Tess LaCoil – Sex Worker

What is(was) your professional/stage/working name?

I have had many stage names in this order: Sara, Jamie, Marie, Jackie, Marie Curie, a variety of assigned names, Sophie, Hypatia, Hypatia’s Clit and Tess LaCoil. My current is Tess LaCoil.

What do you call yourself?

To be clear, I will list all the things I do and have done, but if simplicity is required, I would say ‘Sex Worker’ is accurate. I have been/do Phone sex, webcam modeling, solo porn, stripping, erotic texting and nude modeling. I also venture over to the very artistic side when I perform burlesque.

How old are you now?

I am 31, as I write this. I will be 32 in less than a month.

At what age did you engage in your first professional sexual experience?

I was 27 when I took on jobs doing erotic texting and phone sex. I was a very late bloomer.

Describe your first professional sexual experience, including what happened, how you felt, what you were thinking, how you felt afterward.

I’m going to describe two first experiences because I can’t remember which happened first and because I think they’re both important to look at with this question.

One of the things I tried very early on, in the sex industry, was erotic texting. In this job, I was to respond to text messages from men who thought they were texting someone specific. I did this through a website which provided profiles of the women I was to portray. There was an abundance of lessons to be learned from this job. One of those lessons happened to be how to bastardize the English language in as many dimensions possible. When I portrayed my character, other women were helping to portray her as well. For the sake of efficiency, messages that came into the company we worked for were handled in the order they were received by the masses of women waiting for them. None of us had just one character, we had many of them. None of the other women seemed to have the vocabulary or typing skills that I had. Not that I was better, but it became a point of confusion when a client would get texts in textspeech and then his messages would suddenly turn into something very articulate. By the time his conversation had cycled back to me, I might witness the amusing consequences (primarily confusion) of a guy who thought his text-lover was mysteriously gaining IQ points.

There was a problem, though. These men were under the impression that I, or my character, was also paying for a service designed to help us connect with people. When I signed up for the job, I hadn’t realized that’s what we would be doing. This job made me feel terrible. To illustrate how terrible it made me feel, let me describe someone I interacted with. For this article, I will call him Mel. Mel was a man who lived in London. He lived with his mother and received a check from either the government or his ex employer once a month, but this check was not very big. You see, Mel was confined to a wheelchair. He was poor and he spent all his spare money trying to talk to someone we will call Carol. Carol was composed of the personalities of, what I would guess as being about a hundred women, all reading from a personality outline that described Carol. The mysterious Carol also lived in London and she liked to dance and walk in the park. If I’m not mistaken, Carol had a cat. That doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that Carol sucked every cent she could out of Mel so that he could text her all the time and tell her how much he loved her and begging her, time and again, to finally agree to meet him. He blamed his disability for keeping him from his love and his love pretended it was any number of other excuses. Mel’s situation became so bad that many parts of Carol’s personality objected to him being even allowed to use the service. They contacted supervisors and wrote notes on his file about all of his troubles. The supervisors, though, said to keep feeding Mel from their character. That was their job, after all.

I can handle most types of sex work. I don’t mind playing a role and pretending to be someone that I am not in order to cater to the fantasies of the men that ultimately pay my bills. That is the way the industry works. However, that is only a healthy situation when both people involved, myself and my client, understand that this is entertainment. I hated the fact that with the erotic texting job, my clients did not understand that it was entertainment. They thought they were talking to a real person, often they fell in love with that person. We were fucking with people’s emotions, parts of their brain that could be altered, forever, by our actions. Not cool. Not cool at all.I will never know what happened to Mel because I quit that job very quickly.

My other first job, which happened very near the erotic texting job, was a phone sex position. I received hourly pay that was scaled according to performance. Performance was determined based on how long I kept my callers on the line. I learned very quickly that this job suited me very well. When I first signed up to do this work, I had the idea that I could make this a learning experience. I love learning experiences and I was aware that what I thought I knew about the sex industry and even sex itself was somehow distorted by the dryness of the academic world. I knew there were things that I didn’t understand, things that I didn’t know.

So, as the school of phone knocks began, I set out to tackle my first lesson: translating anatomy into sexual slang. I started this job without knowing anything about talking dirty. I had almost never even cussed. My language was clean. I was raised Mormon and even though I had left the church quite some time before, I had never thought to change my speech patterns. And so it was, my first day of work involved me learning to not say ‘vulva’ and to say ‘pussy.’ I had to learn to avoid words like “Mons pubis,” “glans,” and “vaginal canal” and to say things like, “hood,” “head,” and “hole.” Human Anatomy and Physiology, as it turns out, was the least sexy class that I had taken in college. It took me two weeks to undo what getting an associates degree had done to my sexual terminology.

To further complicate things, I knew a hell of a lot about sex because of college and because I read a lot of textbooks just for fun. But I knew absolutely nothing about SEX. I could describe orgasm types in women and phases of orgasm in men, but I had no clue what a “reverse cowgirl” was or that anyone would ever think to stick their tongue in my ass. I knew a lot without knowing a damned thing and I had to make up for the lack of knowledge in a very short time. Google was my best lover during that time and in a matter of only a week or two, I was rocking the world, one splooge assist at a time.

