Lingerie Moment, by Rebecca Mental
It was Victor, the married man I was dating, who showed the Pornhub video to me. The two-minute clip showed a girl splayed out on the end of a white-sheeted bed wearing a black thong with frilly white lace, her legs spread and draped at the knees over the wooden footboard. The video began with the girl touching herself over the top of her underwear, softly rubbing her covered vulva. “I can tell by the fingers,” Victor said. I could tell by the fingers, too. Even though her face was never visible, the girl in the video was unquestionably me.
***
In first grade, people with naked dolls came to talk to us. We all filed into the gym, purposely scuffing our feet to hear the squeak of our sneakers, and huddled together on the cold, hard floor. The people used their Cabbage Patch-like dolls, one with short, fiery red hair and the other longer and blond, to show us where it was okay for someone to touch us, where someone should not touch us, and what to do if someone touched us in one of the bad spots. Then they played a film that had stories about kids and grown-ups in it. There was one scene about a girl with her neighbor; the neighbor looked like somebody’s weird uncle, with his balding head, stubbly face, thick aviator glasses, and button-down plaid shirt, a little too tight in the belly. The weird uncle asked the girl to come over to his house because he had some pretty clothes he wanted her to try on. It turned out the pretty clothes were lingerie, albeit relatively tame lingerie –a long silk nightgown with lace accents. I think it might have been considered a bad touch to show 1st-grade students a 5th-grade girl in a bustier. I was transfixed by the girl and the weird uncle’s interaction, the way he smiled with his teeth and clasped his hands in front of his heart when she came down the stairs. It was like he was seeing a real-life Barbie. The girl looked so grown up, so pretty. Why didn’t men want me like they wanted that pretty little girl?
***
Before watching the Pornhub video, I had no idea that I knew my hands so well. The fingers on display were long and thin with slightly prominent knuckles, a freckle on the right index finger, and a callus on the left side of the middle finger, built up from years of holding pens and pencils; I was a writer, after all.
***
Growing up, no weird uncle ever asked me to put on lingerie or anything close. Even the pervert old man next door didn’t want me. Everyone knew to be careful of him because he had a penchant for kissing young girls. He kissed my friend Peg once; she told me how he walked up to her and ran his hand down her hair, then grabbed her arms and bent down to press his sandpapery lips to her mouth. Peg lived all the way down at the other side of the street and I was right next door – why did the old man pick her to kiss? As I got a little older, friends had stories of men flashing their dicks at them. I had been on the city bus, I had passed by parked cars, I had walked through the park. Why did the men pick my friends to show their dicks to and not me? Sometimes, I would switch up my route specifically to walk by construction workers, but they never catcalled me. I couldn’t seem to get harassed, let alone molested. I developed a habit of looking for ugly women with wedding rings, reasoning that if they were able to find a man there was some hope for me.
***
“They call you Mona in the comments,” Victor said, “because you make so much noise while fingering yourself.”
***
I fucked the first guy who asked me for my number. I met Jorge, a skinny, dirty, raver kid, on the platform of the Philadelphia EL train. He approached me, his Walkman headphones slung around his neck and his orange pants dragging on the ground, and hit me with a “Hey shorty, what’s up?” I immediately felt like an MTV video vixen, even though that was the furthest thing from my actual physical presence. I was painfully skinny, in a long-sleeved white shirt with a colorful butterfly on the front and scuffed sneakers on my feet. “Where you ‘bout to go?” he asked. I didn’t want to tell him the truth, which was that I was on my way to see my boyfriend who I had met a few months earlier in an America Online chatroom. “To see my friend,” I told him, having trouble even looking him in the eye. “She hot like you?” he responded. My face was on fire. The EL pulled up, and we took seats next to each other. I clasped my hands in my lap, but let my right leg fall to the side to touch his. Jorge talked about the music he was recording with his friend, who was a DJ, and then, with no segue, said “Yo, lemme get your number, shorty.” Shorty, again! My butterfly migrated from my shirt to my stomach. I clumsily ripped a page from the blue math notebook in my backpack and shakily wrote my house number down for him. His stop was before mine, and as he exited the EL, he winked at me. I was smitten.
