Tonight, I’m going to an industry party. A sex industry party, that is. I don’t usually go to such things - they’re really geared more towards the escorts and sensual-touch ladies. I am considered a niche service, and a lot of the vanilla boys just don’t know what to make of me. (Some of them know what they’d like to make of me, though. I admit that it can be entertaining to tease them.)

No, I’m not telling you where it is, sorry. Those who know, know, and I haven't been empowered to give out information about it. Besides, it’s not that exciting to the naked eye (so to speak). It’s just a cocktail party-type thing where the professional ladies smile and flirt and pass business cards to interested parties. People make conversation about the weather and sports teams and the monorails crashing into each other, and oh by the way, sweetie, do you have a website? What are your hours? But if you were watching through a window, it wouldn’t look so different than lots of other social events.

The street workers usually don’t come to stuff like this. No, it’s mostly the middle-tier of sex workers - the largest group by far - that you’ll meet at these events. (What would upper-tier be? Porn star-escorts who get a thouand dollars or more for dates. That's a relatively small group.)

It’s a nice system in some ways. There’s no question that having met someone at a party like this makes booking an initial appointment with them much less fraught with tension. You’re less likely to get no-showed by a guy who’s met you already, and when he shows up, you already know something about who he is, in terms of personality and looks. It removes the whole blind-date anxiety - on both sides, I imagine.

I’ve been to a few of these things, and as I said, a lot of the boys don’t know quite what to say to me. Some of them email me after the fact and tell me they were afraid to come talk to me, as if I might pull out my riding crop and thrash them on the spot. But my entire purpose in going to firmly establish the fact that I actually don’t have snakes for hair, and I don’t turn men into stone with my glance, and some of the boys clearly enjoy getting to hang out with me a bit. Oddly, though, the guys who can chat with me in a perfectly relaxed and friendly manner usually aren’t the ones who wind up calling the next day to schedule with me. It’ll be the boy who stutters and shuffles and barely meets my eye that I’ll be hearing from. Which I suppose is sort of charming, when I think about it.