As someone who works in the non-porn part of the sex industry, going to the AVNs was something I never imagined I’d get to do. For context, In December ‘25, I premiered my short film about Brooke Johnson who is a sober sex worker and BDSM porn star. When they came from Vegas to New York for the premiere, they told me they had been nominated for an AVN award. I was over the moon for them! I asked if I could film them going as nominee and walking the red carpet. They said yes! Filming Brooke at the AVNs would also be a continuation of my short F-cking Sober that we shot in 2023. I see a feature in F-cking Sober’s future!

For non-adult industry people, the AVNs are the Oscars of the porn biz. It’s a big deal. It’s also one of the only events where all these content makers, sex toy sellers, porn stars, production companies and their fans all come together and network. It’s a five day affair. It starts with the expo in the Virgin Hotel’s convention hall and ends with the award show.

The AVNs cater more towards mainstream porn. If you get off on sites like Pornhub, the top videos usually feature these stars who go on to be nominated for an AVN. Brooke was nominated which was extra special because they perform in a more niche category of porn which is hardcore BDSM. I am proud so of Brooke’s nomination!

The day after I flew in, Brooke and I went to the convention for five hours. I filmed the entire time stopping for a chicken tender break in the casino food court. I’ll try not to be a big dork and get too detailed but basically I created a set up that would allow me to carry my camera steadily while I followed around Brooke. Brooke spent their time scouting talent for Kink Dot Com. Not only does Brooke perform but they also book other performers for Kink Dot Com shoots. I filmed them chatting up a lot of hotties and we also ran into Brooke’s performer friends who were doing signings for their fans. This is where my experience got a little complicated.

As a worker and as someone who has worked on non-union and big budget productions (non porn) as a production assistant, there are many things I keep in mind. Ethicality is my biggest priority when filming. Like a lot of people, I’m tired of cis white men/ non-sex workers trying to represent the experiences of sex workers. It’s not to say they shouldn’t, but they definitely have way too much representation in the media. That’s a big reason why Brooke and I decided to make a short doc in the first place. For one, it would be made by a sex worker (me) and a friend of the person starring in it (Brooke) so I’m not just some outsider trying to capitalize something “fringe”. We also needed something to represent us as sober sex workers. Once I started filming, I tried to run shoots differently than I had seen working in mainstream television and documentary. For instance, consent is obviously a priority in filming. I usually do releases or and have a priot convo with a person that I am filming. But it was a bit different at the AVNS. I was shadowing Brooke but, of course, there were thousands of people there for the convention. No one bothered me or questioned me about filming, porn stars are already out about what they do- that’s kind of the whole thing about porn. If this were a convention of sworkers who only did in person/escort services, my worries would be a lot different and anonymity would be the priority. But in this case I felt I had a green light to film. If you bought a ticket to AVN you basically signed a waiver consenting to be photographed. There were tiktokers, press people, everyone had a phone and was using it so if you didn’t want to be filmed as an attendee, it wouldn’t be wise to go.

I was the only doc videographer that I could tell and moreover, the only female videographer filming. In fact, on the night of the awards, I was following Brooke in all my camera gear when this security guard at the hotel called out to me, “you know, you’re the only woman with a camera i’ve seen! Good for you! We love to see it!” It was a bright moment – a little teary eyed it made me.

Even though I am a woman and a sex worker and actively trying to document sex workers from their own point of view as considerately as possible, honestly I still felt icky sometimes.

For one, I noticed that most performers charged for photos. This is when a fan takes a photo with a performer which can start anywhere from $10 a photo. Granted I wasn’t posing with them, but I felt like I was cheating them in a way by filming. After all, I am still filming the goods, the face, the ass, the award winning stuff is on display, doesn’t that mean I owe them money? Speaking of goods, they were everywhere! All the naked or minimally clad parts of the human body were present. Skin, skin, and more skin. Skin being shook, slapped, flexed, and grabbed. At times I felt like a creep having my camera running as I passed by it. I attempt to document experiences and the experience of the AVNS is being around a lot of nearly naked bodies so that’s what I filmed. In my discomfort, I kept reminding myself that these people do porn and they are familiar with their bodies being filmed with little to no clothes- it’s part of their job. But at the same time, I couldn’t stop worrying if I was exploiting performers. That’s a good thing though! I think more people who make docs should be way more cognizant of how their filming exploits the people in front of the camera. It was just kind of a mindfuck trying to be conscious and respectful and be someone who knows how the body is profitable and the profit should benefit the person the body is attached to. Another way of saying this, if I am filming someone shaking their ass, am I exploiting them?

I could go on a long rant about the history of docs and how they’ve benefited colonization, white supremacy and elitism. I guess one of the answers for me lies in who makes money off the documentary. Documentaries by and large, especially independent ones, don’t make money, they hemorrhage it during its production in my experience. I am one person and I am the one filming. No production company, no HBO or VICE or Channel 5 is funding me. I’m funding me. Therefore, if some cosmic force pulls through and I get $ for the documentary, would then some of said $ go to the person shaking ass in the b-roll shot? And if not, am I exploiting the ass shaker? Or were they throwing it back for fun and don’t even care that much?

That being said, there’s a lot that I filmed that won’t go into the final cut of the movie. What will determine that is a lot of things but a big factor is if one- is ethical to include a person that I filmed based on the scene’s context if I am not paying them or if it doesn’t benefit them in any way. The politics of doc making has historically been that you don’t pay the “subjects” of your documentary. The industry argues that payment distorts authenticity. In all honesty, I did pay Brooke for the short we made. Originally, that was not a part of the plan, but after we had filmed, I decided to pay them for their time and emotional energy for the project. It was something I did as a payment plan over time and a decision I felt solid about because people usually do not get paid for their time and labor, and they should! Also, there’s a difference between people getting paid for their appearance in a doc before it’s completed and getting residuals after the doc is made if the film happens to do well. Hoop Dreams is a good example of this situation for my doc nerds out there! I am no expert at all, and there are many different ways filmmakers and the people being filmed go through this process and it changes with time and culture. The process is also all dependent on each player’s financial factors, positionality, access, and of course race, class, and privilege. Blah blah so i’ve made this spicy post about the porn awards to a boring filmmaker ethics seminar but it’s something that consumes me! As it should every filmmaker! I’m gonna attach some resources that have been helpful to me on this doc journey at the end of the post.

I did not go to school for this. The first time I filmed something, I was filming Brooke for what ended up becoming F-cking Sober. Almost three years in, I like to think I am somewhat informed, but more often than not, I feel like I’m shooting a ball with my eyes closed, praying my ball lands in the basket. The ball being filming and the basket being that the filming is beneficial to the person being filmed. All this to say, I’m operating in multiple contexts being both a sex worker and documentarian, and in my mind I obsesses over the questions, “is this ethical? Am I doing the right thing by filming this or am I a bad person for filming this?”

Okay, okay! I know you’re bored at this point so I’ll go back to ass and titties! There was a lot. There was a lot of animatronic hole too. Robot sex dolls were a big part of the convention. A little dystopian looking at the banners above the doll titties that say “Never be alone again”. Dolls dressed as maids bent over the vendor’s table with a handwritten sign that said feel me.

Anyway! Fun moments include: vendors spanking customers with three foot long tentacles, long lines of men waiting to get pictures signed by their favorite Brazzers stars, a woman slipping me a flyer for a discount to get my pussy replicated via silicone mold. On the third day of the convention when I was getting b-roll, I stumbled upon my favorite male performer’s signing for fans so of course I had to say hey! At the award show, Wiz Khalifa was the entertainer. I’m not a huge fan but all the performers getting on stage while he performed Or Nah was pretty sick. There was a collective boo for an advertisement for Joi- AI porn. After the audible disagreement from everyone, a woman in front of us looked back and said, “we [performers] don’t agree on much as an industry but I’m glad we agree on that!” It was a sweet moment.

Overall, my AVN experience and time with Brooke was unforgettable and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity. We filmed A LOT and I’m excited to share the footage with you one day! And when I do share it, I hope it benefits Brooke and everyone who participated and does positive and meaningful things for swer representation just as we intend for it to!

Here is a pic of Brooke day one of filming!

There are more stills on my instagram as well as project updates: _emvaughn

My cat who brought me stability and undying love for the past five years slipped away a few months ago.

I feel like every time someone says to me I’m sorry for your loss,” I just want to fire back and say, “no, but you don’t understand!”

I have a theory that sex workers (no matter the field) keep special bonds with their pets. I know not all people who do this work have pets because there are so many reasons why pets are not super accessible to have (i.e. vet costs, care, time, etc).

BUT for those of us ones that do have pets, I think we share a very unique bond with our animals.

Here’s why I think this:

Animals do not have the concept of stigma, at least our domestic ones like dogs and cats.

My cat loved me regardless of what I was doing. She slept on my chest every time- whether I did fs with a client or not. When I was sore from work, she was there. When times were good financially she slept on my chest. When times were iffy financially- she was there. She was there if my client that day had been married or single. She was there when I had fun with clients, when I had a rotten time with a client. She met a few of them too. Even at times when I felt totally lost in the work and in my life- she was there.

She sat and watched me put on my makeup every morning and night. She stayed when I styled my hair- always interested in the phenomenon of the hair dryer. She licked my makeup brushes like it was her job. She sat down and tolerated being the star of the money showers I threw when I had a good night. She kept me sane when I felt completely insane. She was my shadow. I got her a year into my sobriety and she came on the plane with me to nyc when I moved here.

When I started to work multiple jobs, both in the industry and in film, she stuck out the long days I couldn’t be home. She stuck it out for all the overnights I had with clients.

You might think, “Oh but it’s just a cat, you’re projecting. She’s an animal.” Okay and so am I? And yeah i don’t wanna speak for her but she was my shadow, my sidekick, my baby, my best friend. She gave me so much love and support regardless if she knew it or not. She helped me stay sober in the tough early years because I wanted to take care of her, I loved her love.

In the winter of 2023, she got real skinny and didn’t seem like herself. She was only four and a half at the time so it was strange. The day I took her to get checked out by the vet that first time, I had slept with that stupid married guy. After we hooked up, I took my rent envelope from under my bed, packed her up, and asked him to drive us down the street to the vet. I was letting him hit for free so the least he could do was drive me a few blocks. He laughed at me when I grabbed the rent envelope, “spending your rent on a cat?!” he asked.

Fuck you! He clearly never knew unconditional love and it showed.

Besides family visits and shoots every now and again, I stopped traveling to put less stress on her. Every night I had spent the night out with a client, I was weary and rushed home in the morning to her. I thought I would have 2-3 years more with her because she was so young. But I was wrong.

The last few weeks of her life were some of the most awful I have experienced. We spent those weeks in bed. I worked as little as possible because I didn’t want to leave her side. I would allow myself a short walk each day to leave the apartment and friends visited us. She slept on my chest for hours and hours each day and night. She went to hospital, got blood transfusions, and when she was home she needed around the clock care and medical treatment. I had to force all these medications down her poor throat and draw and measure and stare and administer and wait. Her care consumed me.

On one of her last days, she stopped wanting my touch. She didn’t want to lay on my chest anymore. She curled up in her comfort place on the ground and I made a pallet next to her so she wouldn’t be alone. When she became incontinent the next day, I called around urgently to find a vet that would come that same day to put her down.

A vet came to put her asleep in my bedroom and she passed in my arms. I was able to spend around twenty minutes with her body, her tiny, sick body that had fought so hard. I wish I could’ve spent more time. We put her down on the pallet I had slept on the night before, under a quilt that belonged to a friend of mine who passed away a few years ago. I prayed for her soul to meet my other friends who have passed over and that she would look out for me and to have a blissful time wherever she went.

There have been quite a few nights and days where I have held her fur clippings and sobbed. I still have her bowl and a few things out of hers that I just can’t put into a closet or storage yet.

Now, I feel an emptiness, a distrust and a pain that didn’t exist while she was alive. For us, to find something, someone to love us without condition, without judgement, without shame, is something that is next to impossible for us who do sw. It’s hard to find just as a human being but I would argue finding that special connection as an sworker is something cosmic, much bigger than what we understand.

