Riddle me this. You can pay for many things that help you get laid. You can pay for manicures and pedicures, for waxing and sugaring, for lipstick and mascara, for thin-strapped bras and matching thongs. You can pay a club’s cover. You can pay for cocktails that loosen you up, slide you from the chick who hates speaking up in meetings to the chick who is grinding her ass into a stranger, singing, Please don’t stop the music. You can pay for membership to an app that will, in theory, intro-duce you to the person you’re going to fuck. You can pay for medication and devices that let you fuck without procreating. You can pay for medicine and procedures that will terminate pregnancy if prophylactic measures fail. And you can pay for childcare if you want to have the kid, or have no choice. This being America, you can and will pay for the health care you need during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. It goes on and on. Hell, you may end up paying for the kid’s college degree. You can pay for everything that surrounds fucking, every spoke of that wheel, but you cannot pay for the fucking itself. You cannot pay for the hub.
Paying for sex is illegal, and, anecdotally at least, that’s the first reason most people give when asked why they don’t. But we do all kinds of illegal things. Little white crimes. We jay-walk, and drop litter, and text while driving. We take pens from the office and buy booze with fake IDs and give friends our Xanax when they’re nervous about flights.
Close to 30% of men say they have paid for sex. I know a few of them. They’re matter-of-fact about it. Years ago, a guy pal vacationed in Prague, wandering happily among the Gothic buildings and their ochre roofs, bingeing on beer and pork knuckles and Kafka and cafés. Toward the end of the week he visited a club. Amid the digital thumping of EDM and the poles of light from colored lasers, he started chatting with a woman. She told him she was a sex worker and, that evening, on the job. His calculation was quick, effortless: I’m horny. She’s working. Let’s go. No hand-wringing. No shame, no big deal. They left the club. She gave him head. He paid her. They parted.
But I don’t know any women who have exchanged money for sex. Maybe this is because there’s no presumption of safety with strange men, so spending an hour with one in a hotel room, for instance, could be as likely to lead to a police report as an orgasm. Maybe it’s because a woman’s orgasm isn’t guaranteed in the same way it usually is for men. Maybe it’s a thread of demisexuality among the fairer sex. Maybe it’s a coincidence. But I don’t think so.
I think the real reason women don’t pay point-blank for sex is because it just isn’t ladylike, it just isn’t proper, and most of us are still yoked to the idea of being or appearing to be the right kind of woman. We want to be normal. Paying for sex directly—the way you swipe your card at the nail salon—reveals hunger and ambition that is unbecoming. The hunger to fuck; the readiness to fuck without all the relational gymnastics; the willingness to use one’s money selfishly. We are taught to trade our relational work for sex, not our cash.
I considered paying for sex. I considered it at great length, in great detail, with great trepidation, with great debates between me and girlfriends, me and my therapist, with Sturm und Drang. On the surface, it seemed like a simple solution to a complex set of problems, one of which was simply that I wanted to have sex but I didn’t want to date. And yet, and yet—I scratched below the surface, and the complications started to explode like popcorn kernels, slowly at first, and then like something that might get out of hand. How would I even find a sex worker? If the sex worker was a man, how could I ensure I wouldn’t be raped and killed?* How likely was a random sex worker to grok the idiosyncratic pathways to my climax? Would the experience permanently alter my dignity, leaving me coated with a sleazy, scandalous slime that I could never scrub off? Could I even enjoy sex under these conditions? Or, dear God, might I enjoy it more, buttressed by a novel sensation of agency and authority, free from the boring dictates of cis-het sexual performance, free to make my pleasure the cynosure of those hours? Regardless, could I ever admit to what I’d done? To friends, to my therapist, to future partners? To my daughter, should she ever ask? In other words, could I actually go through with it, accepting all the implications and ready, at least in theory, to face the externalities?
The irony is, with all the jitteriness and pearl clutching, I failed to grasp that I had already paid for sex. I’d paid in ancillary ways—purchasing makeup and push-up bras and bikini waxes and cocktails. But I’d also paid pretty darn directly. There was a guy, and he was hot as hell, hotter than grease on a smoking skillet, like Lord, even my lesbian friends swooned. Our attraction was palpable, electric, deep. He had a job, but he had no money. Money slipped through his fingers. He was kind of a kid like that. So, it was always my treat. The drinks, the Lyfts, the food, the tickets. I even gave him cash because he said he needed it, and I had it to spare. Soon after—like, very soon—he ate me out for the first time. Rain fell and wind howled and “Beauty Essex” came through the speaker, and I came on his painfully handsome face, scruff on scruff, the acquiescent ecstasy of orgasm. Our relationship progressed, and he got a raise, and the money thing evened out. But I think, in the final analysis, that was sex I paid for. It wasn’t ideal—not because I wholly reject the idea of being a sugar mama, but because I don’t have endless liquid cash like that, and I’m sentimental at heart, prone to developing feelings after enough sex has been had. Still, I got the sexual release I wanted without having to launder his gym clothes or cook his dinners. In the final analysis, it was worth it.