Jorge called a few weeks later, opening with “Um, I think maybe I met you at Club Bubbles?” Club Bubbles was the local 18+ club; being a 15-year-old girl with no fake ID, I had never been there. Undeterred by the fact that he had no idea who I was, whereas I had been thinking about him incessantly since our EL ride, I agreed to meet up with him at the mall the next day. When he got off the city bus, he looked greasier than I remembered. We performatively visited Tower Records and thumbed through new release CDs; I picked up Mase’s Harlem World, hoping it would help me channel my inner video vixen so that Jorge would keep liking me.
We exited the store, and Jorge led me by the arm to one of the mall door vestibules, thick with cigarette smoke. The vestibules had always struck me as a no man’s land where anything could happen; really, the “anything” mostly consisted of smoking, talking about love interests, and complaining about your parents. Jorge pulled me toward him and kissed me, his tongue in my mouth with no warning. His kisses were sloppy and wet, and when he moved down to my neck it became slimy with his spit. I kept my arms at my side; I didn’t know what else to do with them.
He led me by my arm again, this time to JCPenney. He took me on a beeline trip to the sparsely populated Men’s Section and then pulled me into a dressing room. I stood facing him as he undid the button on my jean shorts and pulled them and my panties down. He took a condom out of his pocket and then turned me around. He entered me from behind and thrust into me for about 20 seconds, pushed deep inside as he came, and then pulled out with a satisfied sigh. (I would never have a reason for a satisfied sigh after sex until years into my adulthood.) When I exited the dressing room, I didn’t feel dirty, guilty, or ashamed. I felt energized because I had just gotten confirmation that there was someone on the planet who wanted me, who saw me and immediately wanted to fuck me, which meant he must really like me.
Jorge never called me again.
***
The girl in the video looked like me and sounded like me, and, of course, was me, but I had no memory of it ever being recorded.
***
In the year 2000, after I graduated high school, I moved from Philadelphia to New York City to enroll in the ultra-liberal Eugene Lang College, part of The New School. The exchange rate on my attractiveness between Philadelphia and New York was striking – somehow, my looks were worth much more in NYC. I couldn’t walk two feet without a man saying something to me, telling me how sexy I was, offering to carry my groceries, or telling me that I was too pretty not to smile. Never mind that they spoke like that to every girl who walked past them; they didn’t skip me, and that was all that mattered.
Maybe those catcalling men were who gave me the confidence to pick up the phone and call the number on an ad in The Village Voice that read: Make $$$ talking to men. No nudity.
“Hi, this is TLC!” a young-sounding girl answered.
“I saw the ad in The Village Voice and… I was wondering -” The voice cut me off.
“Are you at least 18?”
“I am exactly 18.”
“Ohhhh perrrrrrfect!” she replied. “Do you want to come in for an interview right now?”
I was done with classes for the day, so I wrote down the address and cross streets and hopped on the subway to Midtown Manhattan, traveling to a nondescript office building in Koreatown. I double checked the paper I had written the address on and pushed button number 3. The door buzzed, and I took the elevator up to what would soon become my second home.
TLC (The Love Club) was an in-call “companion service,” meaning that the men came to the Midtown office building to see the girls, contrasted with the alternative out-call, where girls went to the men at their home or hotel. The “no nudity” clause mentioned in the ad was explained to me in the interview – it meant that you could take everything off except your stockings. After handing me back my ID, Brittney, the interviewer, told me that Dan, a regular, had seen me looking confused at the front of the building and had asked to see me; he loved new girls. “He’ll tell you we blow him,” said Jessie, who was also sitting in on the interview, her thick legs crossed over one another. “Or he’ll tell you we give him hand jobs. We don’t, so don’t do any of that, no matter how hard he tries to convince you of it. We’re just here to hang out with them topless, light their cigarettes, and pour them champagne.”
Jessie and Brittney took me to the dressing room and pulled out a white smocked tank top and a short black skirt from a tan bag stuffed with clothing and told me to change into them. This particular set would become my uniform for almost 2 years; I decided to just stick with the leftovers instead of purchasing my own clothes. Brittney let me borrow a pair of stockings from her locker. After I changed, Brittney looked me over. “We’ll call you Sara,” she said with a smile.