So I am entirely indebted to this being and the love she shared with me the past five years. She tethered me to my reality. As a sex worker, as someone who is not out publicly, someone who is queer in my personal life but not professionally, as someone who is sober, someone who is spiritual, someone who daily sees the outcomes of wealth disparities and stigma, I need to center, to be centered, to be tethered to my true reality. And at night when I would come home and let myself rest after thoroughly exhausting myself, she was there and tethered me to my most true self. As someone who values pleasure, helping others, spirituality, she reminded me of all these things about myself which often gets so lost transitioning from one reality to another. Since losing her, I’ve lost that centering time. And how will I replace it? I have no idea but I’m so glad I can afford a therapist to help me navigate this question.

So I have a hard time communicating what she meant to me and what her death represents. I don’t have to justify it but I really want to do her justice. I took care of her for five years and had to be the one to make the decision to end her life because I could feel the immensity of her suffering. Pets that tend to love deeply don’t usually pass on their own which is intensely heartbreaking. But I am grateful I sat with her, cared for her around the clock for her the last few weeks. She deserved a much more complex life that I could give her in an apartment in a big city anyway. We never know what’s behind the curtain of the universe after all.

For a year now, I have been gifted the opportunity to help create the most beautiful project. In 2023, I started to document sex workers out of fear that their histories would be erased because of the stigma attached to what we do. I came to the conclusion that death for a sex worker meant a loss not only for that individual but for the collective as well.

I eventually finished my first short film, F-cking Sober, in 2024, and the process changed me. Making the film and collaborating with Brooke Johnson—the star of F-cking Sober—convinced me that archiving sex workers’ histories through documentary is a powerful and accessible medium.

In late 2024, another community came to my attention that furthered my understanding of how stigmatization affects history. Each year, I went to an event called Wunderkammer, where participants blended life and death in a way I had never seen before. The artists came from all backgrounds but were mostly queer, young people who had evolved their relationship to death and reflected this evolution in their artwork. Circus and drag performances also took place and added to this celebration of life and death. It goes without saying, but this was my favorite event of the year! But in terms of historical erasure, it was really painful to watch each artist present their work to an eager audience and judges only for the story to end as soon as they exited the stage. There was no recording of their presentations. There were always pictures of performers, but both the artists and their stories added more complexity and left you asking more questions.

After my third year of being frustrated by the lack of documentation—and also having the fresh experience of making two docs—I reached out to Divya, the event’s organizer and founder— to ask if they would like to do some sort of storytelling project around the event with me. To my absolute surprise and joy, they said yes, and the rest is history lol.

Here are some pictures of this past year’s Wunderkammers.

In January of 2025, Divya (they/she) of Gotham Taxidermy and I had our first on-camera interview. Divya is a taxidermist but, more holistically, an artist, educator, and advocate for both people and animals. Previously, I had only known Divya through social media and Wunderkammer.

Like I mentioned, I was interested in documenting Wunderkammer, but Divya said something in our first interview that completely changed my perspective on the project and continues to guide the film a year later:

“There are a lot of reactions to death people have that they have towards sex work as well. I find those parallels really interesting. We’re the oldest profession in the book. People have been fucking and dying forever.”

In our conversation about sex work and taxidermy, it became clear how much both practices have in common in terms of stigma. Divya explained that death and sex are two of the most essential parts of human life, yet death work and sex work are some of the most stigmatized professions in our society. We still have trouble talking about sex and death even though they’re literally something all humans experience and have since the beginning of time. What’s more, I became aware that there was an opportunity to record the personal history of someone who is a former sex worker and who also practices death work. The range of their knowledge of humanity would be even more deepened and all the more essential to keep. Yet this person would most likely also face a lot of stigma and shame doing both forms of work.

The documentary I have been filming for the last year aims to tell the story of how death work and sex work are related and a taxidermy competition, artistic resistance to transphobia in the Trump administration, and the importance of environmental preservation. AND ALSO migratory bird death, queer joy, and a wolf/peacock hybrid. I could say more, but we gotta finish the thing!

Since our first shoot in January, the story has evolved and deepened in so many ways and has included even more beautiful people. The film is going to be very hard to edit but in the best way. I want to say more about the project—and I will in a later post because we are still in the midst of it all—but I wanted to plug our fundraising campaign for the documentary first!

Side note: I do have to say I’ve been feeling a bit weird and uncomfortable asking people for money, especially since the economy is so bad and there are countless causes to donate to that are more urgent (i.e. Palestine, people losing SNAP benefits, etc.). But art in response to the time we are living in, as well as highlighting the work and lives of people who are often de-platformed, is essential.

So! Consider donating! We’ve included some very sick rewards for different donation amounts. If you can’t donate, please send this to a person who you think would dig it or post on your socials! I can’t say it enough, but I am incredibly blessed to be in the position of collaborating with some of the coolest and nicest people I have ever met.

So if you read to the end of this post- the answer to the question is….

Stigma !!! yay!

DONATE HERE to our Kickstarter!

We’re living in incredibly bleak times—bleaker, even, than before, if that’s possible. And yet, amid the growing discourse around ICE raids and immigration enforcement, one group continues to be left out of the conversation: sex workers.

Sex workers—especially women of color—have long been targeted by law enforcement. This is nothing new. But under the current administration, the danger for immigrants involved in sex work has escalated dramatically. While many people are rightly outraged by ICE agents detaining individuals with no prior criminal record and denying them due process, it’s crucial that we include sex workers in these discussions.

There is often compassion—particularly among white liberals—for immigrants who fit the narrative of the “good” or “perfect” immigrant: those who work hard, support their families, and have never broken the law. But what about those who don’t fit that mold? What about the mothers, the women working in clubs, studios, parlors, hotels, or apartments—those whose work is stigmatized and excluded from that “respectable” immigrant narrative?

For many newly arrived immigrants, especially those without documentation or access to legal work visas, options are severely limited. Besides selling drugs or doing sex work, there are few paths available to generate income. Sure, there are jobs in construction, food service, or child care—but even when those jobs offer a “living wage,” that wage is often anything but livable, especially for those supporting families here and back home.

Undocumented people are frequently forced to accept under-the-table work that pays well below the legal minimum. In this context, sex work can become a viable—sometimes the only—alternative. It offers flexibility, immediate income, and in some cases, autonomy that traditional jobs don’t. Refugees and undocumented immigrants often can’t afford to wait through the long, expensive process of legal employment. For them, sex work is often the only resort.

And yet, sex workers are disproportionately targeted in raids and law enforcement actions. The lack of empathy—and media coverage—is infuriating. What happens when strip clubs, massage parlors, or private studios are raided? These stories rarely make the news. They don’t spark public outrage. The stigma surrounding sex work robs these workers of compassion and visibility.

Worse still, when someone is detained from one of these venues, we have to ask: what does detention look like for a known or presumed sex worker? These egregious human bounty hunters often have physical power and institutional backing that opens the door to abuse. The stakes are higher for sex workers in every possible way.

Sex workers—many of whom are immigrants, people of color, and mothers—deserve safety, dignity, and recognition. They must be included in our fight against unjust detentions and the brutal immigration enforcement systems that continue to tear communities apart.

For example, the Dance Resource- a popular instagram page that advocates for the safety of dancers reposted the following dm on their instagram:

“Brownsville, TX was visited by ICE/HSI because, “they found a legal loophole to check for citizenship without a warrant. They as well as many FBI followed along TABC to “make sure everyone was 21” but when they spoke to us they said they were looking for a girl with a warrant and forced us to give them our ids. It was obvious it was about citizenship. They had a van out front waiting for people who didn’t have a work visa.”

This is just one example I’ve seen of people in the sex work industry being raided by ICE, but I’ve seen very little else reported. The resources out there—like the ones for dancers—are often aimed at people within the industry, not the general public. So where is the mainstream media coverage?

There’s a studio near me that has been routinely raided—even before the current wave of violent, mass immigration enforcement. It makes me nauseous to think about how much greater the threat is now. The right continues to push the narrative that immigrants are stealing, endangering “real Americans,” and are inherently “undesirable.” The current administration has made that very clear.

The intersection of immigration and sex work intensifies this rhetoric, because it combines two groups the right works aggressively to criminalize and punish. And while some liberals advocate for the protection of immigrants, it’s rare to see that same support extended to sex workers.

So this is just a PSA: when we talk and think about ICE raids and immigrant detainment, we need to remember and include sex workers—people who are less likely to receive media attention or public empathy, but who are equally deserving of both. I want to remind myself and others to keep them in mind. They shouldn’t be forgotten.

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These men don’t really like me. They like their projection of me—whatever that may be. Maybe I’m the coworker they secretly obsess over. Maybe I’m a young girl who’s infatuated with them. Maybe I’m a confused woman down on her luck who needs saving. Their projections aren’t exactly unjustified. Our interactions are transactional. Still, playing out these projections has started to take a toll—more than ever before. I think it’s because I recently chose celibacy.

The other day at the studio, it was busy, which I welcomed after a quiet month. I saw a client nearly every hour. They varied in age and energy: some old, some young, some rambling about their lives, some silent and distant. Some familiar faces, others new. But it wasn’t them that was the problem—it was me. That night, I left the studio and cried. I couldn’t hold a conversation without tears welling up. I knew something had to change.

In a previous post, I shared how I fell in love with a client and how it lowkey ruined my life. We met on Halloween 2023. I stopped charging him after our third session. He told me he wanted to take care of me in ways other men couldn’t—and I believed him. I thought I’d found the person I’d always been looking for. But he was married. At first, I didn’t care.

By not charging him, I lost out on a lot of money. But more than that, I gave up my power. Everything shifted. I became dependent—emotionally and sexually. I felt unrecognizable to myself. Powerless. My friends in the industry either pitied me or harshly judged me. I couldn’t explain what was happening to me. That relationship became one of the most miserable chapters of my adult life.

Dating and hooking up have always been central to my livelihood. Like a lot of people, I only feel somewhat worthy when someone wants me—whether or not I want them, or even like them. This is how I operated for a long time. And Steven—the client I fell for—triggered that craving for affirmation in a way I didn’t expect. The sex was amazing, sure. But there was something else. Something deeper. And I don’t know why it broke me so completely.

By March 2024, I knew I needed to end it. I told Steven I needed 30 days of no contact. On day 23, he called me. Said he missed me. Claimed it had been “about a month” so he figured he would give me a call. I was elated. He called me and talked to me like a person, not just a body to use when his wife wasn’t around. That small act of effort was all it took to pull me back in. And we started hooking up again.

One afternoon, we were in bed at my place. I noticed the yellow pamphlet on my nightstand I had bought recently—The Gift of No Contact. I turned over and looked at Steven instead. I wasn’t ready to leave, even though I knew the relationship was poisoning me. But it was not just me it hurt. I thought about his wife. Did she know? I doubted it. I felt sympathy for her. She was married to a man who used her money to cheat on her. One night, we even used her credit card to pull an all nighter at strip clubs in Jersey. When we finally rolled into my apartment at 6 a.m., I told him I thought I was in love with him. He didn’t even look at me, just stared at the wall. He told me he let things go too far. Then he pulled on his boots and left.

I spiraled. I tried to fill the hole with someone new. I spent hours swiping on dating apps so I didn’t have to feel the brokenness from Steven’s rejection of me. Finally, I connected with someone- let’s call him Jeremy. I was still sleeping with Steven when I started seeing Jeremy. But at least I had drawn one boundary: no more dating clients. If someone wasn’t offering a commitment or significant financial support, I wasn’t interested. Steven had ripped my heart out, and I wasn’t about to let that happen again.

Jeremy and I clicked. He was creative, worked in film, had a great sense of humor, and most importantly, he was not a client. But he was broke. So when I told him I needed some sort of commitment in order to continue being intimate with him, he said he just wanted to be friends. “Homies” as he put it. It took me a week but I held to my word, I told him “homies” don’t hook up with each other. We stayed friends for a while, made some cool art together even, but when he started seeing someone new, he became super secretive and shady about me to his new gf so our friendship ended in a dumpster fire.

After Jeremy, the pattern became impossible to ignore. Every time I felt discomfort, I reached for a person to soothe it. Sex and romance were my coping mechanisms. But no amount of desire or attention was ever enough. The relief was always temporary. I started asking myself: What if I stopped seeking validation from other people altogether? What if I dealt with the discomfort directly?