I’d like for you, reader, to have that experience if you want it. This is about public policy, obviously, but also about shattering restrictions and cutting cords that limit how directly women can swap money for sex. I’m not into the commodification of anything, including people and pleasure. Megawatt capitalism is a joke, with its repulsive need for a permanent underclass and its delusions of limitless growth. But I am into a culture that calls a thing a thing, and that sees women barter their own shit for their own needs without fuss, state intervention, or shame. Women deserve the full range of human experience. We deserve more than having to be subtle, sneaky, or sly when it comes to sexual desire. We deserve our full cup of bliss.
Sometimes in movies men hire a hooker and then just talk with them. The men are lonely. They don’t need sexual release so much as emotional pouring-into. It always struck me as sad. The men they cast in these roles don’t tend to be hot as fuck, or super successful and charming. They’re usually nerds or dorks or just very beta, smothered in layers of isolation. But I get it now. After the end of my marriage, there was a period of months when I felt, literally, like I might lose my mind if someone didn’t see me, hold me with their eye contact, their energy, and yes, their arms. So, I paid a man to do this—a man I had great rapport with, and knew to be sincere and thoughtful, and found attractive but did not want to date. I paid him $500 a week, for four weeks straight, in exchange for six hours of his time each Thursday; I thought of it as a heavy, concentrated course of medicine. I paid him so it remained clear to him, and to me, that this was not romance; it was work. It was services rendered, and it was cash exchanged, like how I pay a personal trainer or my therapist. It felt un-orthodox, possibly even bonkers; said therapist cosigned the idea, though, and the man I had in mind was game, and my raw need for sweetness and company trounced my ego’s wish to appear normal.
These sessions, as we called them, were the best money I have ever spent. Coco Chanel said the best things in life are free, and the second-best are very expensive; in the best of all possible worlds, my marriage would have flourished indefinitely; failing that, I would have left the confines of that marriage stuffed with so much emotional nourishment that I could live off it, like a camel, for months. But this is the second-best world, the world in which enduring the end of my marriage left me hollowed out, devitalized, and starving, and it cost money to get what I needed on the timeline that I needed it. I’d have paid twice as much. Because, my goodness, the way this man understood the assignment, something neither of us had ever done! Within moments of me broaching my idea, he replied, “So, you need me to make you feel really, really tended to and held with warm, healthy masculine energy.” Yes, I do. And the hours and hours of good conversation, whatever I wanted to talk about, for as long as I wanted to talk about it, his mind nimble enough to go anywhere; the hours of restorative eye contact, so much I could bathe in it, my whole body afloat in curative waters; the sensation of his chest against my cheek as we lay down, his arm around me, quiet for a long time until I choked up and said, This feels nice, and he replied, You deserve this, Savala, and deep tears came, the impacted suffering of a frigid, dead marriage flowing out of my mind, off my body, because I was so sturdily enfolded in his sensitivity and strength; the way in our last session, with the sexual assault I’d experienced for some reason on my mind, I asked if he would do this weird thing, which was to gently rest his hand on top of my (fully clothed) vulva, and keep it there for a bit, and send it gallantry and protection, and he did.
And in exchange for this rehabilitation? Just money. I owed no emotional or relational responsibility to this man. I did not have to do one single thing for him. I did not have to care about him, or consider him, or reshape myself for him, or yield to him. I did care about him, of course, as another human being and in an ethical sense as my “employee,” always asking him to speak up if I ever wanted anything that struck him as funky. And honestly, though our time together came about in an unorthodox way, the content of it was quite mainstream—we literally talked, snuggled, and looked into each other’s eyes. The alchemy was that I did no domestic or interpersonal work for this man; I had permission to be radically selfish, concerned only with lading my heart-coffers with the sensation of being witnessed and nurtured. The magic was framing our time as a transaction—albeit a sacred one—rather than as a prelude to a relationship or a test-drive for compatibility or an audition for love. I did not want to be chosen; I wanted to be served. I want all women to have this kind of emotional servicing, if they need or want it, especially women who have tipped themselves over and poured themselves out, for years and decades, so that others could drink. We deserve to be cared for without having to care back.
Excerpted from the book Good Woman: A Reckoning by Savala Nolan. Copyright © 2026 by Savala Nolan. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
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