“You can set limits to protect yourself. We all do that. But in doing so you will eliminate potential clients. To the extent you feel reluctance or shame at what you’re doing, this will put off some clients, although some others will enjoy it. As a geisho, you would be selling services and pleasure. It would be your profession to make your offerings as valuable and remunerative as you can without violating your own sense of decency and honour. Others will train and pay you; I will help and advise you if you take this path; but ultimately, in this or anything else, it is yourself that you must please.”
“How will Dad take it?” I asked her. “Will you keep it secret that you are helping me? If he knows, won’t he be angry?”
“I will not keep it secret that I am helping you. And he will be angry with both of us, at first. But he will also respect you for standing up to him and for paying your own way through school. Though he will be annoyed with me at first, and may even try to forbid me to help you, he will not seriously expect me, as your mother, to withhold my love and support. He knows full well what it will cost him — in our marriage bed and elsewhere — to make me resent him. Also he loves us; and though he has his limitations (like all of us) he is a good man.”
“In the long run, however he rationalizes it, he will forgive us both. In the short term, handling him will be my problem. You don’t need to worry about it. Be assured that I can do what is needed.”
“But I have questions for you my dear, and I must have the truth: How much sexual experience have you had? How would you describe your sexual orientation, and how do you feel about sex in general? How do you feel about yourself as a sexual creature? I know you’ve been masturbating regularly for several years now. I see the semen stains on your underwear and sheets.”
I blushed and started to stammer something. She made a gesture and stopped me short. “No need to be embarrassed,” she said. Remember that I am a very experienced woman who knows all about men, and knows very well that she has teen-aged son. At your age, if you weren’t wanking two or three times a day I would be worried about you.”
“Now, you’re entitled to your privacy, but if I’m going to help you, there are things I need to know. How far have you gone with your girlfriends? Have you had any homosexual experience? How would you feel about wanking with another boy? About giving or receiving a blow job to a man, or a pussy-licking to a woman? About fucking another boy, or being fucked? About getting pegged or face-fucked? Are you a dominant or a submissive or a switch?”
“In short, what turns you on, and what would really gross you out? If you don’t know, if you haven’t thought much about these things, I’m giving you a homework assignment. With your own lap top, in your own room, I want you to watch a porn tape that I’ll give you (a DVD actually), as many times as you like until you’re ready to answer my questions.
She went on, “You will wear a tracking collar as you do so. It will record your pulse rate, blood pressure and skin conductivity, and give us both an objective measure of what floats your boat. It will time itself to the DVD and keep track of the pauses, so you can do this exercise for days — and interrupt to masturbate, as much as you like.” It may tell you more about yourself than you want to know. It will certainly tell me more about you than you are comfortable with your mother knowing.”
“But that is the second point of your assignment. If you are going to be a geisho, you must get used to seeing yourself — and letting some other people see you — from the perspective of that profession. If I am going to help you, you must let me be a geisha to you, as well as your mother!”
“Now, not another word. We’ll talk again in a few days. Meanwhile, think it over, watch the film and let yourself enjoy it. I’ll leave the DVD and collar in your room. Just let me know when your finished with them.”
“Then we’ll discuss the results, and I’ll tell you what assistance I can give you.”
She got up, hugged me and walked away; and for the moment, that was the end of it. But she had given me a lot to think about, and made me see her in a new light.