Steven wasn’t my first toxic relationship. He wasn’t even the first married person I’d been with. But I wanted to believe he was different. Looking back, I know better. And out of respect—for myself and his wife—I finally ended it for good. Yes, I found out who she was. Quick PSA: Just remember if a hooker has any of your personal info, she can end your shit real quick. She probably won’t but def don’t fuck her over.

Therapy was another turning point. I had been out of it for two years. Going back was life-saving. Now, thirteen months later, here I am- a celibate sex worker. In my work life, I work. I need income. But in my personal life, no dating. No sex. I even try not to flirt, though I’m not perfect with that one.

I still get crushes, but I find they’re always on unavailable people. I build fantasies around them—about how they’ll fix me, save me from discomfort. From life. But I know it’s fake. The moment someone wants me, I feel like everything is okay. But that feeling dies fast. Then I’m chasing the next one.

So yes, I’ve made progress. But recently, after that long day in the studio, I found myself on my knees—literally and spiritually. In the shower that night, I felt disgusted. I cried until my chest turned red. The sessions were consensual, so why did it feel like I had been violated? The answer: work. I’ve always known I had intimacy issues, but I avoided facing them out of fear—fear that if I acknowledged them, I wouldn’t be able to work anymore.

And now that I’m not seeking intimacy outside of work, there’s no cushion. No escape hatch. It’s brutal. I’m also sober, so there’s really no numbing the discomfort. But despite everything, I’m proud of myself. I told my therapist I didn’t think I could last a week without sex. I’ve made it way longer than that.

That said—I’m exhausted. So I’m taking a vacation. A break. I’ve always been terrified of taking time off. In this economy, who isn’t scared? But I’ve saved up enough. I’m giving myself three weeks to rest, reassess, and figure out what’s next. I’d be devastated to leave the industry—it’s funded my art and given me freedom. But I have to prioritize my sanity. At least for now.

In Sean Baker’s latest film Anora, we follow the journey of Ani, a sex worker navigating the complexities of her relationships, career, and identity. As a sex worker myself, the movie resonates with me on multiple levels. But beyond the personal connection, I find myself questioning the ethical representation of sex work and whether the film truly portrays the reality of this industry. My experience and perspective as a sex worker, alongside my reflections on the film, will explore how the movie both glamorizes and critiques sex work, while raising questions about who gets to tell these stories and for whom.

At the beginning of Anora, the portrayal of sex work is mostly glamorous: Ani, a stripper and escort, is seen performing her job with flair and confidence. She works in an upscale club, surrounded by attractive colleagues and clients. There’s a sense of excitement, luxury, and excess—private jets, high-end dinners, cocaine, and flashy spending. The glamorization is seductive, presenting a dreamlike version of the life many may envision when they think of sex work. But as the film progresses, the reality sets in, and this glamorization begins to fade.

By the end of the movie, the glamorized image fades, revealing the harsh undercurrents of power and exploitation in the world of sex work. While Ani enjoys autonomy in some ways, she is also caught in a larger power structure that commodifies her body and emotions. Anora exposes how sex work is a transaction, but it also illustrates the emotional toll that comes with this transaction. For many sex workers, the idea of intimacy can blur with fantasy, but it is never quite real. This contrast between autonomy and exploitation is central to the narrative, and it spoke to my own experience.

While Anora presents a compelling story, it is important to consider who is represented. The film centers on a white, cisgender woman, and while her experience resonates with me, it doesn’t reflect the full spectrum of sex workers’ identities. As a sex worker myself, I’ve often felt the need to represent my experience, which is far from universal. The demographics of sex workers, especially those in marginalized communities, are often ignored or underrepresented in mainstream media. In Anora, the world of sex work seems predominantly white, and the film doesn’t delve much into the racial or systemic issues within the industry, which is a missed opportunity. But also is that Sean Baker’s story to tell? 

As a cis white woman provider with pretty fucked up notions of love, I saw myself reflected in Ani’s character. Anora speaks to the autonomy that sex work can provide, but it also highlights how this autonomy exists within a system that often dehumanizes us. For me, sex work can be an act of empowerment—mostly being able to choose your clients, your hours, and your life—but it’s also something that society defiles. The emotional dissonance of feeling both powerful and degraded is something I recognize deeply in my own work.

One aspect of Anora that particularly resonates with me is how the movie touches on the emotional complexities of being a sex worker. Ani’s relationship with her client Vanya becomes more than transactional as time goes on; she becomes emotionally involved. I’ve had similar experiences. Many of us try to maintain boundaries, but sometimes, emotions get entangled in ways that make us question our own feelings and desires. There is often an underlying tension between wanting to preserve professionalism and the deep, human desire for connection. While the movie presents Ani as someone caught between worlds, I see her as a reflection of the contradictions I live with everyday and therefore why I feel seen in the movie. 

The film’s portrayal of Ani’s relationship with her client-turned-husband illustrates one way of how a provider might navigate romantic relationships, especially when marriage or commitment is involved. I’ve known a plethora of providers and I’ve summed up three scenarios based on different provider philosophy according to the rigidity of their boundaries. 

Version One (rigid): Ani laughs off the proposal. Their relationship stays transactional.

Version Two (less rigid): Ani accepts the proposal, they get married but she’s only invested for the money so when the shit hits the fan with the family, she’s not broken up over it nor does she expect him to stay with her.

Version Three/Movie Version (porous): Ani accepts the proposal, they get married and when shit hits the fan, she expects him to stay with her and she’s heartbroken when he doesn’t. I mean this doesn’t do justice to the entire plot but you get the idea.

As a sex worker, I’ve experienced all of these emotions myself—sometimes I have deep feelings for clients. Sometimes, I even imagine a future with them. When consistently I see a nice, attractive regular with similar interests to me, it is often difficult to separate fantasy from reality. Both parties are presenting fantasies- client and provider. And sometimes I get really drawn to the fantasy that a client has presented themselves to be. Some providers have been disgusted when I’ve talked to them about my feelings for clients. Others have related. We’re all different. Ani’s story represents a worker similar to me whose romantic feelings can be swept up into the work but this characteristic is definitely not shared among all providers.

One of the central issues with Anora is the question of who gets to tell the story of sex work. While the film does a good job portraying the emotional complexity of Ani’s character, it still falls short in truly representing the variety of experiences in the sex work industry. Sean Baker, as a director and writer, isn’t a sex worker himself, and the film is still shaped by his vision and the experiences of those who create it, not by the lived experiences of sex workers. It’s a delicate balance—one that needs constant awareness. I don’t expect mainstream movies to do full justice to any marginalized community, but I do expect more honest and nuanced portrayals of sex workers that go beyond stereotypes.

Despite its flaws, I found myself moved by Anora. The film spoke to my own experiences as a sex worker in ways that few mainstream films about sex work do. While it may not represent all sex workers, the emotional truths it touched for me were rattling. The glamorization, the emotional complexity, and the harsh realities of sex work are real and I think the film sheds light on these things when movies about sex workers usually don’t.

 I walked out of the theater feeling proud of what I do, and for me, that’s a rare experience. However, we must continue to pressure mainstream media to tell stories about sex workers—accurately, ethically, and from our perspective—not from the lens of those who have not lived our experiences. 

I will say that I like Sean Baker and very much appreciate his vision for telling stories of sex workers in an attempt to challenge stigma. In fact, the past three of his films are centered around sex workers. Anora won big at Cannes and Baker dedicated the award to all sex workers. 

In conclusion, Anora is hot and you should see it. 

Here is Sean Baker’s q&a on Anora after winning Palme d’or and why he dedicated his award to swers.

It’s 4am. I’m at a party in Chelsea. I’m in bed with two men. Well really it’s me, another gentleman beside me, and one on the end. My legs are long and hard to fold which is what I want to do because the man on the end is grabbing my toes. 

The man next to me runs a successful posthouse In Manhattan. A posthouse is a place where films go to be “finished” (colorized, mixed, etc.) so they can be watched in a theater. The other man is a close friend of his and also a writer. And likes to grab the toes of unsuspecting girls.

Ten minutes before, my friend and host of the party introduced these two to me so that I could network with them. I am a first-time filmmaker. I need the services of the man who runs the posthouse. There is a chance that these services could be discounted because I am a friend of a friend. Posthouse man is also very attractive and grounded unlike his friend, Toes. 

Making small talk, I stammer. I say “like” and “um” too many times. I am probably just what these men think of girls of my generation. Inarticulate, immature, conceited. I grow more self conscious by each word that exits my mouth. The red on my lips from earlier is now flakey, I feel it. 

They stare at me as they wait to hear what I am going to say. Mr. Posthouse is trying to figure out if I am worth his time. I see it in his eyes. Toes asks me what movies inspire me. 

This is a question a film guy will ask you when meeting you and your answer– whatever it is– is unforgivable.

My favorite film ever is Princess Mononoke and it has been since I saw it for the first time at the age of seven. But I know I can’t use that film as my answer because it is a cartoon. It shows my young age. My incompetence. Though I think that film is one of the most endearing, heart-wrenching stories that advocates for labor rights, ecological justice, and gender equality, I assume they won’t be able to get past the cartoon part. 

My second answer I think of is Suspiria (2018), but I know the women-being-violent-towards-men-thing will make them uncomfortable– it could even make them think I am hard to work with. I am running out of time. I can’t say “uh” again.

“Lair of the White Worm.” I am relieved. It’s a Ken Russell film, it’s weird, and there’s no overt feminist themes in it. 

“Why?” they both ask. 

I instantly think of the scene where the female antagonist is sporting this ridiculous wooden strapon while summoning a worm god to eat a sacrificial girl. They don’t make movies like that anymore. 

“I don’t think I’ve seen that,” Mr. Posthouse says.

“Ken Russell?” Toes asks. 

“Yes.”

“What did you like about that film?”

“Um, well I mean the lead woman– the snake lady– is hot and alluring in this really interesting way.” 

“Interesting,” Toes ponders, “Do you identify with her… sexuality?”

I squirm. I knew I answered wrong but like I said, can one really answer right? 

I take a deep breath and remind myself, I’m not talking to an acquaintance, I am talking to a man that has potential to influence my career in film. 

Dial it back- I tell myself. Be professional. Even though they are wasted, you keep your side professional. This is a double standard we are all too familiar with. 

I say, “honestly, I really like the way the film is genre-bending. It incorporates everything from history, comedy, drama, to folklore. Plus, it’s just a really uniquely aesthetically beautiful film.”

Silence. I dodge Toes’s question about sexuality. 

“What do you think of death and reincarnation?” Toes asks. 

My heart sinks. My time with Mr. Posthouse is almost up, and I haven’t gotten anywhere with him. Yet I’ve managed to make an impression on a man who engages in nonconsensual foot play. 

Toes asks again, ending the word reincarnation with a curious smile. His unevenly spaced teeth are yellow. 

Though Toes is demanding my attention, I am here to talk with Mr. Posthouse. Toes notices I keep facing his friend and this clicks for him.

“Well, this guy has everything that you need to make a movie. A really good movie,” Toes explains,” he has the cameras, the color suite, equipment, audio engineers, everything.”

I am relieved our discussion of reincarnation has been killed. 

Posthouse gleams at his friend’s words. He wears his drunkenness on his face. He wears a sports coat and a button up. Curly hair, pale skin, deep brown eyes. 

Mid to late 40’s but he is probably even older. He is definitely someone I need to be connected with. 

I feel a sense of urgency in this interaction. I am mostly at peace with doing sex work right now because I am able to afford to funding extremely low budget passion projects. But it is unsustainable. Both financially and emotionally. I can’t do this forever. Not only that but I have found something that gives me greater purpose and that thing is making films. Story-telling. I need to do whatever I can to invest in my future so I can exit the sex industry with a solid career in something else. Networking is non-negotiable. 

But everytime I try to say something that could help me to connect with Mr. Posthouse, Toes is caressing my upper thigh. He is gripping the arch of my foot. He is making me so fucking uncomfortable and I have to make it seem like nothing is wrong. 

Toes starts blathering about his opinions on eastern religions again. Mr. Posthouse has locked eyes with a tiny woman in a black wig. Big red lips and sharp jawline. She is alluring and stylish, dressed like a pinup doll. 

Posthouse is on his feet within seconds, “You’ll have to excuse me.”

It’s me and Toes now. I lost. 

I see him walk away, talking to this woman. How could I blame him. I just wish I could have kept him entertained long enough to talk to him about the film I am making. 

