATH train fare into the city on Friday nights so that I could get spanked by strangers at The Hellfire Club to punish me for being a failure. Sometimes, if it was a busy week, I might even be able to pay for a livery cab home; negotiating half the fare for showing the driver my boobs.  

This is​ Solving Problems With Big Ideas.  

I put some listings up on a website called NiteFlirt that advertised my services to potential clients. I needed to catch their attention because the site was overflowing with a million kinds of girls all willing to do whatever was needed to make men happy for money. I put my listings under headers like domination, mind control, feminization, sissy play, forced cocksucking,​ and ​BDSM​. I created a highly effective combination of empathy and emptiness. My clients loved how I coddled and then berated them. I knew my audience because I was them. We had both been very bad and were happy to give ourselves over to anyone who could see it. The more I balanced love and abuse, the longer the calls would go and the more they’d call back. When it seemed like I was reciting verbatim from the dark tapes of the hidden beliefs they had about themselves, the harder they got. It was no shock to me that when someone can see how worthless you think you are, it can be quite exciting. What I didn’t understand then was that in the hundreds of hours I spent serving the secret desires of ravenous men, I was also training to become excellent at advertising. 

Targeting. 

I coddled them and normalized their fantasies. I listened closely and repeated their anxieties back to them as if they were my own. ​You are embarrassing. You are disgusting. You should be ashamed​. I hid behind carefully chosen words and dramatic timing to make it seem like I was the one deserving of worship. I constructed a better, easier, more digestible version of myself to make sure I’d be appealing enough to return to again and again. I disappeared; it was always all about them. 

This is called Strategy. 

I used a whisper-soft voice to coerce men into spending lots of their money and time on me. It was my job to make them crawl across their floors and kiss my imaginary thigh-high boots for $3.99 a minute. In many ways, it was a simpler time. People still used their imaginations to masturbate. I positioned myself as ​The Thinking Man’s Mistress ​because I wanted clients who needed their brains to be stimulated too. I had romanticized this idea of highbrow sex because I had a Master’s degree and a subscription to ​Nerve.com ​and also because I’d read ​Vox​ when I was sixteen​. ​I wanted to reach discerning men who understood the premium experience they would have if they called me. 

This, of course, is ​Branding.  

Objective. 

• To scrub up the truth of the disappointing world. 

• To take your time and your money. 

• To disappear myself so as to not interrupt your dreams. 

• To make you forget that you will die. 

• To keep you coming back for more. 

Training.

I could never pass for the head cheerleader, the sexy stepsister, or the centerfold. My body has never been the kind of body that moves product or inspires men to bite their fists like apples to show their lust. I have always been a ​BEFORE​, not an ​AFTER. ​I am round and dimpled and all my parts are the wrong proportions. If something is supposed to be big, mine is small (tits and lips). If something is supposed to be small, mine is enormous (ass, feet, nose, belly, chins). Still, like pretty much any woman, I understand deeply what an ideal woman is ​supposed​ to be. I have been a very good student. So good, I can build a perfect one from scratch. In fact, I have successfully engineered desire on both large and small scales. Men have paid me to whisper bedtime stories right into their ears about how they will look so sexy, like little sluts, when I force them to wear my silky stockings, and global media conglomerates have paid me to make sky-high billboards featuring shiny-haired pop stars to lord over Times Square; ninety-six pound girls pouting like hot babies who just want things to go their way. 

Languages. 

I used to think that phone sex was an outlier in my life, a hilarious dinner party story, an anecdote unrelated to the rest of what turned out to be my successful career. For years I shared this detail of my history with only close friends and I worked hard to bury my shameful secret, particularly from bosses and from the people who worked for me—and always from the A-list talent who were often featured in the advertising campaigns I oversaw. While I was making girls all over America cry themselves to sleep to the image of a slow-motion Harry Styles looking straight into camera for a VMA commercial, or when I got Michael Jordan to earnestly read a poem I wrote about how to BECOME LEGENDARY by purchasing his latest sneakers, I was also trying to pass as a professional who had never berated lonely men and gotten them to cum on their own faces for money. I knew they’d never get that, to me, phone sex was as real of a business as advertising. I gave 100% to my clients, analyzed data to optimize my results, and cared deeply about my work. I mapped trends to pinpoint the best time of day to take calls (workday, lunch hour), tracked what fantasies made for the longest and most lucrative sessions (bad boy, mommy), and logged the kinks of each of my callers in an A-Z searchable spreadsheet (assplay, zombies).

I didn’t understand until recently that my life in sex and advertising go together like chocolate and peanut butter; speaking to each other in sweet and salty tongues, intertwined, defining the thrust of my life. What do they have in common besides everything? Image and desire and money and perfection and love and loneliness and desperation and aspiration and hope. In both of these industries, it’s been my main responsibility to make you want and want and want some more; to never have enough. In sex and in advertising, it is very bad for business for you to feel full.  

Contact. 

I am everywhere. I am the ghost of every supermodel. Every pop-up ad. Every commercial break inside the live coverage of a school shooting. I am Matthew McConaughey in a shiny car on a highway in the dark. I am a bikini girl on a bottle of diet pills. I am the new ​Star Wars ​movie and a red carpet you can walk all over. I am the secret bookmark on your iPhone you look at while shitting. I am the ad on Instagram that is selling a digital kegel exerciser. I am a Nike emblem on a new pair of sneakers on a run at sunrise. I am in your ear, just doing it.  

You, on the other hand, can have this all. You are the hottest. You are the wettest. You are the most wanted. You are 18–24. 25–49. You are barely legal. You are a pie chart in a PowerPoint. You are a return on an investment. You sweat and you cum and you scroll and you need it harder and deeper to make you feel anything at all. You buy, you fuck, you hunt for the perfect pair of shoes to walk into the perfect job, search for the perfect eyes to look into yours and to say to you, ​Darling, you are home​.  

The world is a shopping cart filled with the things we’ve been promised but that we will never have and I am the one pushing it through every floor to ceiling aisle straight down your throat. 

References.  

When I was a phone sex dominatrix, a fifty-year-old married man I never met got a tattoo of my name on his hip.  

Later on, after I’d become a successful advertising executive, another man tattooed a tagline I wrote for a St. Ives Apricot Scrub campaign up his entire forearm. Some days, this can trick me into thinking I have left a mark on the world, not just on his skin: ​I welcome the thunder, because I am lightning.

Published January 31st, 2021