For the latest installment of my Fast and Dirty interview series, I interviewed Debauchette. I first encountered Debauchette after I found her blog in my referrers log. Since then, I've been a regular reader. Online, she chronicles her life as a real-life courtesan--a world-class, world-traveling working girl. Based in New York, she is a 32-year-old nude model turned fetish model turned call girl turned courtesan. Or, as she writes in the about section of her revealing blog: "I have deep relationships and light relationships and predominantly sexual relationships and a few client relationships and if I fall in love with anyone with any seriousness, I’m sure I’ll need to pull the plug on all this." (And her Tumblr is here.) This is Debauchette's first interview.
Reverse Cowgirl: Who is Debauchette?
Debauchette: That's a good question--I have several pseudonyms, so I'm tempted to answer with a few descriptors for each identity. But I think the most accurate answer is this: I'm a highly sexual woman with a highly compartmentalized life. I date, I have a history in sex work, I keep one area of my life secret from the other, and I write about both. I write about sex.
As a person, I'm a little self-isolating and bookish, which might not come across in my writing. People say I'm soft-spoken. I love libraries. And quiet. But I also have a strong appetite for sexual, sensual, sensory experience, and I have a thrill-seeking streak.
In grad school, when I desperately needed money to bridge a summer between two grants, I considered sex work. It felt like a good complement to my studious, analytical existence, and I didn't see much risk of having those two lives cross. I was also attracted to the idea of doing something that's generally perceived to be socially reprehensible. When I was young, I was part of a guerrilla art collective that broke into buildings and pasted posters with heavy-handed expressions on the walls, and I think working as a glorified whore tapped into that same defiant impulse, the same adrenaline rush. But what started as a form of defiance rapidly developed into a very staid, refined, and surprisingly Zen lifestyle.
Now, I have a pretty balanced life. I work hard, I keep a few clients, I fuck socially. I fall in love. Sex plays a large role in my life, and it always will. And, to my surprise, I'm at a stage in my life where those compartments are beginning to break down. Clients become friends, men I fuck become men I love, and my hyper-analytical bookishness persists undisturbed.
RC: Why did you start blogging?
D: I started blogging as an outlet. Writing has always been a release for me, but when I started the sex work, I didn't want my notes lying around the apartment where they could be found, so I decided to post them online by blogging anonymously. This was a few years ago. Unfortunately, a particularly obsessive client discovered my blog and outed me to the agency I was working for at the time, and this resulted in some pretty terrifying fallout. It was my first brush with the dangers that come with blogging.
After hiding out for a while, I opened another blog for the same reason as the first: I needed the outlet. By then, I knew the risks, I'd experienced the dangers, but writing allowed me to think through the issues that emerge when you have a secret life. I can safely say that if it hadn't provided an important outlet for me, I never would've started up again.
Over time, I've come to blog for other reasons as well. For one, I started to receive incredible emails from people who were reading my blog, people who had very different lives but identified with the things I'd said. Also, I'd come to value having this written record of what I've experienced. I've changed a lot, my life has changed, and my views have changed. And now it's a bit of both for me, a release and a record. In some ways, it's become a way to have a secret life without being so secretive all the time. I can be open--if not to the people in my life, to the intimate strangers who read my blog.
RC: Online, you write explicitly about your sex life. Why?
D: I think it's how my mind and memory work. When I write, I usually want to preserve certain memories, and typically the memories I care about most are the most graphic. Sometimes I feel the need to sift through them. Other times I just want to preserve them.
And I tend to prefer graphic language when it comes to sexual subject matter. Rhetoric and politics are smart, but they often suck the heat out of sex, and I'm more interested in trying to articulate how things look and feel. Which, incidentally, is hard. There's no useful vocabulary, euphemisms are fucking awful, the whole terrain is a minefield of cliché, and very little can be said that even begins to capture the intensity of any given moment.
If I have any goal, it's to write about sex honestly with some modicum of intelligence without obliterating the carnality of the act. I don't know if I'm successful, but I enjoy the struggle.
RC: What is haut-pervure?
D: This is a subject I love. I feel very strongly about raising the bar on all things sexual. My first vibrator was a gift when I was sixteen years old, so when it burned out, I had to go to one of those roadside sex shops stocked with cheap vinyl costumes and dildos with names like Dr. Nasty. I remember thinking how amazing it was that these shops could take something as hot as sex and kill that hotness with a roomful of carcinogenic plastics shaped like clown cock.
I've been glad to see a surge in the area of erotic luxury and design over the past five years or so. Myla's commissioned designers like Tom Dixon to re-imagine the sex toy. Betony Vernon's creating pieces that bring gorgeous form to erotic and sometimes sadomasochistic function. Lelo's coming up with innovative vibrator mechanisms. Paul Seville's doing amazing things to leather. Shiri Zinn's experimenting with precious materials, like quartz and mink. Njoy's wands make me feel like I'm fucking a Brancusi. I see all of this as a very positive trend. Art and sex go well together.
And on the subject of art and sex, I'd love to see porn improve. Here I am--a sex-loving voyeur, and yet most porn kills my libido. The majority is aesthetically offensive and patently moronic shit, produced largely by men who don't know how to fuck. There's no reason for porn to be as bad as it is, and just as sex toys have gone luxe, I'd like the see the same shift occur in pornography.
RC: What has sex work taught you about sex work--and about men?
D: It's hard to generalize. I feel like a ghost passing through the lives of strangers, but there's something very freeing about a relationship that's defined by a transaction. It makes you appreciate the moment for what it is, without expectations. But there are negatives as well, the most obvious being that it can be emotionally exhausting. It's very easy to burn out.
I've always noticed a strong difference between my personal relationships and my client relationships. Men I date are less communicative with me--it's generally a slow process for them to open up. But clients are open with me from the beginning. They're incredibly expressive, so much so that with the majority of my clients, my job is to listen, and sex is just some extension of that attention. This is something that surprised me when I started the sex work. I thought that it would be about the sex, but that's rarely been the case in my experience. My client relationships are often more intimate than my personal relationships.
If I've learned anything, it's that we have a very reductive understanding of men and the male ego. Men are much more complex than they let on.
