As I sat in my pyjamas, watching the assisted dying bill fail in the House of Lords, all I could think was: 'bother.' I suspect I'll be getting more requests than ever from my paying clients to euthanise them. It's not an unusual proposition I get as a sex worker. Men have asked me — half-playfully and half in earnest — whether I might help them exit stage left, ideally in a way that feels less clinical than a hospital bed. As one of my regulars, 72-year-old Les, put it, it might feel like a 'bloody big sexy bang' to end a life on.
The first time a client asked me to kill him five years ago, the request was delivered lightly, almost flirtatiously, as though he were testing the limits of what might be on offer. But he kept returning to it calmly, as if we were negotiating a service. He wanted to know whether I'd ever take things 'too far' during breath play, and whether I'd know how to make sure he didn't come back from it. Since then, I've heard it enough that it no longer surprises me. I wouldn't call it common, exactly, but it's certainly not rare. Other sex workers I know have had similar requests, sometimes accompanied by offers of money, sometimes something more theatrical: promises of inheritance, of being written into wills, of making it 'worth my while.'
I can't help these men. You can't consent to a smacked bottom in this country, still less being killed, and any sex-related death would invite immediate and intense scrutiny. These things are vanishingly rare, which makes them impossible to disguise. Just 17 Brits have had cardiac arrests during sex in three decades according to St George's University of London. Chemsex deaths are more frequent at a rate of about three a month in London, according to ITV, but it's still a small number when 460 people die of cancer every day in the UK.
Then there are the tiresome practicalities: the unglamorous realities that intrude on fantasy. Disposing of a body would is quite a faff. Questions get asked, things unravel. The men interest me more than the logistics: I'm actually quite squeamish. All this doesn't stop men from trying to opt-out via dominatrix. Les takes me to lunch once a month when his pension comes in. The rest of the time he lives on bread and jam. 'I don't want to die yet,' he tells me. 'Too much to do. But when I get to that age — 80, maybe — I'd like to die between your thighs. You've got cancer to pick from, or dementia. I don't fancy any of that. But if we do it, you must make sure I'm not quite a corpse before you get me to your car, OK? Corpse disposal — that would be the main problem.' He makes a compelling argument. It would be more fun than cancer. 'I asked another Mistress if she'd kill me too. We went to The Ritz last month. She said, you're fifth in the queue,' he adds.
A few other men have asked me to euthanise them, should they grow ill. They are not all Les, though there are plenty like him: older, alone, rationing small pleasures across the month. Others are younger, carrying a kind of flat, persistent unhappiness. A few mention illness and a desire to avoid indignity. Not all of them want to die now. Mostly they want a sense of control over how things might end, and the hope that they won't be alone when it does. The overlap between sex, control and risk is hardly new. For some, the idea of dying in an intimate, heightened moment feels preferable to the slow fade of illness or the impersonality of institutional care. It's less about death, more about rewriting the script around it.
When men suggest I euthanise them, I don't treat it as a genuine proposition to be negotiated. But I don't dismiss it outright either. Sometimes I'll gently steer them elsewhere — towards a GP, a counsellor, a helpline — though I don't always feel it's my place to intervene beyond that. I'm not a therapist. What I am, occasionally, is a sounding board for things they don't feel able to say anywhere else. Sometimes I jokingly suggest they rewrite their wills and we'll consider the killing later. So far no one's been daft enough to fall for that.
Orgasm has long been called 'la petite mort' – the little death. A safe, reversible one. But no one is dying between my thighs. Not permanently.