“…I just believe the stories that movies nowadays are so much less compelling than they used to be. And this generation of kids consume media that is mostly meaningless,” Toes complains. 

Such an interesting and unique take on youth culture.

“What kind of stories do you want to tell?” He asks me hypothetically. That’s what me and (Posthouse) are trying to find. We just want to go out and ask people what stories they want to hear about.” 

Fuck it. Posthouse is gone. I hate the guy I am currently talking to. What do I have to lose?

“Do you ever think about sex workers and the stories they have?” I ask. “I think sex workers are some of the most interesting people I have ever met.” 

“That may be true but gosh that’s a story that’s been told so many times.”

I want to scream.

“Maybe from a male’s perspective but not from the workers themselves,” I posit. “Rarely has there been a mainstream film told about a sex worker telling their story on their own terms.” He fights to say something but I don’t let him. 

“I mean just think about it. You want to tell a good story. Storytelling is about exposing the range of human emotion and experience. Who better knows that than a sex worker?” 

“Yeah, I don’t know,” he pauses, “I think it’s interesting what the masses will respond to. For instance, I wrote a book in 2012, and it was really popular. Got a big response because the audience was waiting to hear what my opinion really was.”

He wants me to ask him about his book. I will not give in. I do not fucking care about his book.

I don’t say anything. There is silence. 

“Anyway, what interests you about sex work? Why is it something that draws you to it?” He grins, like he has just seen the top of a girl’s underwear peeking out from her jeans.

My chest flushed. The topic of sex work gets him horny so he wants me to say things that will get him off. It’s my fault for going here.

He grabs my upper thigh again. 

“I have to go check on my friend,” I squeak. 

I run to the other room, walking past the lively conversation between Posthouse and Pinup. 

I sit next to my friend on the couch and she is smoking. I am embarrassed. I want to go home.

“Where did you go?”

“I was trying to network with this guy that could help me out with my film.” 

The living room is foggy. Young, attractive artists do lines of k and laugh. I think they are all trust-fund babies. I resent them. I resent everyone here. I want to go home. I have to be up in a few hours for work where once again I’ll have disgusting men grabbing my upper thigh but at least it’ll be consensual. 

I tell my friend I am going. I say goodbye to the host and thank him for introducing me to Posthouse though I ruined it. 

I feel embarrassed for putting myself in the position to get groped by that revolting guy. I feel small. I feel like a little girl.

I walk to the lobby. I see Mr. Posthouse waiting. He is alone. No Toes. No Pinup. This might be my chance to do a redo. 

“Waiting on a car?” I ask.

“Yeah, it’s that time of the night.”

“Well thanks for–”

“Was my friend being overbearing?” He asks.

So he did notice his friend was groping me.
“Yes, honestly. He kept grabbing my feet and thighs. It made me really-”

“Yeah, I had a chat with him.”

“Oh–”

“I told him you can’t do things like that nowadays. You can get in so much trouble for that sort of thing.” He squints at me, like he is about to say something profound.

“You know we are definitely on your side when things like that happen now.”

“Right” I say, “thanks.”

“My car is here.”

“Okay, well hopefully we will meet—”

“Yeah, just get my contact info from Tony.”

“Thanks.” His door slams. 

I walk down the street to Taco Bell so I can get some serotonin flowing after not one but two disappointing interactions. I am sure Posthouse feels like a hero in his UberBlack right now. He saw something and dammit he said something! I am also sure he won’t remember any of these interactions in the morning. But I will. 

I make my order at Taco Bell but my card declines. I cry a little. 

Around March of last year, a friend and I had an idea to make a documentary. My friend and I both identified as  being in recovery and as sex workers. As a result, we both had a strong desire to represent ourselves and other people’s experiences because there is next to none. We wanted to make this doc for lots of reasons and the original is post here.

The documentary is finished now. Well, the editing is. Is a film ever really finished? It doesn’t seem like it but the film is being submitted to festivals nevertheless. 

Before this, I had never made a film before. I couldn’t even fathom it. Growing up, I loved documentaries and liked that they could serve as an accessible way of storytelling. I never thought I would make one though because what even goes into making a documentary? I didn’t know! But my friends’ lives inspired me and I knew they could inspire many more if they had a platform to tell their stories. And since my priority for the last year had been trying to build spaces for sober sex workers, I thought a documentary would be a good avenue of creating that space.

I ended up making the doc by myself but did not make it alone. People helped from the beginning. From all aspects of my personal and professional life, people supported me. A man I was seeing during the documentary’s conception was a retired owner of a production house and he helped me choose an affordable camera that would have “run and gun” capabilities that I wanted the film to be shot in (and no he never paid for anything 😢). I spent weeks coming in and out of B&H and Adorama talking to the men there about audio and camera equipment. When I traveled to shoot for the first time, my friend trusted me with her very nice lens to shoot on. Along the way, I met a woman who had worked for Vice and knew the ends and outs of production and videography. She taught me about releases, copyright, and how to set up a camera rig. She also taught me the importance of ISO, white balance, and frame rate (though I still struggle). I had friends watch uncut footage with me, give me suggestions and ask nothing in return. My brother helped me write the film description for the applications. Many friends supported me, encouraged me, pushed me to finish this project. I got really lucky with people I met along this journey- none of which I could have done this without.

Last winter, just when I was at a loss with what to do with the footage, I met a film editor and we ended up cutting the film together. He had worked on several films and even shot/directed a short doc that screened at Sundance in the early 2000s. He advised me that I should learn editing because it’s a critical part of directing. What’s more is that he said that I could do it. He put faith in me. We met consistently for months. He would even commute an hour to my place to help me comb through hours of footage. On top of that, he didn’t want payment which is a HUGE reason that this film is finished. He also taught me how to cut this film in a way that prioritized authenticity to Brooke’s story. After a couple months, we made selections from the footage which slowly turned into a rough cut. Then we had several rough cuts. 

For a month, I got friends to view the rough cuts and give feedback. Since the editor and I had watched the footage so much, it was important we got fresh perspectives. We wanted to make sure the story made sense, that the music wasn’t distracting and so on. Where did people laugh? Where did people get emotional? When I had collected my friend’s responses, he and I would get together and make adjustments to the doc based on what we thought was most important.

After rounds of feedback, we had a final-ish cut which needed Brooke’s approval. After following Brooke’s notes, the film made it to picture lock which means there was no going back. Because it needed color and sound correction to meet festival standards, the film itself couldn’t be changed. I ended up hiring professionals to do those corrections. (I don’t think I can learn another skill rn). Now, it’s mostly a waiting game. I’m applying on a film festival platform and have a spreadsheet with the festivals I am submitting to. 

Applying for festivals has introduced me to the business of filmmaking. The business part of this is not surprising but still jarring. The whole application process has been hard and problematic at times because you basically need to show the festival that you need their help and money. But at the same time, as I am submitting, I am not trying to promote the idea that I have a really fucked up life that I need to be saved from. Like do I want to work in a studio forever? No. Do I want to be an escort forever? No. Is part of this documentary the hope that I can make a career in film? Yes. But we will see what happens. It’s a totally unpredictable time in the film industry and in the world. But when I get to future tripping, I have to remember this doc all came from a desire to capture the stories of really cool people I knew that a lot of people could identify with. 

I am also really proud to know Brooke and grateful that hopefully they will be seen by a lot more people for the badass they are. There’s so much more I want to say but instead of doing that why don’t I just share the trailer with you- beautifully done by Caelum Ahearn. Enjoy!

scroll down 🙂

(Website by E James Ford!!)

For three years now, I have been an in person provider. I started off (kind of) by accident. Now, in my third year, I have experienced friendship, heartbreak and a newfound strength within myself. I have seen enormous growth in myself and in my relationships but it should be noted that this is all a result of many trials and many errors.

TRIAL

A year ago, a few providers and I had a good thing going. We had a shared space that we would use to see clients. We did upkeep collectively and no one profited over anyone else. Each of us just paid our part of the rent each month. The space gave us an amount of safety and cleanliness that otherwise would be hard to come by on our own. The space was also adorably decorated! I always bought the Kacey Musgraves’ Boy Smells candles for the apartment which is ironic because we technically already had that in there for free. Unfortunately, like all good things, this had to come to an end. The authorities were tipped off by someone or multiple people. A nosy neighbor? An angry client of ours? We will probably never know. But we ended the lease immediately and cut ties with each other. It was very difficult but it was the right thing to do.

I will never forget getting that call saying we had been contacted by the authorities. I was walking home on a beautiful May evening. I was expecting this call to happen at some point but not as soon as it did. It was scary. Extremely stressful. Mostly, I felt bad for my friend who actually had to directly deal with the authorities. There was nothing I could do except go incognito for a bit. I knew I was not going to leave the industry but I knew it would be a struggle to make money for a bit. Luckily, because of my line of work, I had savings: a rare thing to come by as a young adult in this day in age.

Trying to figure what my next move would be- I remembered my friend asking if I wanted to work at her massage studio so I reached out. Now, after working there for a year, I can see that working in this particular studio has made my experience as a provider so much more enjoyable and safe. It should be noted, however, that this is my own experience- this is definitely not everyone’s. In my job now, I not only have more flexibility around the things I am willing to do with my body but I also have coworkers that I can actively engage with. These two changes this past year have tremendously changed my quality of life.

TRIBULATION

Though my personal and professional life has improved a lot over the last year, I still run into problems. I had a situation recently at the parlor where a client was compromising my safety. He was a regular for almost a year and we had a good report. He was the type of client that I looked forward to seeing when he hit me up to come get a “massage”. One particular night, I was alone in the studio and it was late. During our session, this client kept doing things that I was uncomfortable with. I told him to stop but he continued so I started to contort my body to discourage him from touching me in this way that made me uncomfortable. As it escalated toward sex, he kept telling me that we shouldn’t use a condom. I kindly declined. He asked two more times. I said no. When I said no the second time, he said that if I had such an issue with not using protection that it was me who had a disease, not the other way around. Super manipulative. He was a finance lawyer and they have that all too familiar grin when they say, “c’mon babe, I’m clean.” The cut on his upper lip said otherwise. Maybe he had gotten into a fist fight the night before or was a coke binge. I still told him no despite his best efforts. He asked three more times as we had sex. Each time he got more stern than the last. And each time I said no, he became more upset with me. Continued to guilt me. I told him no. In the end, he kept the condom on. After finishing in a record three minutes, he went to clean himself in the bathroom but I sat there on the table teary eyed and tight in my chest. He came back in and chuckled, “thank you for being the responsible one in the situation”. Like he suddenly had some post-nut clarity but at my expense. Instead of letting him get off the hook, I told him that he crossed the line. After all, what are all these expensive therapy sessions good for if I still don’t take action when my boundaries are crossed.

As he got dressed, I told him, “When a woman tells you no, you stop. You don’t keep asking.”

“Oh, I thought as long as I wasn’t doing anything physical it was okay to ask. I didn’t know asking was bad.”

I was not surprised at his answer. Most people think only physicality equals violence. Not language or verbal interactions. In that moment, though, I felt really scared but there was nothing I could do except say no and hope for the best.

Before I came to the parlor and regularly talked to other providers, there were similar situations where clients would pressure me not to use protection. Unfortunately, I would give in. It’s hard to think about now but at that time, it was happening consistently and so I didn’t think it was a big deal. When I went for a regular std check up during this time, my healthcare provider recommended I go on PREP which I still take today.  I’ve always maintained regular std screenings doing this work so I have always taken care of my health in this regard, but my mental health, my emotional capacity, my worth, can no longer be challenged as it did just over a year ago. I will no longer be pushed to sacrifice my health in such a drastic way.

I do want to express that I do see clients who are respectful though there are always bad ones. Though they are few and far between, there are clients who have even restored some of my faith in not only men but also humanity. For me, this work can be hot, fun, and even exciting some days. These are the days that keep me going. But mostly my joy from this work comes from experiencing freedom from day to day.

ERROR

I fell in love with a married client this year. It caused me a great deal of pain. I am not someone who cries much. But in the last six months, the tears have been flowing. Incessant. Thankfully, the chapter with this person is closing and I am moving on from it. But having this relationship has fundamentally changed the way I look at the provider/client dynamic and why payment is a necessary boundary in most cases. It has also influenced the way I interact within my personal relationships. It’s even pushed me to create art that I have been too scared to do previously. I can actually thank him (though never directly) because some projects I would have never started if I had not been so motivated to ignore the massive pain I felt due to this person’s unavailability.