“Remember, we don’t do anything that he’s gonna tell you we do,” were my final instructions before I was pushed into a dim room with a sagging purple couch. There was a middle-aged man sitting on it, fully clothed but doing some impressive manspreading. As the door closed behind me, I introduced myself as Sara and stuck out my hand to shake his. Dan laughed. Just like Jessie said he would, he tried to convince me to blow him, then tried to convince me to give him a hand job. I stayed strong and declined, not wanting to break the rules on my first day. I sat next to him while he talked about his job for a while because there was really not too much else to do. I learned that he was a construction foreman who lived in Long Island and that the Long Island Expressway always had really bad traffic. When our hour was up, he gave me a $20 tip and made his way down the elevator.
“Oh my gosh,” I told my friend later during dinner on St. Mark’s, “all I had to do was sit with this guy in a room and the place paid me $80 and the guy gave me $20 more!” It was the easiest job I had ever had.
On my second day, I got a better idea of what life at TLC looked like. We, meaning me and 6 or so other girls, would spend the day lounging around watching MTV and smoking cigarettes, some girls periodically going to the fire escape to smoke joints. When a client arrived on the elevator, we would quickly switch from MTV to a VHS porno and cram together on couches that smelled of stale smoke and Bath and Body Works lotion. “Hi, Sir, how are you? Oh us? We were just hanging out watching Barely Legal: Amateurs, touching ourselves and dying for a man to come play with us!” After talking to us for a little while, or even just staring at us, the men would go to the front desk and indicate who they wanted to take back to a room. More often than not, they chose me, Sara. I speedily built a roster of regular clients. My sessions evolved from the conversation with Dan about his job (I now realized the $20 he gave me had been meant as an insult) to charging hundreds of dollars for blow jobs. I found that I could set my prices higher and higher and higher, and the men would just keep paying it.
But why did they pick me? Why did they pay me so much? Why, when for my entire life I felt like no one wanted me, would these men be clamoring to spend their time with me, to ogle my body, to beg me to take my stockings off? I can’t discount that part of my popularity likely came from me looking about 16 years old, but I also know it was because it wasn’t Sara who was in that room with the men, it was Rebecca. I didn’t pick up a persona or disassociate, and I didn’t do drugs or get drunk. I reveled in the men’s interest in me, not caring if they were old or fat or ugly. I was high on being wanted. And I felt like I was in total control. I eventually started seeing my clients outside of TLC at their houses, in hotel rooms, or even in my own apartment in the West Village. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t need a middleman; I could take care of myself.
***
Although Victor was the one who showed me the video, I didn’t hold any suspicion that he was the one who had recorded it. The girl in the video was not 2013, 31-year-old me. I could tell by the fingers. I no longer had the writing callus present in the video because I had switched to typing. I had been getting regular manicures since moving to California in 2003, whereas in the video my nails were bare. There was no other possibility but that the video was from my time in New York. I lived there from 2000 – 2002, meaning it could not have been spontaneously recorded on a cell phone. A chunky video camera would have had to come out to get that footage. How could I forget something like that? I had never had the experience of getting blackout drunk and forgetting an evening – I didn’t think so anyway – and in general, I had an impeccable memory. Forgetting things was not in my wheelhouse.
What upset me was not that my private parts were out there for all to see – no one would know it was me anyway. Victor had always been hyperattentive to my body and was able to recognize my fingers, but I don’t think anyone else outside of the two of us could pick them out of a lineup. What upset me the most was that I didn’t remember it happening. I felt like a frantic paralegal with a lawyer breathing down her neck, demanding a document while I dug through a drawer, paging through files desperately, but not even finding a hint of what I was looking for. My mind turned the scene over and over again as I was driving, while I was in class, while I was preparing speech therapy materials for my clients. Was I supposed to go to a hypnotist and see if they could help me resurface the memory? Was I supposed to talk about it in therapy until I cracked open whatever vault in which it was hidden in my mind? Was I just supposed to push it down and never think of it again? Who could I even talk to about this? I had very few close friends; Victor was my primary support system. He refused to believe that I didn’t remember the recording being made and was mad at me for its existence, not off-brand for our relationship. I decided the best of my options was to speak with a therapist. I was in graduate school, so I called the university mental health clinic and let them know I needed to come in for a crisis situation, knowing that meant I would be seen right away and wouldn’t have to go on the waitlist. They scheduled me for the following day.
