On (ex-) Mormons and monogamy...

Last week I had a visit from a lapsed Mormon who was hoping for a quick handjob while passing through town. I looked up at his slender, athletic frame as he towered over me, and imagined that he must once have been the very embodiment of all-American, clean-cut masculinity in his missionary clothes. Now, however, the suit and the nametag were gone and instead a wispy, untidy blond beard framed a face out of which piercing blue eyes stared uncertainly. 

I liked him immediately even before he opened his mouth. Perhaps it was his air of hesitancy or lack of self-assurance, which appealed to me. He told me that he used to live in Salt Lake City, but had fled to Northern California after renouncing Mormonism. He had since given up his job there and was travelling aimlessly throughout the US while deciding what to do next. He was thirty-eight yet, due to the rigidity of his former religious beliefs, had only lost his virginity seven years previously. He was very obviously a man who wanted to make up for lost time as quickly as possible.

The rugged, Kerouac-like romance of his life intrigued me because it was so different from that of my normal client base. I live in a ‘technology town’ and the majority of my clients are software engineers who seem to be clones of one another – they have the same sensible ‘short back and sides’ haircut; the same khaki ‘slacks’; the same lumpy ‘office job’ body; even the same impeccably trimmed and groomed pubes. If they’re single or divorced, corporate America invariably sucks up all their time, so they have no energy or inclination to find a girlfriend, or even just a one-night stand. If they’re married, the frequency of sex with their wives apparently leaves a lot to be desired or, worse still, has dwindled to nothing. This is, at least, what they tell me – it’s unlikely I’ll ever get a client who’ll say, “Yeah, I’m happily married but I just want a bit on the side”. 

Some sex workers believe that they provide an invaluable service for married men by allowing them to relieve their sexual frustration quickly and efficiently without the emotional messiness of an affair. My married clients, however, leave me feeling conflicted and depressed. Part of me judges them for leading such emotionally and sexually dishonest lives - but I do realise that my condemnation of them is hypocritical. I am, after all, perfectly willing to make my living from their deceit. I also acknowledge that I, as a single, thirty-something commitment-phobe who’s rarely kept a boyfriend beyond nine months, am really in no position to judge other people’s relationships. If I was in a sexless marriage of twenty-odd years duration would I really have the guts and integrity to walk away from that? I’m not so sure. 

Perhaps I judge these men because it’s easier to do that than question the institutions of marriage and monogamy. I want to believe in love and romance, but it’s increasingly hard to do so when there are countless married men every week lying naked and flat on their back in front of me. Perhaps this is also why I was so taken by my Mormon. Instead of being an accessory to marital infidelity, I felt for once like a sexual social worker who was helping a man discover himself and his sexuality. Whatever he was looking for, I knew he was unlikely to find it on my massage table but, well, he had to find that out for himself.