CONSOLATION

Though I have experienced toxic relationships this past year, I have also experienced many positive ones. One positive is that I gained a best friend. When we met, she told me she was a provider and needed a safe environment to work in. I told her about my situation at the parlor and she wanted in. I had only known her for a day, but told my boss that she would be a good hire. Once she was hired, we started working shifts together every week. Once we got to know each other a little better, we started to hang out outside of the studio. Then we started to text, send memes, commiserate about our work, boy problems, politics, so on. We even made a little money together. When we went through difficult times, we were there for each other. Finally, for the first time in my adult life, I have someone who is the same age as me and does the same work.

To finally find a friend who I can be fully myself with and not worry about hiding parts of my life has opened me up to so much more loving. I am so grateful for this friend. Our relationship is just another example of how important friendship and community is in this industry. She’s pushed me to examine my worth and to set hard boundaries with clients. She’s also been there when I have made the unwise decision to date married clients. She encourages me on so many levels and helps me when I struggle to make decisions that benefit my health.

Let this be a reminder that workers have to be able to talk to each other in this industry. Criminalization of sex work keeps these connections closed and it can be so dangerous to do this work alone. Criminalization encourages hiding.

PROSPERITY 

Recently, I was able to lessen my shift load at the studio because my other creative projects have taken off in some respects. In the past year, I have made a steady income not just for myself but also for my boss at the studio and I felt justified in asking for less shifts. She was understanding and gave me no guilt. She supports me having a career and other passions outside of this work which is key for me to stay in this business. I want to recognize, however, that lots of sex workers don’t have that choice of having a pleasurable side hustle or passion. They’ve gotta take care of their kids or families or debts, etc and it leaves them no time to seek outside opportunities. So I acknowledge I am in a lucky situation.

It is May and the world feels new in a lot of ways in may. When I entered this work three years ago, my life fundamentally changed- mostly for the better. I am beyond grateful for the time and resources I have been granted through this work to follow my passions and make them something that compels me to keep being in a world that is so hard to live in. I am so grateful for the people- providers and non-providers- that have shown me so much love and tenderness this past year. Best of all, I am grateful that I have found my current calling which is exactly what I set out to do three years ago. I wonder- what will these next three years bring? God only knows <3

A fembot is my ideal form. Not the kind of fembot that open fire on Austin Powers in Bettie Page inspired lingerie but rather my ideal form is an intuitive machine that comprehends human needs perfectly. I want to be a machine whose sole purpose is to please, cater, and comfort. I want to be a machine that can act in all the ways humans want to be cared for. As a machine I can achieve this perfection but as a human I am set up to fail so I am realizing. 

I want to be flawless. From my skin to my speech pitch to my intellect- I desire perfection. I want people to wonder whether or not I’m real. I want my insides to be questioned as to whether they are cold and electric rather than palpitating and warm. 

As I write this, I get a flood of emotions. One of them being disappointment. I went to liberal arts school and started a feminist club at my high school. I read “Cult of Domesticity” and The Second Sex in undergrad as well as a myriad of excerpts of feminist lit right before class. So I’m aware that my conception of care is distorted. But intellectually knowing something, is not the same as knowing it. 

Will I look back on this post in the future and think about what an idiot I was to be wasting my time on pleasing other people. Or maybe when I look back I’ll pity myself. Or maybe I’ll think wow so true queen… 

Maybe you too think, “wow what a pity she feels this way…” 

Maybe you’ll even think to text me and see if I’m alright… Don’t  worry,  I’m good.

Instead of texting me, why don’t you ask yourself a similar question? How do you strive for perfection in your job? Family life? Romantic life? Physical appearance, etc? I can think of very few people in my personal life who do not yearn for more in themselves. Do you really want to text me to see if I am okay?  Or are you texting me because this thought feeds into your whorephobic narrative that everyone in this industry is being held captive? Ask yourself. 

I think it’s society that has made us this way. I don’t think it all has to do with my line of work. It is a systemic issue. No matter if you’re working at a hospital, non-profit, or restaurant, the world around us demands perfection and then some. At the end of the day, we are all just people attempting to secure a life for ourselves while being forced to create wealth for people who usually don’t care about us. 

Within our labor system, labor is separated from the person who produces it. We are isolated from our product. So of course perfection is expected because our humanity is erased. With all that being said- I still care. I still like to please. That sounds insane though, right? Maybe I feel this way because of some sort of trauma or my upbringing. Or maybe I was born with this need to please others. I’m not sure. 

Years ago, my life didn’t revolve around pleasing cis men. It was actually kind of the opposite. Instead of thinking about how to attract more cis men, I was thinking about how far and how long I could stay away from them. And when I did encounter them, how then did I make them feel uncomfortable? My friend circles were made up of women, nonbinary people, and transmen. I was rarely around cis men but when I was around them, I felt entirely on another plane of existence. My friends during this time felt the same way I did because they were too traumatized by cis men at various times in their lives. We all stuck together, moving through spaces that we wouldn’t have to interact with them. We coped with being around them by eye rolling or smirking when they spoke. When my friends and I came together again, we joked about them. Giggled about whatever menial interaction we had with them then went back to talking about Guernica or some shit.

Due to the collection of traumatic experiences of cis men in my high school and early college years, groups of men made me nauseous. Being around the frats on campus struck my nervous system like a whip. Today, my life and relationship with men is completely different. It’s kind of crazy that my life is so different from what it was just four years ago. It’s a whole other blog post of how I got to that point to my current reality of having a genuine interest in keeping steady romantic and platonic relationships with men. 

To be a woman means to feel pressure. Actually, to be a human in late stage capitalism is to feel tremendous pressure. The added gender nonsense to our lives makes the pressure even more complicated. And it can make us hate each other in the process. It can make us hate our own gender or hate other genders, etc. 

I do this thing during my sessions where I massage the faces of my clients’. Though slightly maternal, it’s arguably still hot because my tits are in their faces. The action is something small and soft and gentle. Three characteristics that cis men are brought up to be disgusted by. But when I do this with a client, he relaxes. His body disposition changes. He gets a little sleepy even. 

I have regulars that come to me so they can really get their degradation fantasies on. Like throat fucking or slapping their dick across my face. Basically, any sexual act that is obviously more about a power exchange rather than something pleasure centered. One particular time, this rather dominant client had given me a facial as per usual but when he sat down at the edge of the table and I rubbed his back, his disposition changed completely. He stayed there naked, eyes shut and said, “wow, I don’t think I was actually horny, I think I just needed this.” To be touched. He meant he just needed to be touched. 

Some of you reading this that are civ (non-swer) might be disgusted by what I just wrote but I would encourage you to look at it from a different angle. Working 40 plus hours a week for something that is emotionally and financially unfulfilling is something much more degrading. To me. And I do like providing services that can potentially make other people’s lives better. Even though I work in an industry that demands pretty much all of me, I still love to serve, to nurture, to care, to please…

Maybe I really do have a little Stockholm syndrome. But maybe not! But if I Am in some sort of great denial, why would that be? Some psychological flaw maybe, or childhood trauma. Is the desire to please okay? Or is it really “unfeminist” considering all the power dynamics at play. It is my truth that being pleasing is rewarding. So, why not encourage a behavior within myself that brings me some purpose in a world that gives me little to look forward to.

Clients usually come back and see me. And my services stay relatively affordable because I don’t believe this kind of care should be reserved only for a few that can afford the luxury. But if I were a machine, I wouldn’t have to answer any of these existential questions. I could just be a thoughtless object concerned with nothing. If fembotification is achievable in the near future, my only other request is to be dressed in classic fembot attire. See above. 

There was a man  who I saw for a year when I moved here. Brutish finance bro who had won big early in his career and  life and lived like a rockstar most Saturday nights. Hookers, coke, top shelf scotch, molly. 

I did not meet him through the usual channels. There was a worker I met through a support network for industry people. This person was so cool, a long time provider but trying to make their way out of the industry. 

One day, they were shooting photos for my website and they told me, “I have a client who I’ve seen for 8 years, and he is always looking for girls that are new to the business. Want me to pass your info along?” 

My pupils rolled back and dollar signs appeared. Of course. Without hesitation. I trusted this person would set me up with someone good. Sure enough, I was stepping into an UberBlack the following Saturday. (I truly still do owe this person because their connection ended up being my primary source of income during my first year of living in NYC.)

Often, I asked my client what he did.

 “Are you a Wall Street guy?”

“Wall Street guys could never do what we do,” he would reply.  

And I still don’t know what that means or what he did for a living. But it didn’t  really matter because he owned a corner apartment in Flatiron that he purchased in cash. Each bathroom had a bidet control unit built into the wall. His living room walls were covered with contemporary art pieces he had purchased directly from Art Basel. His furniture probably once sat on display at Ligne Roset so of course I had to leave my shoes at the door. 

Unless you met him you really have no idea what he was like. He was an asshole through and through. But of course he was slightly charming and funny,  yet domineering. He is a textbook finance bro. Bloated ego, psychopathic, and addicted to drugs. When I watched American Psycho for the first time, I realized Christian Bale’s character was just a more attractive version of this guy. Sans the coathangers and murders. (That I know of). All this guy really just wanted was to feel important. And I did genuinely revere him in his presence. He had a knack for persuasion. He convinced me that no matter how much scotch he drank or lines he did, he was not an addict. One time he told me that his great uncle screwed hookers and did coke until the very end of his long life. He believed he was going to do the same.

What this client wanted in the bedroom was a little different than what I’m used to. I don’t wanna give away too much about the services I provide but let’s just say I’m not a dominatrix. By any means. But this guy basically wanted the services of a dominatrix. To this day, I have never had a client desire something so routine, so painfully habitual. It was no wonder he hired someone to do it because it was more of a job to be executed than physical affection to feel close to another human. 

For at least a year, my Saturday nights looked like this: an Uberblack would pick me up. I would arrive, request him in the lobby. Go up to his floor, and he would answer me in his robe with a “hey baby”. We shoot the shit for a bit. Or really it was him talking at me- usually stories of how he absolutely demolished an employee that had made a mistake that week. He would already be drunk and, upon my arrival, would take an edible. Once the chit-chat was over, he would lie down in his California king, dim the lights, and  finish doing the platter of drugs he had prepared himself, or if he was feeling so moved, he would snort lines off my ass cheeks. From there, I would  straddle him, strap him into the restraints that were on either side of the bed, blind fold him, and do my thing for an hour or so. Eventually I would feed him poppers- opening the tiny bottle for him as he twisted his head in either direction inhaling the  fumes. Then I would retrieve a black bag from his bedside table and take out his chic butt plug. Sterling silver. On insertion, I would ride him because although he was on multiple drugs, the butt plug helped him stay hard. Riding for hours, my legs would ache, calves would be sore but it was all worth it for the cash in the bathroom and the UberBlack rides home. Once our time was up, usually an Escalade would take me back to my apartment in Brooklyn, and I would stare into the dead streets of Chelsea feeling important. On weekends, when I saw young finance bros stumble between bars, I would think, “you want what i have.” So it wasn’t all bad. And he started to grow on me- a little more than I should have let him. 

On occasion, he would do molly and become such a sweetheart. Like one night, several months into our arrangement, he took molly and as he was peaking, he wanted me to take his blindfold off and just chat. 

“Tell me everything  I’ve done that’s hurt your feelings,” he said. 

I  chuckled because his request was a mindfuck of deciphering what was real and what was transactional. Do I tell him how I really feel? Or do I say nothing because my job is to be enjoyable and not challenging? This was just one example of our arrangement became a struggle because while I was providing a service, we were not a real couple. This was business. Supposedly. However, that night, I felt pulled to tell him the truth because in a lot of ways, he did feel like my boyfriend. 

So I told him, “when I brought my friend over for a threesome, you fucked her missionary and you’ve never done that with me. That really hurt me.” 

He nodded. “What else?”

 “You’ve made comments about my weight before, why would you do that?” He made something up.

It was nights like these that I would think, “wow he really does care for me. Maybe this has a future.”