***
My appointment at the clinic was around lunchtime in the same building as one of the student cafeterias. Undergraduate students clogged the stairs as I made my way down to the basement. When I checked in, I was given a mental health survey to fill out. It asked about things such as suicidal thoughts, social anxiety, and excessive crying. It also asked if I had ever gotten intoxicated to the point of blacking out. Neither “yes” nor “no” felt like the right answer, so I wrote “maybe.” My name was called a few minutes later, and the therapist introduced herself as Amanda. I followed her back to the therapy room, and it was then she clarified that she was a clinical psychology PhD student. An immediate refrain of “Are you fucking kidding me?” ran through my mind. Clinical psychology PhD students were in the College of Arts and Sciences, the same college where I was doing my PhD in communication sciences. Although I did not recognize her and hadn’t had a class with her, it was highly likely that I would run into her at some point in my studies. I could have ended the session right there, and with what transpired after, that would have been the right call. But I didn’t want to make a fuss or be difficult, so I nodded and agreed that she could record the session for her clinical supervisor.
With a new therapist, the first question is always, “What brings you in today?” After she asked, I pressed my lips together, pulled in a good amount of air through my nose, and pushed it out forcefully.
“I don’t really know,” I responded. She looked at me expectantly, doing a good job of leaving space for me to say more; she must be a stellar student. “There’s this video of me, a sexual video, online, and I don’t remember it being made.” I waited for the “And how does that make you feel?” but she remained silent. “I think it’s from my time in New York. When I was there, I was doing sex work, so I was involved with a lot of different guys.” I suppose I should have jumped right back to the video, but I dove into some background about the job, feeling that it might help her help me understand where to file the situation with the video in my mind. As I was talking about my time as an escort, she started shifting in her seat. The tight pencil skirt she was wearing made it impossible to cross her legs over her thighs, so she crossed them at the ankles, the top foot wiggling back and forth. Her eyebrows began to furrow, and she started bouncing her knee. She was very obviously judging me, but what was I supposed to do? I didn’t want to call her out on it and make her feel bad, and I wasn’t assertive enough to do so anyway.
Before I could get back to the video, she started counseling me on why my time as a sex worker was okay and not shameful. “You were doing the best you could at the time,” she said in her most precious, reassuring voice. Hearing that I was doing the best I could at the time was not what I was there for. I didn’t need to be counseled on my sex work, I needed to figure out what to do with this video. But she was so uncomfortable, and the session was going so wrong that I felt like I needed to reassure her, to make her feel like she was doing a good job. I am a people pleaser through and through, so I emphatically said things like “Oh thank you, you are right, I shouldn’t feel shame.” I just wanted this poor woman to relax. Somehow, her counseling me on my time as a sex worker took up the whole session, and I left her with a hollow but genuine sounding “Thank you so much, I feel so much better, I’m so glad I had the chance to talk to you.”
***
I’ve never spoken to any of my subsequent therapists about the Pornhub video. I don’t have the link to it, and I’ve never tried to find it to watch it again. I have decided to tuck my knowledge of the video away in the cold case file of my brain; however, I still occasionally take it out and turn it over in my mind. Sometimes it’s the hole in my memory that bothers me, but when I dig a little deeper, I have to admit to myself that the video’s existence is proof that I wasn’t always in control of my sexual interactions during my time in New York. It’s proof that maybe being a sex worker wasn’t just a self-esteem booster and a fun story with which to entertain the right kind of people at parties. That video means that at least once, wielding my sexuality so openly hurt me. But then there’s the other side, the one that I prefer. Wasn’t that video the lingerie moment that I’d been waiting for since first grade? Wasn’t that my dream, to be considered pretty enough to be violated? I was a girl who was so irresistible that some weird uncle got her blackout drunk or drugged her and then recorded her touching herself. I was a girl on a video that that weird uncle jerked off to over and over again. I was a girl in a video that was posted publicly so that everyone else’s weird uncle could jerk off to her, too. In this version of the story, I don’t care that I don’t remember any of it. Instead, I’m just glad there is video proof of how much someone wanted me, once upon a time.
Rebecca Mental is a creative nonfiction MFA candidate at Bay Path University. After living in many different states, she has finally found her forever home in Cleveland, Ohio. She lives with her husband, two hairy pekingese dogs, and one very mean torti cat. This is her first publication.