At what age did you entertain the first (serious) thoughts of going into sex work?

I had never thought about being a sex worker until right when I was faced with the decision to do so. It wasn’t a fantasy or even something I thought I would be good at.

What made you decide to enter the line of work you’re in?

That’s kind of a complicated question to answer. I can’t really deny that money played a role in me deciding to do sex work, but it wasn’t really just the money. I was also tremendously curious. I have an insatiable curiosity about how people, the universe, things work. Joining the ranks of other sex workers allowed me to see into a window of the world that no other opportunity could. I also realized that if I did well, I could gain information about behavior that I could share with the world and, to my knowledge, nobody else was doing that. Knowing that the world’s perspectives on sex work were wrong, I wanted to educate people. So that’s what I tried to do.

What do you enjoy most about your work?

I masturbate for a living. Fucking. Awesome. My job is to bring pleasure to the world by helping people along with their most innate drives. My job ranks in importance somewhere between a gourmet chef and the guy who cleans out the porta-potties at football games. The difference between me and them, though, is my job is fucking awesome. My job is fun and my job involves the kind of getting dirty that doesn’t ruin your clothes or require an apron. My job is Le Petit Mort.

What do you like the least about your work?

Every once in a great while, not very often, some guy thinks that he must establish dominion over me. Sometimes, this is as simple as him pretending that he’s slapping my ass (over the phone or on webcam) or something as big as him setting me up to be kidnapped. Each of those things has happened. I don’t like assholes, so men who are rude and overbearing really suck for me to deal with. One such guy once decided that he was absolutely in love with me and he tried to set me up for some unknown adventure which he wanted me to pack for and which I was not willing to go on. That guy, sadly, is still out there, somewhere, so I have to be extra careful when I’m performing so that I don’t tip the world off on where I live.

Does your family know what you do? If so, what do they think?

They have no idea. If they did know, they would disown me. I will not be telling them anytime soon.

Do you have a spouse, partner or significant other, and if so, do they know about what you do? If so, what do they think?

I don’t like talking about my love life, much, so I will answer this more in terms of what my past experiences have been. I have had a variety of responses from lovers about my work. Some people have a difficult time dealing with it and some seem to find that it makes me sexier to them. I’m always open about my work, no matter how I think they will respond, though, because I would never want my work to be the reason that myself or another person gets hurt. As a result, one of the first things I tell a person I’m interested in is that I’m a sex worker and then I explain my work to them.

How much longer do you think you’ll do what you’re doing now, and what are your plans for when you quit? If you’ve already left, what made you decide to leave and what did you decide to do for work when you left?

Sadly, this industry has a natural early retirement age. There just isn’t much of a market for people over the age of 35, so no matter what I or anyone else wants to do, there needs to be a back up plan. I am fortunate in that I already have a little college education and I never thought that this industry would be anything but a temporary arrangement. I’m planning on going back to school very soon and will probably continue in the sex industry throughout the time that I’m in school. Once I am finished with school, I will, very likely, cut another path for myself.

Describe your educational background.

I have an Associates degree in Health Education, minoring in Linguistics. I was forced by circumstance to drop out of a University program when I was only 18 credits away from a Bachelor’s in Liberal Science, Majoring in Liberal Science and Health ed and minoring in Mexican History, Anthropology, Sociology and Linguistics.

If you had to go back and tell your younger self (mid to late teens) that you’d be doing what you’re doing now (assuming you’re still working in the sex industry), what do you think your younger self would say about it?

I would have then fallen prey to belief in the supernatural, thereby changing the events that made me leave religion and enter the sex industry, which would then create entirely different results. I would change the timestream! But, um, all theories aside, if I could do that and not risk altering time, I would think that I was crazy. I was religious when I was a teenager and I saw sex work the same way that most of the rest of the population does. I was judgmental and fell into the same pattern of believing in all of those terrible myths about the industry. It is for the best that I wasn’t aware, though, because having experienced that side of the fence, I feel it better prepares me for what activist work I do to help those in my industry as we face problems associated with stereotypes that exist.

What advice would you give someone who was looking to get into your line of sex work?

I have actually written a lot about this before. People interested in joining the sex industry often need to see many myths debunked. They have to understand that everything they may have thought they knew about how much money they might make to how people will treat them is not as the rest of the world has told them. I think it is important for people joining the sex industry to have a good self-esteem, to be well informed about their work and even to know a few things about business and economics. I love my work and it has done me a lot of good, but doing activist work to help others has taught me that the way things have gone for me is not the way things go for everyone and just a little education can save many women a lot of trouble as they cross the threshold into the world I’m familiar with.

Other information: Currently, alongside my work, I help out with several online sex worker communities and I write about a variety of things related to issues I’m passionate about on sexandscience.org/blog. I use my work as a way to shed light on issues that I would otherwise not have had a very good perspective on and I try to share whatever I can with as many people as I can.

Tess’ Phone Sex Site:  Phone Kelly
Tess’ Twitter:  @SophieHirsch