We went from meeting at 10pm every Saturday night for sessions to meeting for a home-cooked meal at an appropriate hour. He cooked expensive meals like the type you cook when you have been together for awhile. Ribeye from the East Vil Meat Market with sauteed fresh vegetables. The dynamic changed. Instead of me doing all the work, I would sit down and he would do all the work. Dishes too. And then. we would eat Magnolia’s for dessert. It felt like we were a real couple. He would say things like: I’m trying to do less drugs. I am only going to drink wine. No more edibles. But once our dinner was over, he wanted hook up. Regular couples do that too but, the only way he knew how to be intimate was to be piss drunk, high, and blindfolded. And with a hooker no less. 

Our relationship  got even more slippery. He started to fantasize, “if we got married” or ”what if I got  you pregnant,” he would say. He was always intoxicated while saying these things but we spent so much time together. I started to seriously consider it.

 I thought that I would be taken care of if we got married. I could live out a childhood fantasy of living this super bougie lifestyle – like the ones you see in movies, in shows on HBO. I’d be one of those insufferable white women with a nanny, but I would never have to worry about paying rent again. Our marriage would of course be contingent on having a child together though. That was the real drawback. And deep down, I knew if I had his child, it would be a boy. And my client’s sociopathic genes would be passe down. I imagined loving our baby for a few years but then I would grow to resent him. Just like I did his father. My client would show me pictures of himself as a child and I would imagine those same demented black eyes coming out of me. And it really wouldn’t be my child in the end, but his. And he would probably grow up to hate me anyway. I started to catch myself in that spiral. And  I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I was supposed to act, to manipulate, to hustle clients. Especially ones like him. He deserved it. But he wasn’t the first one I began to like, and unfortunately, he wasn’t the last. 

That’s the thing about this work is that I let my relationships with clients turn into gray areas too quickly. I will see a man as a client and sort of “fall” for him and agree to go on dates without getting paid. Then I’ll start fucking them without getting paid. Then start I’ll loving them without getting paid. Then some time passes and all of the sudden, I have forgotten why it was that we met. I have forgotten the transaction- that it was supposed to be business. I am by no means against providers romantically committing to a client, it’s very common. I am not against it for myself either. But our arrangement ended before I could even make a decision about whether or not I wanted that.

It’s now been over a year since I’ve seen him. He ghosted me after a year and I think there were two big reasons. One- he had written me a  big check a few weeks before he stopped hitting  me up. I think that was to avoid the physical transaction in our hangouts. Like I guess to further tread into our relationship cosplay by hanging out without leaving me money in the bathroom. Like a real couple. But I asked for money too soon after he wrote me the check. I believe this upset him. Maybe it was too harsh of a reality check.  Two- maybe he too came to the conclusion that we were taking it too far. Or could have been neither of those things but I guess I’ll never know. Or maybe he found a real girlfriend but I honestly doubt it.

Honestly, it felt good to be his special girl. I still miss it. If he took it to the next level with, I would be the real life Vivan Ward. And isn’t that every working girl’s dream? He had been married before and often told me how much he paid her out when they divorced. I could be like her, I thought, I could get paid out if we were married long enough. Though it would be on the condition that I had his kid because what other reason would there be to marry me? But those dreams are long gone and Thank God. Being ghosted (that time) was a blessing. 

At the end of the day, this work can be so confusing. In lots of ways, it has changed the way my mind and body react to sex, romance, and attention. It has changed the way I receive affection, the way I do labor for others, the way that I communicate, and so on. Sometimes, I wonder if it’s possible to reverse the negative effects later on when I want to leave the industry. I’m curious about the ways that other providers deal with this. It’s embarrassing for me to admit this problem I have with clients to other workers. Last week, I nervously  opened up to my  co-worker that I yet again started seeing another client for free. She was understanding but still encouraged me not to do it. I asked her if she ever dates outside of

work and she said, “girl, if I have sex without getting paid, I feel dirty.” She’s a real one. I should try to be more like her. 

At the end of  May, I received news that I was no longer able to use this communal space as an incall location. It was a beautiful, easy location that was really too good to be true. And it was. I don’t feel comfortable enough talking about what happened yet. But when I feel ready, I will share about it. The loss of the space, however, basically meant I was back at square one like when I first moved to Brooklyn. When I came here, COVID was still affecting hotels so their prices were discounted to retain business. The handy Dayuse app as many workers know was great until prices skyrocketed again. The other thing about Dayuse is that if you stayed past 6pm in a room, you would automatically have to pay the night which is usually at least double the day price. This price surge happened when I had my own space and I always thanked God for giving me an opportunity to pay a small rental fee in my own nice space and the rest was taken care of. 

The loss of the space meant going back to hotels which was not ideal as the hotel knows all your info. And in the end, I would hardly profit from sessions. I was in a jam. Luckily, I thought back to the winter when one of my friends’ pleaded with me to come work with her at a “bodyrub” studio. I really laughed it off at the time partially because I didn’t really know what that was but I pictured a dingy old time brothel where girls stand in robes outside their tiny rooms waiting for a suited man to choose one of them. 

It sounded nearly miserable. But a few nights after losing my place, I reached out to this same friend desperate to land even an interview. I was able to and the following week I was properly introduced to bodyrub.

Bodyrub is sex work but I thought otherwise until I came into the work. Before I thought: “oh, it’s the easy way out. F/S* is real sex work, body rub is a little more than having an OnlyFans.” I know, super ignorant. My judgement also brings up whorearchy which I will have a post on later down the line. But basically whorearchy describes the way in which workers prioritize their value based on their participation of criminalized sex work. It creates tension between doms and escorts. Online and in person. Strippers and body rub workers. These are just a few examples. Whorearchy exists and will probably always exist because society will always engrain its people to feel shame about their bodies, sex and the labor they engage in. I will say that hopefully in some communities it has gotten better over the years. I know my perceptions have changed a lot in a short amount of time. Anyway, more on this later. Back to the story- I got an interview and started bodyrub that same week.

As employees we are required to wear lingerie and full faces of makeup at all times during work hours or you run the risk of being called “homeless” by our house mom. Shifts are six to eight hours long. Up to two girls are always working. My commute is an hour. The money I make is not all mine to keep. Basically, I have begrudgingly entered the workforce once again. My life as an independent worker is over for the moment and I am still mourning that. I resent some aspects of the job. At first I felt the cut from my boss was synonymous with theft. It was my labor and body after all, and she was taking a cut. Maybe I’m just brainwashed now but I do feel differently. 

While our boss advertises us a little, we still have to screen clients who hit us up directly via our work phones. And of course we have to set up ads outside of hers’ if  we are going to make money. I spent three shifts in a row (7 and 8 hrs each) with not one client. And we are not paid to be there, we are paid by the client. I was furious but also felt defective. It really tugged on my insecurities. I know its unhealthy- but if I am being honest I do derive some worth from clients and making money. I don’t see how you could grow up in a society that summarizes you down to your job/career/money acquisition, and not feel insecure when these things are being threatened. Plus if I were to charge my full hourly fee, I would have no problem making at least 2k each day I worked. I bitched and moaned about this specific thing but finally it comes down to this. Sure, everything is relative and I could be charging more for bodyrubs- but the bottom line is that I do not (90%) of the time do not have sex with these clients. My boss told me during my interview, “girl, I make so much money and I don’t even take my panties off.” I winced at her remark but funnily enough when I tell other workers what I do- I hear that same phrase coming out of my mouth. 

I do need a break from f/s. In the months leading up to losing my spaces,  I started to tell romantic partners that I wasn’t interested in having sex with them for the time being. I had gotten tired and even angry from having sex when I did not want to. I mean- no one ever forced me but myself. I was tired of forcing myself and my personal life was being affected. Even a few months off being f/s full time, I can tell there’s still stuff I need to process emotionally. Now if I do f/s, it’s only because the client is cute enough and I upcharge the fuck out of them. Of course they don’t know that. They don’t know I was a f/s independent escort before they met me. They probably think I am just a girl trying to pay her rent because the SAG/WGA strikes have left me out of work (which is true).

Learning the clientele of bodyrub has been one of the most fascinating things about the job. First, I wanna say this post is all from my own experience. I also work in a privileged space because the woman who runs is a worker herself. It’s not some dude involved in organized crime who has little empathy for the workers. We are also not workers who have been trafficked into this. It is my choice to be here. Being white, cis and having English as my first language privileges me immensely. So my experience working at the place is almost certainly very different from someone who works for a non-sex worker and/or is trying to immigrate to the US with little resources. Lots of people are at risk of being trafficked due to their immigration status and it is a sad reality. As far as I know, my coworkers and I choose to be here.

With all that said, the men that come through are interesting. It is my impression that most of these men would not be caught dead with a hooker. Rather, they fall into the category of clients who think paying for sex makes a guy a loser. But! A handjob at the end of a massage is just normal and even a coming of age event- they may think. Happy endings are so much more normalized. Especially in NYC where there is a prominent spa culture. But it’s just funny to me because most of us are literally hookers. I will say that some girls will tell you they do not do “extras” or “upgrades” whatsoever and those workers very much exist. There are even some places where the girls are naked while they work but nothing about the actual massage is sensual. There are lots of underground places around the city that have historically run some type of bodyrub facility. See what you can find. Could be a fun exercise. 

For me,  the release at the end is no sweat off my back. What’s more, I’ve actually learned quite a bit about teasing and edging. What’s the difference between my nuru/erotic/tantric/edging massage, you ask? Literally nothing but the price! If a guy comes in for an hour at the house rate, I give him a good massage and rub my body on him and do a release. If he comes in and says he wants nuru, I rub oil on my tits and charge him 40-100 depending on how nice he’s been to me and do the same damn thing. Is that a scam? I mean in American capitalism, you can sell basic dish sponges for a dollar or charge 5 dollars for one that’s shaped like a smiley face. Pricing is arbitrary and it always is. In all fields of work and product. What will people pay is the question. And when they do pay an arbitrary asking price- there you go, there’s your rate.

In bodyrub, I have found it better in terms of connecting with clients too. Since I am not stressing about how I will have to have  sex with them, I make it more of a priority to make them feel good for this one hour they have away from work/personal relationships/struggles. I am someone who has always been a proponent of massage and the idea that tensions and bodies need to be touched for good health. Or, we may walk around miserable because of our lack of intimate touch. I’ve met some good guys, I’ve met some that have made me sick to my stomach. But all in all, I feel like I am recovering- from what I’m not sure. And if we are being totally transparent- I am making more consistent money than I ever have. Fingers crossed it stays that way. 

*ull ervice

I am making a documentary. I have never shot or filmed anything before. Making a film has been a dream of mine but I thought it was silly and could wait for another lifetime. But the opportunity to make a documentary has risen. 

I am a sex worker who has been in recovery for almost 5 years. I meet each week online with a group of people who also share this unique intersection of identities. One of the women who I have become friends with in this group has 20 plus years of sobriety and has been doing sex work on and off her entire life. Though I had previous thoughts of wanting to create content for and by sex workers, I didn’t know what it would look like. I rarely articulated this dream to others but when my friend admitted that she too wanted to make a documentary- I told her to count me in.

A few nights later I was walking back to my apartment in the cold and empty streets, my friend called me. She called me and told me her vision of creating a documentary centered around sex workers in recovery. 

“I think it’s only right if we make a documentary about sex workers in recovery. It is two areas that we have lived experiences in and it would feel exploitative to make content about things we haven’t experienced,” she said. I couldn’t agree more. 

She then went on to explain how she envisioned the structure of the film. My heart jumped, it sounded perfect. And ever since then I have been working daily to make this vision come alive. 

Though I worked as a production assistant for over a year and my collaborator went to film school, we have never created films ourselves. In my mind, I reserved that privilege for the pros. But when you think about all documentaries, don’t they usually just start with a person asking a question and seeking answers?  That’s what we are doing.

We are not working through a production company at the moment because I feel this content is so sensitive and can so easily be exploited in the wrong hands. We are not even sure if we are making a feature. We are crowdfunding the money as well as putting in our own. I am doing some sessions now just for the sake of funding our film. It’s all been very challenging to navigate something so overwhelming and gate kept but this film has given me a purpose again. Most importantly, I believe in this film. Part of the film’s mission is to represent the varied experiences of people who do sex work. My collaborator and I feel that the intersection of recovery and sex work have never been represented in film though both things are very intertwined. All in all, his film is going to fuck up vapid and straight up destructive narratives that people have about sex workers.

