Between the Worlds

by Jean Roberta

In 2010, I was interviewed in the media (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) because an antique set of laws controlling the sex trade had just been struck down as unconstitutional, and sex workers were being asked for their opinions. At that point, I had not turned a trick in many years. I was Ye Olde Harlot, but because I was willing to admit publicly that I had worked for two escort agencies in the 1980s, I was apparently considered eligible to speak for Scarlet Women in general.

It became even clearer to me in 2010 than it was in the early 1980s that out-of-touch laws arose from out-of-touch attitudes to sex. The interviewers seemed amazed that I could interact sexually with total strangers in shady hotel rooms, then go back to my Master’s thesis, a work in progress, and discuss it with my faculty advisor. According to them, I had been living an unheard-of double life.

What the mainstream media has never heard of could fill a library. Why does no one interview women who somehow manage to hold down paid jobs, then rush home to cook meals for their families, do laundry and tend children? Couldn’t this hectic lifestyle be considered a double or a triple life? From what I’ve seen, graduate students in general have to function in several other roles as well, since they usually can’t complete a thesis while living entirely on student loans, scholarships or modest honoraria for providing teaching or research assistance to tenured faculty. Sex work could be considered a part-time service job, and it can be made to fit a grad-student’s schedule.

We live in a culture and an age in which adult women, in particular, are expected to switch from one role to another with ease. If I was living a double life, who hasn’t?

On the subject of double lives, let’s consider notorious men who juggle two or more wives and sets of children without holding down a job (other than manipulating other people out of money), and never admit anything to anyone – until it all comes crashing down. Let’s also consider the world of espionage, and especially double agents who collect information for two very different governments while maintaining at least two cover stories. This is the kind of double life I’m sure I couldn’t handle. At some point, I would drop all the balls.

Writers, scholars and other nerds (such as devoted fans of television or movie series, or on-line role-playing games) live double lives which don’t require dishonesty. Erotic writers are only a sub-category of writers in general, and all of us live in the world of our imaginations whenever we can, even though reality (in the form of dirty dishes and Significant Others) often hauls us rudely away from there.

Over the holidays, I finished reading a three-novel series by my colleague Jes Battis, writing under a different pen name, Bailey Cunningham. In his “parallel parks” fantasy saga, four graduate students at the local university discover a portal to a different world in the large local park, which actually exists. In the novels, the very believable characters make regular visits to a version of ancient Rome, a city named Anfractus, which exists in a parallel dimension. It is clearly inspired by role-playing games, and the real-life characters have different names and different roles in the other world. For example, a sensitive young man named Andrew becomes “Roldan” in Anfractus, and he acquires useful information as an “Auditor,” one who can hear the voices of the lares, elemental spirits who coexist with humans in the city. A young man who lives in a cheap apartment over a sex shop in the real world (and I’ve often seen it in downtown Regina) becomes an enchanting musician named “Babieca” in the imaginary city. Shelby, a young woman of First Nations descent, becomes, Morgan, a “Sagittarius” (archer) in Anfractus.

The characters, who are all supposed to meet regularly with their faculty advisors to discuss their academic progress, are understandably distracted by the parallel lives they lead in the alternative world after dark. At first, they strenuously try to avoid even talking about their lives in Anfractus when getting together for real-life activities such as grading student assignments, but conflicts in the other world threaten to spill over into this one.

I thought about the double and triple lives that are described in the novel. Graduate students as a group are in a kind of limbo between the school life of teenagers and the working life of adults. To earn degrees, they must spend much of their time in the alternative dimensions of fiction or history or theoretical systems. Yet as human beings living in real bodies (which are usually young and healthy), they must live in the real world too, which means constantly adjusting to current circumstances.

In the novel, a female character (an education student in real life, a knife-wielding gladiator named “Fel” in the other world) becomes pregnant by a male “meretrix” (courtesan) in Anfractus, and gives birth to her son in the real world. She decides to raise him, with much help from her loyal brother, and must eventually decide how much to tell her precocious child about where he came from. On some level of his mind, he seems to know.

I could relate to this. In some sense, all children exist as fantasies or abstract concepts before they materialize in the flesh. Those of us who read, write and have offspring could be considered creators in several different ways.

