Chapter 9 - A meeting of minds
Emma. 1
Jess was screaming. It was amazing how she could make it sound so real when Emma knew that it was anything but. As one of the best, most requested whores on the colony, Jess had a constant stream of men passing through their shared little apartment, and each of them paid an eye-watering amount of credits to get inside her. But god-damn, did that girl know how to put on a show. The headboard of her bed was knocking against the wall, and the fainter but growing grunts of her John were almost being drowned out as she screamed out the words that invariably hurried the whole process along.
"Oh fuck!" Jess's muffled voice sounded through the thin walls. "Fuck that big dick into my slutty teenaged cunt, use it; you paid for it, it's fucking yours! Do it, fucking dump that load into me, make me feel it, make me feel you cum, do it, baby, fucking
ruin
me!"
Jess watched too much porn.
Fortunately, it would seem that the men who paid for her company did too. Emma found it cringe-worthy. It was tacky, it was cheesy, and she couldn't imagine for the life of her how anybody could get off on something so obviously scripted... both the porn and Jess's panted tirade. She literally used those words, verbatim, on everyone. Of course, there was something to be said, Jess claimed, for the throes of passion. Seeing such a pretty face using such dirty words, the guy knowing where that mouth had been and what it was capable of. It was the loss of one's self into the fantasy, and although none of these guys ever made her climax, she enjoyed the fantasy almost as much as they did. Men didn't pay her for sex, she had said in one of her more thoughtful moments; they paid her for the fantasy, and then they paid her to leave. Or, more accurately - since Jess lived here - they paid for the ability to be able to leave, guilt-free.
That made less than no sense to Emma. It seemed to run contrary to everything she thought she knew about sex, love, or relationships.
But then, even Emma had to admit that she knew as close to nothing about those subjects as it was possible for her to know. Emma wasn't quite a virgin, but she may as well have been. She was nineteen, and one fumble with a former boyfriend a few years previously did not a woman make. It had been quick, it had been unsatisfying, it had been confusing, and it had been more than a little tainted by the fact that the boy in question - a boy she had convinced herself loved her - had scurried out of the room immediately afterwards, only to dump her the next day, then hook up with someone more... worldly... about a week later. That had been her last foray into the world of sexual adventure.
Jess had no such qualms. Her body count had been in the double figures long before she realized that men would pay good money - a
lot
of good money - to get access to her body. Jess had it all: she had the sultry good looks, the killer body, the overly healthy attitude toward sex, and the dirtiest mind of any woman Emma had ever met. More than that, Jess argued, her father had always told her that the key to a happy life was to find something she loved to do and then find a way to get paid for it. Emma doubted this was what the man had in mind, but Jess loved to fuck, and she sure as hell had found a way to make it pay.
Emma's own father had given rather different advice.
"There are two types of boys," her father had said, sitting her down one day to have his version of 'the talk' with her. At the time, she had wanted the ground to swallow her whole; she had been mortifyingly embarrassed, but the more time had gone on since that day, the more sense everything he had said now made. "There are real men, and there are dogs, players, fuck boys, or whatever you want to call them. Now, no real man is born that way; a real man is made. He is made through sacrifice, hard work, through investing time in himself and in the people around him. It is his mission, his purpose in life, to improve himself, and a real man will take you with him on that journey. He will look after you; he won't treat you like property, but you will be the most valuable thing in his life, and that is the way he will treat you. But a real man wants a good woman, and all women, at some point in their lives, want a real man.
"Fuck boys are the opposite. Either unwilling or unable to put the time or effort into improving themselves. They see dating as a game, and the only thing they are looking for is found in just one place.... Between your legs. They can be manipulative, abusive, inconsiderate, objectifying, and immature. It doesn't matter how good of a person they are; if they have never put the time in to build their own lives up, they cannot possibly know how to be a positive part of yours. They don't care if you are a good woman; they want to win the dating or the hook-up game and the prize for that victory is what is between your legs. Access to that, be it for one night or for years at a time, is the sum of their ambition. They will take a good woman, drag her down to their level, and then beat them into submission with experience.