I got into sex work in sobriety. And I know many others have done the same. This is surprising to most people when they hear this because most people view sex work in terms of movies/tv shows they have watched. We know the narrative. Representation of sex work is usually characterized by addiction, rape, and coercion; pretty much, nothing short of torment and misery. We see this in popular films like Requiem for a Dream where a girl must sell her body for drugs because she is caught up in her addiction. She is miserable, forced into violent situations and is forever shattered by this betrayal of innocence and her body. This is not to say this does not happen, it does. But it is a great injustice to have that same narrative told and retold by people who are not even sex workers! Because of the beauty and the distinct experiences and of the people who have volunteered to be in this documentary, the film seamlessly portrays the nuances of what sex work can look like and who does it. 

Bullet points for those in a time crunch!

What our documentary plans to do:

• Humanize sex workers

• Represent sex workers who are in recovery from drugs/alc

• Validate that sex work can be enjoyable and be a means of freedom

• Center trans-voices 

• Show a variety of sex workers- from online work escorting to mainstream porn

• Establish that content about swers are best told by swers themselves

There are many other bullet points that I am probably forgetting. By no means does this film strive to be perfect. This is because it is one film. Hopefully, this project will encourage other sex workers to document their own lives if they feel safe and are compelled enough to do it. Sex worker history is sadly lost everyday since most of it is not written down. The history of this profession is made mostly in the shadows. I don’t want to lose another story, another history because what we do makes people uncomfortable. 

I am lucky enough to be surrounded by friends who have a variety of experiences and backgrounds. I get advice everywhere I go. I am learning about cameras, lenses and shooting in low light and recording audio. It feels like I’ve gone back to school. But we are going to make this documentary. I finally feel a sense of purpose again. Follow me on the journey. And donate when that Kickstarter link drops!!

( i have my cashapp in the graphic bc if i haven’t mentioned i’m not getting paid to do any of this so if you feel compelled to fund me personally, cash app is great.)

I worked on a farm as a seasonal worker right around the time I graduated from undergrad. I was burnt out of the fields (lol) that I had previously worked in. I had interned for a reproductive rights-centered org every year for the previous five years. And while I was grateful for the opportunities and learned a lot, the nonprofit world just stopped making sense to me. I didn’t want to climb a neoliberal career ladder. Though I highly respect some of those organizations to this day, the work just felt disingenuous. Plus, sitting at a desk all day hurt my back as humans are not built to be in an office chair for the majority of their day. I would sit at my desk and think, “wow the truly radical thing to do would just be to give all this money directly to the people we are claiming to serve. No need for a middle man.” I started to despise the nonprofit world so I decided to try my luck at yet another “nonprofit” my senior year at college. 

In April 2021, my friend told me that she was plant harvesting for our city’s zoo for $15 an hour. Pre-crushing inflation and economic decline, for the town I was living in, $15 an hour was a good wage that only a few institutions were paying. I was psyched. I immediately applied. I had also just come away from a spiritual journey with a 75 yr old man I met by the side of the road who exposed me to plant medicine and healing. I thought I could continue this plant exploration via this job. Following my interview later that week, I had gotten the job. My boss was an older midwestern man who had come out of retirement a few times. This was one of those times. At first, I really liked him. 

On my first day, I was given my thick collared tee shirt and told to buy the rest of my uniform. In order to qualify for employment, I was required to have a car and car insurance which was then all thanks to my family’s support. How else could someone afford these things on fifteen dollars an hour? The shifts started early so we could avoid the oncoming delta heat. After our six am clock in, my coworkers and I met with our boss to discuss what needed to be harvested. Thankfully, one of my coworkers was my friend who told me about the job. We were some of the only girls in the entire horticulture/harvest department. This fascinated the other male workers. Safe to say we stuck together. The man who we shadowed on the job was a burly, threatening looking man who could work faster than anyone. His name was Jake. When I talked to him though, Jake’s voice was actually soft and sweet. He was a true gentle giant. He had been with the department for the longest and it showed.

The next coworker I met was Dan. He stared at me strangely before we made our introductions. I had heard whispers of some workers that he was one of the many workers from the state’s prison diversion program. He had a thicker accent than I had ever heard and we are from the same state. He was a boy basically- maybe 20 or 21. On our first drive to a harvesting site, he told me that he had basically been in jail throughout his teenage life. He came from a holler in the eastern part of the state and got sent to the city on the account of the city’s prison diversion program that kept men like him out of jail cells in order to make their bodies workable to the city. There were 6-12 of men like him at all times at our workplace. These men cycled out- some running away or getting kicked out of the program. They were not paid, no, but were given year long contracts which dictated they were to work 6 days a week from 6-2 with only 2 holidays off in the year. No sick days. They were required to do the labor that no one else wanted to do. And they were looked at as second-class in a lot of ways. I was extremely upset with Dan’s working conditions to say the least. We stuck together when we worked and Dan and I got pretty close. Dan showed off a lot for me, helped me with my workload sometimes and defended off other guys’ attempts at flirting with me. My friend who had told me about the job quit soon after I started, so it was just me and Dan mostly.

On paper, our jobs were simple. We were to harvest orders that we had been assigned by the zoo keepers. The trees we harvested were sweet gum, willow, and pear trees- just to name a few. Usually standard orders were fifteen to twenty five pounds each. Along with our regular three bundles of fifteen pound bamboo. Each person was assigned six to eight orders each day to get from fields and farms we drove to. The animals that ate our vegetation were the red pandas, a picky capybara, gorillas, and giraffes. These animals, however, were secondary to our primary consumers- the giant pandas.

I guess my job was all thanks to a diplomatic deal in which twenty years earlier, China gifted our city’s zoo two panda bears. At the time of the deal, the zoo bought several acres of land outside of a land reserve and planted six types of bamboo. Twenty years later, the bamboo had grown too rampantly and much of our job was to work this land and harvest all that we could.

If you know anything about bamboo, you should know not to plant it. In fact, suburbanites who had originally planted them in their yards as decoration came to us after their yards were overgrown with green stalks. Bamboo can be almost impossible to get rid of because they root underground in a network. Unless you dig up the mother root, they will root all over. Some facts about bamboo (and I’m full of them)- the shoots can grow up to four feet a day during spring. However- if we got them too late and that was common- the pandas wouldn’t eat them. Extremely picky eaters these pandas were and this caused a lot of waste. A LOT. The first time I saw the majority of what we had stripped the land of the previous day end up in the dump made me extremely resentful.

Getting used to the job, my tolerance for heat and general discomfort had improved tremendously. My stomach hurt from standing so long but my legs grew stronger. On top of our required fifteen and twenty pound “bundles”, we had to fill three to seven barrels of bamboo shoots each day. These barrels at the end of the day each weighed around three hundred pounds. I tried my best to help my male coworkers move the full barrels off the box trucks we drove, but I contributed very little so I was only expected to dolly the barrels into the exhibit once they had been removed from the truck.

My second pang of environmental guilt hit when we started in on the willow trees. We basically would harvest the trees until they had no more new growth. Jake would saw off branches to make the quota while I tried to pick twigs that the trees maybe didn’t need. There were other species of trees that we harvested from but after completing a college ecology class, I knew the importance of willows to their ecosystems and felt horrible cutting them down to nothing day after day. 

Early on, I found out my pay was not to be fifteen dollars an hour but twelve. Complaints ran high from me to my coworkers but they attempted to pacify me by telling me that we were the highest paid hourly workers. That’s right. Twelve dollars was the highest wage bracket for an institution that employs hundreds of people. What’s worse, the employees below our pay grade were required to have at least a bachelor’s degree and a rigorous science background. Those were the zoo keepers. They worked tirelessly and were in constant distress about the high expectations of their job in animal care. But of course, it is a genius plan to exploit compassionate people because if you love animals, you’ll probably go to any length to work with them. And if you get tired of making a poverty wage- well what are you going to do? Abandon the animals you take care of day after day- living in subpar and even detrimental living conditions? I was floored. But my resentments didn’t stop there.

Over time, I started to despise my boss. He kept a plastered smile on his face. His day always ended before ours- before it got too hot. He sat in an air-conditioned office and would say things like, “not too bad of a day, huh?” when we came in. Being the good employee that he was, Jake would always reply, “nope, not bad at all.” Resentfully, I would echo him. I didn’t want to be the one girl who couldn’t handle the work. Even though he could pull way more mass than me and was skilled at this craft, I didn’t want to be the weak one that I knew myself to be. 

At the end of the day- I would speed home. As soon as I got into the door, I peeled the clothes off me right there in the doorway and ran to the shower. I was always disgusting. When tick season started, I would light fire to them outside the shower. They were always of course in the worst places. For the rest of the day, I would sit my ass down and watch adult swim, that is unless I needed to work on finals for my classes. 

At the job, manual labor was not the only form of labor required of me. Since there were few women workers, my gender performance needed to be smooth and seemingly effortless. I needed to be endearing and forgiving if I was to be liked at all. Though I loved Dan, he had been raised with a specific dynamic with women. He was taught to be chivalrous in a very classic way meaning that he saw me as weak and dependent. This of course benefited me in some ways because he would help me get my quotas filled but it was exhausting to play this role all the time. I didn’t have to do this but I was happy to have his friendship and trust so I played along. At the end of the day, I am a people pleaser. My boundaries have gotten a lot better since graduating but they were pretty porous back then.  

I was graduating soon and would be mostly cut off financially from my parents. At this time, my partner and I were in talks of moving to Brooklyn, NY so I needed money and fast. A previous coworker of mine in a reproductive justice internship had mentioned something about “sugaring”. Though I didn’t really know what that meant, I thought that sounded pretty good. I had already thought about going into dancing and that was in the same world as sugaring. So I created a Seeking Arrangements profile and was off to the races. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent circumventing time wasters on that site. That’s a story for another time though. 

A few weeks into “sugaring”,  I met a man at a popular coffee shop in my town (not wise) and he told me I would be his sugar baby. He left me a 50 dollar bill at the table and told me to reserve a hotel room during the day and he would meet me there. This is what sugaring was I was told by him… Looking back on it now, that is not sugaring, that is prostitution. But, I did what he told me. I reserved a hotel room and dressed revealingly thinking the people working concierge would have no clue about what I planned to use the room for. Within an hour, he was out the door and I had made $285 which was a bigger paycheck than I made in a week of working my ass off in the fields. $285 is low by the way- don’t meet a man for under $300 for fs. It’s usually not worth it. I was relieved to come away from the hotel unscathed and I told my partner so. I quit the harvesting job soon after and shamefully wished Dan goodbye and good luck. I felt guilty that I was leaving him at this job that exploited him so deeply. I knew he loved me and I loved him too. But I couldn’t take the job anymore now that I had a way of actually making real money. I couldn’t take watching his body get worn day after day. I couldn’t take seeing these majestic and intelligent animals progressively lose their minds in the enclosures. I couldn’t take ripping vegetation from keystone tree species that would just be thrown out at the end of the day. I had the choice to do something else and I did it. 

When that first client laid his cash on the hotel endtable, it felt right. Ever since that day,  I have never looked back. Sex work has transformed my life for the good and the bad. I can support myself in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I can pursue my artistic dreams- even ones that I have thought to be absolutely ridiculous. But what it has given me is time. I have time to be a person, a human. My life is not defined by a job like so many other peoples’. I have time to be a person- a human who experiences life in a fullness that most can’t. Of course sex work defines me in other ways but I am by no means spending at least forty hours a week at a place I can’t stand doing miserable busy work living from paycheck to paycheck. Through the good and bad, this is the life path I’ve chosen for now and I have immense gratitude for all that it has afforded me.

It’s tax season and this time of year has taken on new meaning since joining the industry. When I started, I was dead set on evading taxes. How would the IRS know? I was paid predominantly in cash and Cash app/Venmo was still unsupervised to some degree. I thought about the people who I had known to deal drugs and used exclusively Venmo and Cashapp for business. They didn’t seem too concerned about the government coming down on them. I also saw not paying taxes as a way to condemn the government, especially TN which is the state I started working in. I didn’t want my hard earned money to go to cops or any policy that was actively trying to fuck over marginalized people. Plus, wouldn’t reporting my income out me? One of the few resources I had in TN was a badass swer in her 40’s who had started in the industry a few years before I did. We met up in person one time, and I paid her for her labor as she generously gave away crucial lessons she had learned as a worker.  