Thinking of double lives, I wonder who actually lives only one.
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Black, White, and Burgundy

by Jean Roberta

Even nudity can be a costume. I knew that in the 1970s when I supported myself as a part-time university student by modelling for art classes. I was in demand, and I was told it was because I was very good at imitating an object: a mannequin that could hold different positions for longer and longer periods, and move myself on command.

A budding feminist art student in one of the classes once offered me sympathy by saying the job must be humiliating. I told her I didn’t mind. No one in the art classes actually knew me, and studying my bare body wasn’t going to give them anything more than generic information: I was young, white, female, short, pear-shaped (teacup breasts, tiny waist, concave belly between womanly hips, a perky ass), with long brown hair that hung over my shoulders. I wondered whether any of the males in the class knew there was anything more to know.

Sex work in the 1980s was somewhat parallel, but it was more like acting than modelling. I collected sets of lingerie in matching colours: bras, panties and garter belts, with a wardrobe of stockings. I had a black lace set that I wore with seamed stockings that were a few shades darker than my skin. For a more innocent look, I wore the white set, sometimes with startlingly red stockings. The set I loved best was burgundy, and I thought it contrasted well with my pink skin. At one point, the burgundy bra disappeared from the communal dryer in the single-parent co-op where I lived with my young daughter. As it happened, all the women who lived in my building at the time were about the same size, and when anyone passed me in the hall, I wished I could see what was under her T-shirt. Mysteriously, my bra returned to the laundry room like a homing pigeon.

I sometimes paired my lingerie with ridiculous shoes that couldn’t be worn for long walks. Four-inch heels were the highest I could stand if there was any possibility that I might need to walk quickly in them. I had to do this once when a john refused to pay, and he seemed to think I owed him free service. Luckily, I was still dressed. I ran out the door, stepped quickly out of my dove-grey leather pumps, and continued briskly down the street in stockinged feet, my shoes in my hands.

My clothes were my companions on various adventures, and I associated my lingerie with different johns and different occasions, much the way Top Ten songs on the radio are embedded in my mind with periods in my past. When a pair of my stockings became too laddered to wear, I grieved for them, especially since I couldn’t always replace them with an identical pair.

Did the johns appreciate my lingerie? It’s hard to know. They rarely commented on it. Since they were paying by the hour, they wanted all my clothes to come off as soon as possible. I was sometimes tempted to ask their opinion of underwires and seams vs. a more natural look, but I suspected that even the guys who knew something about the construction of buildings and furniture weren’t really interested in the construction of clothing, including their own. They weren’t seamstresses like me.

One john became my regular, and I let him continue seeing me for five years after my job for an escort agency ended abruptly on April Fool’s Day when the owner for arrested for theft. I felt lucky to avoid jail, and I wanted to keep a low profile, but the steady income I earned from “Mr. Johnson” (who liked Johnson’s Baby Oil) was too essential to give up. I could say his money was more supportive than underwires.

Eventually, I found out that “Tom Johnson” wasn’t his real name at all. He had a wife, grown children, and grandchildren who apparently had no clue that he came to visit me approximately every two weeks. It was important to both of us that our sessions together should remain separated from the rest of our lives. Separation was often bragged about as a feature of various bras that were advertised on TV, and I could see its value.

When does a costume become a uniform, and when does a performance become a lifestyle? I never intended to continue wearing show-off lingerie and garters under my clothing after I had earned my Master’s degree and (with luck) acquired a place in a university classroom. I knew that teaching was also a performance art, but it would require concentration on ideas, not body-awareness. The academic robes worn at graduation rituals are a sign that academics have traditionally been expected to function as much as possible like disembodied minds whose bodies are an irrelevant secret.

“Tom” didn’t see why we couldn’t continue to see each other forever. He told me that if anything “happened” to his wife, he would ask me to marry him. He seemed to imagine a shared future in which I would never grow older, and I would spend my days cooking, vacuuming carpets, loading the dishwasher and the clothes washer in my lingerie, complete with stockings and heels.

I looked forward to a completely different future.

He knew I dated women, and he seemed to think this was something I did on the side, as another performance, part of my role as a kinky slut. I wanted an honest, long-term relationship.

It was inevitable that “Tom” wouldn’t be willing to give me up until my new girlfriend had introduced me to some police officers who were willing to enforce the new anti-stalking law.

