So, what are you into?

There’s one question often posed by new clients that I always struggle to answer.

“So, what are you into?”

This is a bit like walking up to the Safeway customer service desk and asking, “So, what do you have here to eat?”

Answered honestly, it’s a question that gets me in trouble. To a client I don’t know, my reply needs to communicate that I’m open to experimentation and adventure, but not so much as to scare them off.

If the mild to wild spectrum was rated from zero (reading the Sears catalogue while playing footsies) to one hundred (where felching is merely flirting), I would probably be somewhere in the mid-60s. Not too extreme, but enough to justify my ownership of a duffel bag stuffed with leather, metal and silicone toys, gathered over the years from the back ends of sex shops.

However, when a client’s tastes live somewhere around the mid-20s, mentioning my bag o’ tricks is a bad idea. That’s difficult for me not to do, as I’ve become so comfortable talking about sex that I often misjudge what’s commonplace and what might shock a suburbanite.

My early attempts to answer the “what are you into” question were awkward, to say the least. “Mild to wild” means very different things to different people. I’d be talking to the guy who only uses four colours of crayon like he’s got a 200 pack with the built-in sharpener. If I said the wrong thing —like dildo, for instance —the discomfort coming from the other end of the phone was palpable.

Asking the question back was useless. The conversation usually then disintegrated into the wheel-spinning “I don’t know, what do YOU want to do?” cycle.

In almost every one of these cases, all the client actually wants is what I call basic cable: kissing, cuddling, body contact, oral, give or take anal. I take these to be the bare minimum of services that an escort needs to have available.

Asking what I’m into always implied to me that the client was fishing for a specialty channel. So I began to answer with what I’m not into: blood, scat or unsafe, with watersports (receiving) and rimming (giving) decided on a case-by-case basis. Usually, this works to establish some common ground.

The most satisfying response, however, I read off of another escort’s website, and I’ve been stealing it ever since: “I’m into guys that are comfortable in their own skin, and are able to relax enough to enjoy receiving pleasure.”

I owe you one, Juan Latino Vancouver. It’s the absolute truth. I’ve never found anything in the back room of a sex shop that makes for a better time than that.