"This is the main difference between men and women. To have any sort of value at all, a man has to earn it. Success, ambition, drive, maturity, life experience, the ability to provide. Women are born with value. A woman's sexuality is the highest of all prizes for a man, for
any
kind of man, and women come tailor-made to be everything a man could ever want. They come of age already in possession of their youth, their beauty, their femininity, their fertility, and their purity. I know it sounds awful, but no matter how evolved we think we are as human beings, we are still primal, instinctually driven creatures. Those are the women that men are biologically hardwired to desire because they are the ones most likely to continue his genetic line. But each time they give their sexuality to a man, it loses value."
"So, what?" the younger Emma had argued defiantly, railing against the misogynism she felt she was hearing. "I have to save myself for the right man? No sex before marriage? Should I prepare myself for a life in the kitchen, too?"
Her father shook his head. "No, those concepts are, thankfully, long gone. What I am saying is that you should be selective in who you give yourself to. You should wake up each morning, look in the mirror, and see yourself for what you are. Not some trophy housewife or some piece of arm candy, but a vibrant, intelligent, beautiful woman that
any
man in the entire galaxy would be lucky to get. So if any man is to get you, then he had better damned well be worth it. Because by giving yourself to any guy who shows you attention, all you are doing is cheapening the value that every man should aspire to be worthy of. The more you do it, the cheaper it gets, until the men out there who you
deserve
, the ones you will eventually want to be with, won't want something that everyone else has already been given for free.
"There are a million things that make a girl into a good woman, things she can do, just like men, to build herself up. Get your education, be the woman who challenges her man to be better, be able to match him, hell,
beat
him on an intellectual level. Find your passions and chase them with everything you have. Develop your sense of self, learn that there is a difference between being smart and being wise, that there is a difference between being hot and being beautiful, and that when it comes to a relationship, every single human being alive, men or women, are only the sum of what they can bring to the table. Beauty will never fade with age, hotness does, but beautiful women are born every day, you need to have more than that, and a man needs to be looking for more than that to deserve you."
"Aren't you supposed to be telling me to find love or something?" She had asked.
"Love is the most important and powerful thing on earth, Ems," he sighed, using the pet name he had given her as an infant. "But love comes later. This is just to start the relationship; this is to get the door open. Love is through the door, but it can and will remain sealed closed if both you and your future partner aren't careful now. And you deserve love.
"Every good, real man out there has been on a journey to build himself up for his entire life; he has built himself up to be a King of his own world. But contrary to what the magazines and the movies tell you, a King doesn't want a Princess; he wants a Queen. But even if you are a Queen in every single other way imaginable, no King is going to settle for a woman who gave away the most intrinsically valuable part of herself to anybody who caught her eye at the time."
"Jesus, Dad," she had groaned. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I am a man," he answered simply. "And I know how men think. More than that, I am the only man who is going to tell you the truth about this because I am the only man who is not going to try to manipulate or charm you into bed. One day, you will want to settle down, you'll want to find someone, and you will want to be happy; I'm giving you the one piece of advice that nobody else can."
"I'm not sure Mom would agree with that."
"Who do you think asked me to talk to you about it?" he'd shrugged. "When I met your mother, I was 32, and she was 26; she had been with three people before me."
"Oh, so she wasn't a good woman 'cause she'd given it away?" Emma snorted.
"Three men in eight years, assuming she started at 18, is not giving it away. That is being in a few relationships that she dedicated herself to, and they didn't work out. That is being selective. Your mom was 26 when we met, your aunt Kim was 22, and she had already fucked around with about 30 different guys. Tell me, what is the one thing that she always complains about now?"
Emma failed to stifle another groan as she thought about the long, wine-filled nights that she had been forced to listen to as her Aunt bitched to her mother. "That she can't find a good man and that the only men interested in her are only after one thing."
"She chased the cheap thrill. She lied, she cheated, she threw away the good men who were all around her because she wanted the next shiny object. Then, when her looks had dried up, and a new generation of easy women came along to replace her, she was left dealing with the consequences of her actions."
"But mom tells her that she'll find someone. So she's lying? To her own sister?"
"Yup. Because your Mom doesn't want to hurt her feelings by telling her the truth. She made stupid decisions, poor choices, and chased attention instead of affection. And now, real men won't take her seriously because she can never be his Queen. Sure, they'll fuck her; no single man is going to turn down free sex, but when it comes down to what she brings to the table, that is all she has, and it's all used up."
She had to admit, thinking about the miserable, lonely, bitter woman and then hearing her alcohol-fuelled recollections of her wilder, younger days, this was marking a morbid kind of sense. "So, what are you saying I should do?"
