Emotional Labor and $400 Work Dinners
by The Awl
Sheila McClear on the emotional labor she performed once for a terrible man:
He didn’t say $400 straight out. He didn’t name any sort of price and I knew it’d be gauche to ask; it would ruin the deal. I had just started a two-year career in the business of fleecing men for money, in strip clubs and peep shows, and sometimes guys would offer me more money to hang out with them in various ways, many of them quite innocent. I’d never taken anyone up on it, except Greg, because I had the feeling he was harmless. I met him hanging around the front of the club, drinking a Heineken. He was 20 years older than me, handsome enough, with salt-and-pepper hair, and was wearing a crisp white button-down shirt, the kind the guys I dated never owned.