Two pieces of advice for unicorn hunters

1. Stop harassing women on dating apps and in real-life.

2. Hire a professional.

the advice expanded

Yes, unicorns¹ exist. But, like their namesakes in myth and legend, bisexual women interested in threesomes with relative strangers are rare.

And the vast majority of bisexual women who are not unicorns and who are just trying to meet someone (on dating apps) or who are just trying to go about their day (in real-life) are beyond weary of being seen as objects (even if theoretically desirable ones).²

Unicorn hunters impose a fantasy on the world and forget they are looking for a person. And, the essential futility of the quest aside, this is a complete ethics failure. Unicorn hunting fails the would kindergarteners accept this behaviour test. It fails the don’t be a dick test.

But, unicorn hunting as ethical failure aside, hiring a professional has benefits of its own.

Most people are sub-par at sexual communication, especially in the US. Formal sex education is awful; formal sexuality education is non-existent; and the default alternatives (internet porn and ill-informed peers) make things worse.

People are not great at communicating with the people they are actually being intimate with. Navigating and negotiating with a third-party they don’t know well is something most people are not up to.

A professional sex worker obviates this: they do the navigating and negotiating for you. They may not like the baggage you bring, or your bullshit assumptions. But they know your baggage and your bullshit all too well and they can drag you past it and make what you actually want crystal clear.

And not just for your sake. Indeed, mainly for theirs. People who are good at performing intimacy are generally also good at communicating and setting boundaries. The two are intimately linked (pun intended).

I’m not in the US. And where I am, sex work is decriminalised.³ So my direct knowledge is not perfectly transferable. Nonetheless, in my home state, many sex workers make being ‘the third’ for couples a specific service offering.

If ‘adding a third person’ is on your sexual wish list, a professional is an ethical way of making that wish come true.

nonetheless, check yourself first

Before making a booking, interrogate yourself, especially if you are the straight woman in the hiring pair.

When I interviewed several dozen sex workers (across genders) for an article on this specific subject some years ago,⁴ two things kept coming up:

1. Way too many of the women in the hiring couple were clearly not enthusiastic about the whole thing. (Patriarchal heteronormativity is fucking awful.)

2. Way too many of the men in the hiring couple were clearly not enthusiastic when their wives/girlfriends actually got in to the whole thing and said men suddenly felt like third-wheels. (Patriarchal heteronormativity is really fucking awful.)⁵

NB: I also got multiple accounts of appointments going really well. When both people were in to the whole idea, the addition of a professional helps in so many ways. The professional’s experience and skill gets things going and keep things flowing. And those same professional skills also work to get clients through in-the-moment problems like jealousy, fear, shyness, and anxiety.

If a threesome is something you want, a quality professional is almost certainly the safest and best way of making your first such experience as good as possible.

on the basic ethics of threesomes and objectification

Threesomes are an incredibly common fantasy. And whatever your heart dreams up is fine. You can’t hurt anyone else in your imagination.

But, at the core of most such fantasies, is sexual objectification. Whether it’s one person’s fantasy or a couple’s fantasy, the third party’s place in that fantasy is, mostly, to be a willing and available source of pleasure.

And that can absolutely be a fine thing. The complementary fantasy to this sort of threesome dream is also quite common. I am, at least for this little while, an object of ultimate desire and utter pleasure. Whether that object is worshipped or ‘made use of’ or a complex mix of both, there are many who fantasise like this. Moreover, when you frame this as being, if only momentarily, free of all worries and cares; as a way of being entirely concerned with pleasure, it makes perfect sense as a fantasy.

But ‘being about nothing but desire and pleasure’ is a vulnerable-making fantasy. To allow yourself to be entirely about being desirable and desired, means placing serious trust in the hands of those doing the desiring.

Which is why a professional is a good idea. Sex work is, at its base, the performance of intimacy and desire. And just as a good actor is completely in their performance on stage or screen, a good sex worker is completely in their performance in their place of work. They aren’t faking it, because performance isn’t about faking, it’s about making the pretend real.

