Q I’ve got a question I doubt you’ve ever gotten before. It has a bit of everything: sex-work etiquette, long-distance phone interaction, and a het cis chick anxious not to lose her tolerance badge. Here it goes: A few months ago, I started getting hang-up calls from numbers I didn’t recognize in Boston. Then weird texts started showing up, trying to set up “dates.” I responded to the first few because I figured someone was giving out a fake number that just happened to be mine. (I kept my cell phone when I moved from Boston to Seattle.) But after the fourth or fifth call/text from a different unknown number, I turned to the Internet. Google informed me that my phone number is identical, except for area code, to a trans escort working in Boston. I’m getting one or two calls or texts per week meant for this other woman. They’ve started to get more explicit. Because of the time difference, they come at weird hours. I don’t know what I should do. I can ask my phone company to block each number individually, but that’s a pain in the ass. I can text the correct area code to the men who are writing to me looking for the trans escort, but I don’t really want to help people too stupid to read a phone number correctly. I suppose I could report the whole thing to the Boston police, but I doubt they’d care, and I don’t have any moral objections to sex work, I just don’t want people to call/text me asking for it. Aside from changing my phone number, which has been my sole number for almost eight years, anything else you can suggest? —Stupid Phone and Messages
As distressed as you are to receive these calls and texts—and, again, one or two a week doesn’t seem like that big of a deal—that sex worker will probably be more distressed to learn that she’s losing so many potential (and numerically illiterate) clients. I have known and loved a few sex workers—loved in a strictly platonic sense—and most would change their professional phone numbers regularly to rid themselves of time wasters and clients they didn’t want to see again. The sex worker whose calls you’re getting may be willing to change her number, SPAM, or at the very least emphasize the correct area code in her ads.
A He can so come—he just needs to crank himself over the edge using his fist. Needing his own fist to finish may be the result of death-grip masturbation techniques, and he could retrain his dick with some time and effort. But it’s not fair to say that “he can’t come.” If a woman can’t come from vaginal intercourse alone (which 75 percent of women can’t) but can come during oral sex or when mixing fingers or a vibrator into vaginal intercourse, we don’t say, “She can’t come.” We say, “This is what she needs to come.”
