The Memoirs Of Maddy Flanders–The Sex Life Of A Capitol Hill Courtesan

Maddy Flanders was born and raised on an Iowan farm.  She milked the cows before sunup, helped her mother cook breakfast, took the school bus to Winterset, completed her chores before sundown, and helped put her five brothers and sisters to bed. 

Until the age of twelve she was a second mother, indispensable and responsible in large part for the survival of the farm, threatened by big agriculture and New York banks.  She was a good, dutiful, observant daughter but who like many intelligent, naturally ambitious girls of her generation waited impatiently for an independent life of her own; a life without the stink of pig sties, cattle sheds, chicken coops, and barnyards.

Because of her conservative religious upbringing and stolid Middle American values, her parents never remarked about her remarkable natural beauty – a God-given gift to be offered to Him and if the Good Lord saw fit, to her husband.  She, however, was a nymphet, already a young woman at a surprisingly early age, a girl with a spontaneous, unassuming sexuality who was always in heat and followed by boys who smelled her.  She wanted them, all of them without knowing why or how. She felt it in her groin but could never put words to it.  An itchy hunger which she only half-satisfied on the swales of her mattress, waking up wanting something more but what? It was an incessant desire without definition without release or surcease.

Until Bobby Phillips could wait no more, and she knew that what he wanted had to do with the itchy hunger and waiting was not an option.  Nothing was an option – not the Biblical verses her father read every evening or the harsh, appraising looks of her mother when she came home from school, or the prudential warnings of Pastor Leaven.  Only Bobby Phillips mattered and what he wanted.

Neither she nor her many psychiatrists over the years could disaggregate his unusual, precocious, and unique sexual maturity in a woman who instinctively and without guilt, regret, or remorse, sought sexual pleasure, knew how to achieve it, and could offer it at the market’s highest prices to her clients.

It wasn’t difficult for a young woman of her inclinations, natural beauty, and fearless, uncomplicated sexuality to find employment in the best-regarded professional escort services in Washington.  Surprising only to those few who look at the nation’s capital as the center of probity and moral authority, it is no different in its collective sexual appetites than anywhere else in the country.  The only difference is that men of power and wealth can afford the best, and have an attributed sexual attractiveness thanks to their status and influence.  

‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac’, Henry Kissinger once remarked.  Even he, an ugly man who outside of circles of power would have been a sexual beggar, had any woman he wanted.  

Washington was a stable of alpha males always on the make.  The bellwether was John Kennedy, a young man of natural sexual allure who needed no aphrodisiacs and nothing other than natural charm and sexual confidence.

He was not the only one.  In fact they all were Lotharios.  The revered Martin Luther King, American hero, moral giant was perhaps the biggest high-profile tomcatter around, joining LBJ and both sides of the aisle in their sexual escapades.  The press at the time was willingly complicit in their dalliances, although J. Edgar Hoover, a closeted homosexual jealous of powerful men’s sexuality, went after both King and Kennedy with a vengeance. It didn’t stop either one, of course, and had the American public known about their infidelities, their approval ratings would have gone up even higher.  

The Sixties was a golden age of libertinage.  Love the one you’re with applied to everyone.  Some discretion was called for in official Washington, but who really cared?  Everyone was jumping naked into the Reflecting Pool.

While the likes of JFK and MLK could have any woman for free, most of the rubes from the Midwest had no such luck.  The sexual allure of power did not necessarily apply to first term Congressmen from Madeleine’s home county, and it was with the capital’s many call girls with whom these substratum politicians sought pleasure. 

A recent governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, had frequent assignations with a number of high-class, high-priced call girls in the bridal suite of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.  He, a former prosecuting attorney and man of Mosaic law and vengeful justice, had no time to seduce young women, as easy as it might have been (like Kissinger, a physically unattractive man whose sexual conquests were made easy only by the aphrodisiac of power); and so he resorted to professional services. In fact call girls were Spitzer’s preferences.  As the Phillip Roth character Faunia Farley says in The Human Stain, ‘Men don’t pay you for sex; they pay you to leave’.  Sex with high-class, beautiful hookers was perfect for a busy politician. 

Unfortunately Spitzer got caught and had to resign, although confidants knew that he had no remorse.  He had done nothing wrong, harmed no one except perhaps his aggrieved wife who disingenuously claimed she knew nothing about his affairs and collected a pretty penny in a divorce settlement.  

Spitzer reminded many of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former French Presidential candidate, scion of international finance, who had a gargantuan sexual appetite and who was open and remorseless about his affairs.  When asked whether the women he had been consorting with were prostitutes, he replied how could he know. “Women all look the same with their clothes off”.

So Maddy’s clients were all of the Eliot Spitzer, Dominique Strauss-Kahn variety.   They appreciated beautiful women, had no interest in disaggregating them into professionals and amateurs, and enjoyed sex with whomever they chose.  Choosing, availability, accessibility, and security was all they asked for; and Maddy offered the complete package.

Although in today’s censorious, accusatory, MeToo hysteria and Puritan sexual ethics, call girls have come under increasing scrutiny.  A number of rings have been outed and prosecuted.   Yet prostitution is the world’s oldest profession for a reason, and a few sanctimoniously rabid neo-feminists have had no lasting impact whatsoever.

The powerful men in Washington are no different from any other.  They have been married to unpleasant, nitpicking, righteous women for decades and look for sexual comfort elsewhere.  Although sexually confident, bold men like Donald Trump make no bones about their dalliances and get more votes because of it , even the timid seek some release from a contract they regret signing.  Which is where Maddy Flanders and her colleagues come in.

These women benefit from the sexual double standard in Washington.  Progressive women in Congress press for decriminalization of prostitution, arguing that prostitutes are ‘sex workers’, providing a service like millions of other women.  Their choices should be respected.  At the same time, these same activists claim that women are a protected species and must be kept safe from predatory men.  Prostitutes, like all women, suffer daily at the hands of abusive men.  So damned if you do, damned if you don’t so prostitution survives and prospers as it always has.

The only issue for Maddy Flanders was when to retire, not a difficult decision, for her Vanguard retirement account was in the millions.  When the bumps, sags, and wattle become a liability, she said, off she would go to a luxury condo in Sarasota.  Her personal life was incidental to her professional career, but there are men around who when sexually active cared little for the distinction between professional and amateur servicing, and so paid no attention whatsoever to the resumes of prospective live-in partners.  So most of her colleagues and friends in Washington have assumed that she is living the good life in Florida.