Sexual History Interview: Critique and Reactions
This paper concerns an interview that I conducted with a 27-year-old ex-escort. This individual was a college educated female who will be given the name Samantha, as an alias for the purposes of this paper. I was able to make initial contact with Samantha through a range of referrals from friends of some of my colleagues. Samantha was willing to talk to me, though only if I was able to provide her with the utmost privacy and confidentiality. Conducting the interview was fascinating, as I had never met a member of the sex industry. I was worried that perhaps I might say something that she considered naive or that she would be able to see clearly that I was new at the task of interviewing someone about their sexual history. Samantha came from a two-parent middle-class home, and was not raised under any particular religion, though she did say that she believed in God.
We met in a very dimly lit bar in a town that was openly acknowledged as being a place where neither of us lived. When I arrived at the bar, I definitely felt like I was in a movie. It felt like a lonely, dusty and mostly ramshackle cowboy bar from the 1980s. This made me feel even more nervous about the interview, because I had heard that escorts could sometimes be tough, withering people and that they sometimes were unfriendly to other women. This turned out to not be true. She was very polite but had firm boundaries up.
The interview then commenced with me asking her direct, though sensitively worded questions about her sexual history. The first question I asked pertained to the age that she lost her virginity. She said she lost her virginity at age 17 to her boyfriend at the time. Her answer somewhat surprised me; I guess I had thought that she would have lost her virginity at a much younger age, as she was someone who was working in the sex industry....
I was also surprised because this meant that her and I lost our virginities at the same age. It surprised me to discover that I had something in common with someone from the sex industry.
I asked her about the memories and emotions that she hand in connection with losing her virginity. She explained that her emotions were mostly positive -- at least with that first incident. She explained that she had a warm connection with her boyfriend at the time and she never felt pressured into having sex with him. It was her subsequent sexual partners that she felt turned her off on sex. She felt that many of them were just using her, and not at all interested in her pleasure or even them sharing something together. All subsequent experiences were negative. When I asked her how they had been negative she explained that she felt used by a lot of partners: either they disappeared after she slept with them, or they weren't interested even remotely in her pleasure. This really made me think. I had had a lot of partners who had treated me the same way; I just didn't end up working in the sex industry. I found this very provocative because I wondered what was different about us that made us live through the same experiences but deal with them in different ways.
Samantha provided a curious answer when I asked her if she had ever been abused. She said, "I don't know." When I pressed further, she merely explained that she didn't remember any history of sexual abuse or any specific incidences, but that she had always felt or sensed that something like that had happened in some regard. She also explained that she had always felt uncomfortable around certain members of her family, such as her father and uncle, but that she never understood why. When this arena of the discussion came up, I tried to keep things as professional as possible, and I tried to make all my questions seem as direct…