Eventually, my sweetie and I and our three children moved in together to form a fairly chaotic household of five distinctly different personalities. There was no room in my life for the lingerie of my past, but I couldn’t bear to give it up, so I kept it in a bag in the back of our closet, with my stockings at the back of a bureau drawer. I didn’t want my new partner to run across this stuff by accident, because I knew she was unsettled by what it represented. I was still as fond of my old costumes as though I had once performed as Cleopatra, and still had the serpent headdress.

In time, of course, I realized that my lingerie would no longer fit me. I gave it away to a used-clothing shop, and I hope it found a good home.

Hustling Through the Ages

by Jean Roberta

The concept of sex workers (people, mostly women, paid to provide sexual services for customers) as “hustlers” has always filled me with mixed feelings. If a “hustle” is a con game, are whores/harlots/call girls/courtesans offering something bogus or overpriced? Is this because women are expected to provide unlimited sex for men without expecting anything in exchange?

In my experience, most heterosexual men are willing and eager to have sex with women, so why would women have to make a great effort to tempt them into it?

This line of thought reminds me of double-bind conversations I’ve had with men who disapprove of 1) women who manipulate men into marrying them and supporting them financially, and 2) women who boldly go into the paid workforce to steal “men’s” jobs. Men who don’t think women should try to survive in any material sense also tend to disapprove of: 1) “frigid” women who say no, and 2) sluts who don’t say no. These seem to be the dudes who resent the female “hustlers” who fascinate them and who supposedly spirit men’s money right out of their wallets.

Disapproval of women who offer sex as part of a “hustle” is often blended with disapproval of women who outwit men in various ways, often during a war. Behold “Rahab the Harlot” of ancient Hebrew times, as imagined by a nineteenth-century French painter, Jacques Tissot:



Supposedly she helped the Israelites conquer the city of Jericho by hiding two Israelite spies from the men who were searching for them. From a non-Israelite viewpoint, this made Rahab seem untrustworthy.

Here is a Greek image of a sex-worker plying her trade. For some reason, this has been associated with Rahab.


Part of the problem of morally evaluating the likes of Rahab is that the sex trade has often been conflated with other careers (such as tavern-keeping), and the cultures of the ancient Middle East were distinctly different from the later Christian cultures of Europe and Britain.
For example, this woman would look like a “hustler” to most puritans:


They would suspect her of being a follower of this guy:

According to traditional Christian theology, a wedding ceremony neutralizes the evil inherent in sex, so that married couples can procreate without committing sin, but women who couple with men who are not their husbands are doing something illicit, which is akin to other sins such as blasphemy, lying and stealing.

In 1660, when Puritan rule ended in England, and King Charles II brought back the monarchy, Christmas revels and the theatre as a popular place for hanky-panky, he had already fathered his first child on an early mistress. (Eventually, he fathered between 12 & 19 of them, none born to his legal wife.) One of his favourite playmates was Nell Gwyn, who worked in her mother’s bawdy house in her early teens, progressed to selling oranges in the theatre, then to performing onstage, and then to the King’s bed. Apparently, when he was on his deathbed in 1685, he told his advisors: “Let not poor Nelly starve.” How generous of him.


The Victorian Age brought about stricter morals in theory, since the reigning Queen and her husband the Prince were role-models of proper domesticity. In real life, the sexual double standard created a thriving “underworld,” some of which was surprisingly above-ground. Here are two relatively well-known courtesans of the time:

[Catherine Walters]
[Cora Pearl]

By the Edwardian Age (early 1900s), naughty postcards like this were popular. Undoubtedly, the women who modelled nude for photographers and painters were thought of as “hustlers” who earned a dishonest living.


Despite what I’ve sometimes claimed, this is not an image of me in my distant youth.

I haven’t actually sold sex since the early 1980s. Here is a very recent photo of me, taken this week for the university website. Am I still a "hustler" in any sense? I honestly don't know.

If women in general have an illicit relationship with a money economy, then yes, I am still "hustling," since I not only support myself, but help to support my spouse & stepsons. I do this by introducing impressionable young adults to the mysteries of grammar, and of literature. Heh. There are so many ways to corrupt the righteously ignorant.