Benevolent Lying

Staring at the ceiling, leaning back in my chair on two legs just the way my teachers scolded me for when I was 10, I hooked one of my bright orange, ouchless ponytail holders under my black acrylic nails, stretched it back, and took aim at a duck-shaped water stain on the ceiling all the while trying to cradle the phone between my shoulder and ear. The voice on the phone sounded shaky. I could only assume that either this was his first time calling the line or he was already masturbating. Given his question, I assumed the latter. “So what do y-y-y-you look like, baby?” I tightened my throat as I let go of the back of the band I had hooked onto my finger and just as it crashed into the ceiling with thump, four inches from the duck, I spoke in the best hot, high-pitched, little, eighteen year old voice I could muster. “I’m 5-foot-5-inches, sweetie, I have long, curly blonde hair and big blue eyes. I have a lean body because I like to work out. My tits are nice, soft, b cups but I have nice, big nipples that love to be touched. My round hips fit nicely into my little shorts and I have a tight, shaved pink pussy.” My aim is really horrible and this was my least favorite call type. Barely legal? Fuck, I just turned 27. Looking back down at my desk, I marked the appropriate square on my datasheets. I still didn’t know if this was the type of data acquisition that I wanted, it seemed inadequate - like it was put together by a retarded monkey from the domain of Dr. Duncecap’s Lab of Horrible Things Gone Wrong, right next to John Mack’s* old office at Harvard University. I needed a way to collect as much data from each individual as possible, quickly and quietly in a manner that would show me some form of measureable, observable (or in this case, audible) data. Voice inflections, trembles and grunts don’t carry over well to paper, nor are they easily measured and recorded. “Baby, I know a-a-a-about girls like you,” the man hissed. His tone changed dramatically since his question about my appearance, but he was panting more now as well. I was caught off-guard and momentarily lost my normally smooth articulation, “Oh?” I squeaked. “Yeah,” he said, “does it bother you that I know that you and all your slutty friends are crack addicts?” Regaining my composure, I was able to take the reins again and I thought I understood what he wanted now. “Yes, sir, are you going to punish my friends and I?”

I may be a fat chick, but becoming a decent liar over the phone has helped me survive. In reality, I’m 5′7″. The average height for most women is barely over 5′3 1/2″. I’m taller than approximately 85% of women my age. That isn’t the only lie. I have long reddish-brown hair (red only shows up in the right lighting), green eyes, and I’m fat. I do work out around an hour to an hour and a half a day but it doesn’t keep me skinny and I’ve never handled crack in person unless you count what residual crack there may have been around my dad’s house from my sister’s many adventures in the substance abuse arena. I told my client on the phone many more lies in that conversation because he wanted to hear them. I told him I did things that I’ve never done, that I’d never try, and things that I’ve never done that I would really love to try and they were all about sex. So I confess to being a liar, but I also confess to being an entertainer and here I’m going to lay out some reasons why deception is the foundation of some forms entertainment and how this deception is what I might call benevolent lying.

From the time I was a very young child, I was taught that lying was wrong. There were few exceptions and the exceptions that existed were considered extreme and rare. One such example was a story from the Book of Nephi in The Book of Mormon. Nephi, who you may have guessed was the main character, was sent back to Jerusalem with his brothers to steal some important documents that had been stolen by a guy named Laban. Laban was portrayed as a bad man with lots of power and the Plates of Brass (those important documents) were considered more important by God than Laban and his people. Thus, Nephi kills Laban’s guard and then steals his clothes and dresses up as him in order to steal back the Brass Plates and be on his merry way. For a child that is taught never to lie or steal, this story is rather confusing. At some point I began to reason that killing people over just a possession was probably a bad idea, but was lying bad? I didn’t think so. Unfortunately, the conditioning I had from my childhood didn’t give me much room to find out. I disliked the idea of lying so much that I pretty much sucked at it. When I became a phone sex actress at 27, I had to learn how to do it very fast and for some damned good reasons. I needed the money and I wanted to study sexual behavior from within the sex industry. What does sexual entertainment do for the consumers and what is it really like for the performers?

Another thing I learned as a child was about the Holocaust. An estimated eleven million people died during the Holocaust because of Nazi Germany. The Jewish people, especially, had to hide from the thousands of Nazi soldiers who hunted them down, harassed them mercilessly and then brought them to their imprisonment, tortures and death. This kind of unfortunate situation is prime for asking certain questions on the ethics of lying. Indeed, this kind of question presented in this context is frequently asked (to the point of nobody seemingly knowing where it originated): If you were hiding a jew in your house and the Nazis came and asked if there were Jews in your house, would it be more ethical to lie or tell the truth? Most people would consider it more ethical to lie. In fact, one of our greatest heroes from that time and situation became a hero because he lied. Schindler’s deception saved thousands and he is still honored for the effort that kind of deception took. So why is it assumed that lying is unethical in the first place? Shouldn’t a lie be determined ethical or unethical based on the consequences of said lie?

This is, of course, the train of thought that leads us to the concept of the benevolent lie - a lie of goodwill, charity and/or benefit. My job as an entertainer is to make people happy. Me lying to someone over the phone about having a tight, round ass is no more evil than Jim Parsons pretending that he has a Physics degree on the TV series ‘Big Bang Theory.’

Another element to my work, though, is that the men I entertain also lie. They often lie about their personal traits in order to impress me or to their significant others in order to keep from facing potential consequences of their partner finding out that they sought sexual entertainment through me. While the former lie can be absurd and has been the fodder of many, many jokes between my peers and partners and I, it is also not a lie that does harm. The latter, however, only does harm if the significant other finds out and the man’s pursuance of erotic entertainment was not in the percieved agreement they had in their partnership. It is the latter kind of lie that also seems to get the most attention from other women. Unfortunately, the negative attention seems to get directed at me. The assumption seems to be that it is my moral duty to turn down the clients who I know are married or, at least, not there with the permission or blessings of their significant others. I view this dilemma as being akin to the sweat shop dilemma, only not nearly on the same calibur. In some sweat shops, conditions are so bad that the workers have to go to extreme measures in order to make ends meet. Sometimes this means stealing some of their product and selling it to people they know. This action brings them more money as their job doesn’t meet their needs. Stealing is assumed to be wrong, but in this case, it isn’t the buyer’s duty to tell the owner of the sweat shop that his worker has stolen from him. In fact, one would hope that the buyer would be understanding enough to keep the secret of the worker not only so that they can gain from the purchase but also because they understand the worker’s needs. The situation between the worker and the buyer, in this case, is one of meeting the needs of each other. Sexual drives are a very natural thing to have. There is nothing wrong with them and we are each the owners of our own bodies and are responsible for seeking out the things that our bodies need. If another person assumes that they own the sexual aspects of their partner, this need becomes theirs to meet and if they can’t meet it, it is entirely reasonable for their partner to get their needs met somehow. This doesn’t mean to do something irresponsible. It doesn’t mean spending money they don’t have or making bad sexual choices that could lead to disease. However, if they come to a club and pay $5 for some tits in their face so that they can masturbate sometime later that night, it is a necessary trade for both the worke … um … stripper and the client. My last dinner cost me less than $5 and if my young self and my friends are imagined to have been punished for being crack addicted whores** for that $5, it sounds like a good trade to me.

*John Mack is a UFOlogist who seems to have helped create memories of alien abductions in people who previously had no memory of them. He worked at Harvard.
**Crack addicted whores, as it turns out in the above fantasy, are punished by being told to eat each other’s pussies.