But, and again as with good actors, good sex workers know they are performing and, consequently, know how to keep the performance safe for themselves and their clients.

Sex workers still have to trust their clients. But they are much better than novices at knowing when to stop performing/trusting and when to start advocating on their behalf, or on behalf of another.⁶

finally, for those who insist on going it alone (so to speak)

If you are still insistent on going with a non-professional,⁷ at least follow Erika Moen’s and Matthew Nolan’s advice from their 2014 comic, ‘How to rock a threeway’.

Moen and Nolan don’t explicitly say ‘don’t go unicorn hunting’ but the ‘be respectful and communicate frankly and honestly’ theme of the whole piece makes unicorn hunting an impossibility by default.

Put another way, Moen and Nolan make the point that, to bring a third in to your bedroom by yourself, you must take on all the logistics; all the practical setup; and all the emotional labour.

Because you can’t be a unicorn hunter and a decent person at the same time. To do this yourself and stay on the right side of the decent person | utter tool divide, you have to be a find the right person and make the entire experience right for them hunter.

Which is a lot of work and which, for me at least, makes hiring a professional all the more compelling.

1. A unicorn is a bisexual woman interested in being the 3rd person for an MF couple seeking FMF, MFF, or both, sex.⁸

   The term can also denote any bisexual person willing to indulge the ‘bring a third person into the bedroom’ fantasy of any couple. This usage is, at least so far as I can determine, rare.

2. Lesbians also gets these fantasies imposed on them. Because all sexuality is ultimately about the male gaze apparently. <heavy fucking sigh>.

3. This means it’s regulated like all other labour, rather than being subject to sex-work–specific laws.

4. Not published in English.

5. This isn’t the indicator of straight women being ‘queerer than they realised’ you might think it is.

   The consensus opinion of the women I interviewed was that a few of their female clients in these scenarios did experience a bisexual awakening of sorts. Most, however, were simultaneously delighted by their orgasms and anxious to get their partners doing what the sex worker had done.

   Because the orgasms were great, but they couldn’t get into the idea of a woman being the source of said greatness. As one interviewee put it, she could tell the straight women because they’d close their eyes and imagine it was their husband down there, finally getting it right; also, they always balked at reciprocating.

6. If you read this as arguing for sex work decriminalisation, you read correctly.

   I’d argue further, however. It’s just as important to de-marginalise sex work, so that anyone performing such labour has unfettered access to structures that protect their labour rights and personal safety.

   And a social narrative that appreciates sex work’s complexity constitutes an effective way of de-marginalising.

   And, as with other pink-collared workforces (nurses come to mind), one effective way of improving pink-collared work is to professionalise the occupation. For better or worse (I’d argue mostly for worse, but that’s a different discussion), status accrues to roles and tasks that look white-collar. So, I’ve used professional language above to, if only for this piece, put sex workers into white-collar space.

   It’s a demarginalising strategy. Moreover, when you consider intimacy as labour, it seems obvious, to me at least, that this work is professional in scope and seriousness, and should be valued as such. (And, yes, we should also ask why we value things this way, but that’s a further different discussion.)

7. Performance not being ‘fake’ notwithstanding, there’s a pre-occupation with ‘authenticity’ that convinces many that hiring a professional in circumstances like this makes the experience somehow ‘lesser’.

8. FMF is a 3-person sexual encounter in which both women (F) engage with the man but not each other. MFF is a 3-person sexual encounter in which the man and one of the women engage with the other woman, but the woman who engages with the other woman does not engage with the man.⁹

   My interview sample (n=45) was too small to safely generalise from, but almost all the women I interviewed said straight couples who hired them engaged them for both FMF and MFF services. That is, they were hired to be intimate with both the man and the woman.

   And, yes, this short-hand is reductively binary. It pre-dates emerging language by decades.

9. Footnotes in footnotes: tell me you’ve worked in academia without telling me you’ve worked in academia.