Page 16 of Shamefully Trained

The first one called himself CapitolTraditionalist and opened with:

I appreciate a proud girl if she knows when not to argue.

The second wanted to know whether I had ‘natural breasts and an unpierced pink mouth.’

The third was somehow worse because he tried to sound civilized.

Your reserve is appealing. I suspect you would look especially beautiful after a well-deserved spanking.

I dropped the phone onto the bedspread, then snatched it back up a second later because disgust apparently did not preclude curiosity. Or desperation. I scrolled farther.

One man asked if I would relocate ‘without fuss.’ One wanted to know my exact weight. One wrote only:

You’ll do.

Another had attached a prewritten list of expectations that included nightly photographs in sleepwear and ‘no ideological hostility to traditional domestic correction.’

I laughed once, in disbelief, and then hated the laugh because it sounded strained. Things stirred inside me as I read the awful messages. I wished those things had remained as deeply repressed as they apparently had been before a senator had told me to take my clothes off.

The sponsor tiers sat beside their names in little metallic labels.

Economy.

Moderate.

Premium.

Luxury.

Green, bronze, silver, gold.

I found I had started checking those before I read the messages themselves, which might have been the ugliest thing of all. I remembered the figures almost involuntarily.

Economy: one thousand a month.

Moderate: two thousand.

Premium: three thousand.

Luxury: five thousand and up.

Numbers that would once have seemed like abstractions and now translated instantly into rent, debt, groceries, the possibility of continuing to breathe.

Then I saw a picture that made the room go colder.

Under the name Jay G.

The profile picture showed only a jaw and a tie knot, no more revealing than half the men on the app. But the message said:

I think we’d suit each other. You already know I prefer ambition to innocence.

I felt heat and revulsion break over me together.

Only one man in Washington would have written that way to me. He had expected me to hear the private smirk underneath the words, I felt absolutely sure.

I clicked into the profile with a kind of horrified compulsion. Economy sponsor. Of course he was. Senator Jason Gowry, with all his money and appetite and swagger, had listed himself as economy. The cheapness of it somehow disgusted me more than if he had priced himself high. It made the whole thing feel dirtier, pettier, meaner. He wanted women to come cheap because he thought they should.

I backed out at once, my face hot.