“Girl, the IRS doesn’t care if you’re a hoe. They care that you pay your taxes,” she told me as we sat and ate papa johns at my kitchen table.

But I wasn’t convinced. And after she told me she paid $1200 every 4 months or so in taxes, I made up my mind that I would not be doing such a thing. I was also vastly ignorant of tax preparation and wanted to stay in the dark about it as much as I could. Though I was paranoid the IRS would come after me due to the many nondescript payments via Cashapp, I rationalized it. 

After moving to NY, I was stuck with an ethical dilemma. I was made aware of the numerous social services that the state and city could provide for its people. Public transportation, health insurance, other services that indicated that NY cared more about its people than TN did. And don’t think I’m not aware of the complaints and the real and violent ways the NY government fucks over people all the time- especially the homeless. Not to mention the military force that is the NYPD where unimaginable amounts of tax dollars go. But relatively speaking, it was better than TN in many ways. And the right thing would be to pay for my share as well, right? 

One of the first relationships I had in NY was with a former Hasidic man and let me tell you- this man was a heartbreaker. Even sidelocks triggered me for weeks after our breakup. It was hard for me to go to Bushwick and parts of Crown Heights for a while. But before breaking my heart, he taught me all about tax evasion. I am now convinced he was a part of some sort of Hasidic mafia. Putting together what I know about the dwindling Italian mafia via Sopranos and a mob boss I had as a previous client, looking back, there was something shady going on. 

Let’s call him Sam. Sam and I connected online and agreed to meet for a spa day in NJ. Keep in mind that I didn’t really know what a real spa was before coming to NY. He purchased a car for me too and I met him at the exquisite spa which had five different levels of saunas, heated pools and waterfalls. I was highly impressed. I even got butterflies when I saw him for the first time. He was beautiful, young, and held himself confidently. He was too good to be true. I thought he was Icelandic when he started to speak. I couldn’t place his accent but he had bright blue eyes and white-blonde hair. Scandinavian I thought. I asked him where his accent was from, but he ended up revealing to me he was from a way of life I knew little about.

 Sam was born into the Spring Valley “cult”- his word not mine- which is a dense Hasidic community in upstate New York. He told me about the poor education system in his hometown. He said, “if you want to know how to do something archaic like purchase and take care of ram, the education is absolutely valuable. But besides that, we had no real education outside of religious texts.” During his childhood, he defiantly read books, learned English and became acquainted with the outside world which culminated in his exit after he was married to a woman at the age of nineteen. After his departure, he even garnered public support and went after Hasid men who threatened their wives with violence when they tried to leave their abusive marriages. He told me that the Hasidic community was a cult because anyone who tried to leave or defy the principles were condemned. 

So why did he still do business with them I wondered. One evening as we met before a Broadway show at his office at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, he filed out with other Hasid men into the parking lot. Though he lacked a long black coat and top hat, a kippah sat on his head. At my confused expression, he promptly pulled it off and threw it in the backseat as we got into his car. “Forgot I had that on,” he said passively. I did not know what to say so I said nothing.

As we dripped sweat at one of the many saunas we visited, he taught me about tax evasion. “You must get an LLC,” he advised, “it’s easy to apply, you just have to pay a small fee. I have LLC’s that pay for my LLC’s,” he bragged. I asked him if he feared the IRS coming after him and he assured me that I was in a great position as I had never paid taxes before. 

“Think of it like this, if you never get into the pool, the IRS doesn’t know you exist, but once you get into the pool, they’ll know you.” So essentially he was saying- don’t pay taxes. Amazing. That was my plan exactly and now I had the research to back it up. 

I started falling for him that first day we met at the spa. We had not met through an escort-exclusive platform but it was still sex work adjacent. A place where sugar babies could find a daddy-essentially. And though he flaunted his sex positively- his familiarity with non monogamy and play party scenes- I had a gut feeling he did not want to date a hooker so I didn’t tell him at first.

My primary partner and I ended our relationship shortly after Sam and I met. He was not exactly the reason as we had an open relationship but my romantic feelings did not help. My ex was the first person I ever loved fully, but we couldn’t be together anymore. It was traumatic so I put all my hopes in Sam to cope. I even imagined what it would be like visiting for weekends on his huge estate in Jersey. He had a four year old whom he shared with a previous partner. Was I ready to get domestic and ditch my big city dreams so soon? I considered it. So when we laid on a hotel bed in SoHo, I told Sam what I really did. I told him I was the hourly type, not just a curious girl who was interested in spa dates every few weeks. He scooted away from me and considered this new information. 

This really let him down. He thought I was a good girl, as he had called me many times before. But no longer. He told me he couldn’t date someone like me. “I was looking for a second girlfriend but I’m not interested in dating a woman that is so sexually active. The girl I date in Jersey is very inexperienced and reserved and I like that a lot.” Essentially, I was too dirty for him. Can you imagine? A man who grew up in the Hasidic community thinking a girl was dirty for having sex? My chest grew heavy and tight. I wanted to sob and beg him to reconsider. But we had an appointment for a couples massage in Korea Town in thirty minutes and goddamnit, I deserved a massage after this devastating interaction. I held in tears as we drove to the spa. After receiving our massages, an attendant gave us an entire room that consisted of at least 10 shower heads. It was insinuated that it was ours for thirty minutes or so. We were still seen as a couple after all. And though I was dirty, it didn’t stop Sam from receiving head from me for the last time. As he later called my Uber, I knew it would be the last time I would see him so I tried to hustle him out of two $500 pit tickets for a show at the Barclays for my trouble. He didn’t oblige. Oh well, at least I tried.

I was crushed about the break up and bawled to my friend on the phone. For weeks I missed him. Now, more than a year later, I hope his tax evasion catches up with him. Going into this tax season, I am paying someone else to do my taxes. Avoiding the “pool” is no longer something I am comfortable doing. Recently, I went to a tax seminar for swers which was run by an escort who had a CPA license. She echoed what my friend in TN said about the IRS just wanting our tax money. Plus, she taught us about how we could legally deduct lingerie, travel, phone bills, sex toys and condoms on TurboTax. I was sold. But I still had an overwhelming amount of W-2s and I99’s from another job that I work on the books. So she recommended me to a place in Texas who was sex worker friendly- for a high price. Whatever. I paid it. I am no longer willing to put up with the paranoia that I will be forced to pay tons of back taxes in the future. 

Tax evasion? Never. Underreporting? Maybe. 

I am struggling. I’m struggling with this profession, living on my own, and in all honesty, just struggling to become. I’m not sure what I am here for. I know I came to live in NYC on a whim after living my entire life in the south. While that was the best decision I have ever made, I find myself in a peculiar position where my labor is not demanded from morning to late afternoon five days a week like most people. I can make rent within one week when I get the work. What person can say that for themselves? I am extremely privileged, and while the work takes a toll on my life that most people are not willing to sit with-I have time. And Time is one of the most limited resources we have in late stage capitalism. Our world demands to know how we spend our waking hours. Even the hours when we are sleeping. In what ways are you producing? Is it efficient enough? And if we are not producing, we are told that we are wasting our time here on Earth. 

Millions of people world-wide were forced to reimagine work and school environments during the pandemic. We saw a surge of people get laid off and struggle with what to do with their free time. Some could afford this break from work, others could not. Some benefitted from the stimulus checks and some did not. It should be noted that a lot of people did not stop working and only continued to work harder. This group often included those providing essential services and/or products for the sick and those who could afford to have goods and services brought to them. But even so, perhaps there was a cultural shift in the way we thought about our lives. If life can be brought to a premature end, what do we do with the time we have remaining? 

So this is my journey with time. This is my individual curiosity about what life consists of outside of work. I acknowledge that having free time goes against American ideals around work ethic. We’re not supposed to have much free time because it would potentially allow us to question the validity of arbitrary social rules and conventions which often creates hostility we have toward one another. Too much free time and perhaps we will see more revolts just like we did during the George Floyd protests. It was not a coincidence that the George Floyd protests and a large demographic of Americans experiencing newfound free time happened at the same time. Free time also gives us a chance to connect to our communities and realize how oppressive systems create inequality between ourselves and the individuals we know and love. For example, we saw a burst of mutual aid orgs during the pandemic. People in the same community met for the first time even. For instance, a friend of mine started the community refrigerator trend in NYC and it’s still a critical service for many people. For me, the pandemic totally changed the trajectory of my life because I was set to move to Chicago that summer and start a promising career path with a nationwide non-profit. Instead, we were all forced to stay home so I did not go to Chicago. I remained in my hometown and even fell in love with someone who would later bring me here to NYC. 

Just like most people, my time was scheduled out from morning to night at least five days a week for twelve years. Then for four more years. Though I will say college let me create a schedule that benefitted me in the way that chunks of time could be spent by my own volition. But now out of college and not in the regular workforce, I find myself wallowing in thoughts of what I am doing and what I am not doing. How I am being productive and how I am not. How I am worth something to society and how I am not.

So I guess all this is to say, I want to find other people who struggle with time too. Where are my gig economy people? Artists? Writers? Freelancers? Dealers? Even those who just struggle navigating what to do with their time outside their job. I know I am not alone. How do I compensate for not having a 9-5? How do I justify not clinging to a rung on the ladder of a company or an organization? Do I even qualify as an adult or am I just a spoiled child in an adult’s body that refuses to do real work? Do I still deserve time away from “work”? Do I even call it that? I could go on with this line of questioning until I reach a self-induced spiral but would that be an efficient use of my time? 

I hate my client and I can’t exactly tell you why. He’s the only client that both gives me gifts and tips me each session. He’s not ugly, just a middle aged man who I happen to despise. After our first session together, I was not particularly thrilled. But that experience regularly comes with the territory. He did not do anything in particular to make me feel this way, it was just not an enjoyable experience as I found him a bit creepy. And yes, sometimes I get joy out of sessions. Actually, I prefer sessions to be enjoyable if it’s for the right reasons. I think it’s misconstrued that all swers dislike clients and the sex they have with them, but I would much rather enjoy the company and forget that I’m working at all. I mean that’s the dream right, to feel like you’re not even working. If you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life? That statement that needs a lot of unpacking, but why should swers be excluded from this sentiment? Is it because we seem dirty? And we seem dirty because we fuck for money? 

Anyway, when we met, I was not getting booked as often as I would have liked, so I didn’t immediately block his number when the session ended. He asked to see me again a few days later and I did not have the capacity to conceal my disgust so I passed, and told him I’d see him the following week instead. The next night, I had no plans but to watch some cheesy 80’s Japanese action films so when I got hit up for work, it was a no-brainer. Upon screening the potential client, something did not quite sit right with me so I told him to meet me in the cross streets as opposed to my actual incall location. Thank God that I listened to my gut because I was right. This was no new client, this was the same man I had seen earlier in the week. His dumb face appeared as his car window rolled down. I flipped. I have a temper and usually I keep that at bay but I was so triggered upon seeing his face. Though I have had 90% good, non-coercive experiences in this industry, there is still the other 10% that hangs in the back of my head when I see clients.

My anger bubbled up through my chest and exploded through my throat. “What the fuck are you doing?!” I screamed. I went to walk away but he screamed my (work) name and told me to get in his car. This only made me more vile and as an innocent party of bar-hoppers passed me, they got caught in the crossfires. I screamed at him again and told him I was not getting in his fucking car. He waved a black and white striped gift bag out the window, “I’m sorry I just wanted to see you. Let me explain”. My blood was boiling, standing in the cold on a Lower Manhattan sidewalk during fucking Santa Con- arguably the worst time of the year. I wanted to run but the inner hustler tugged at me. I was curious as to whether I could still get my hourly which I fully deserved at this point. You can judge me for this part- I do. I got in the car. However, I got in with the condition that the car was to be turned off and my leg could hang out of the door, shoe to cement, blocking the car’s ability to lock or drive off.

I got in the car and he started his long winded apologies. As I furiously bit my lip, he suggested that I open the the gift bag. It is a full-sized Gucci Bloom perfume in its beautiful pastel pink bottle. It’s my favorite scent and I had only been able to afford the mini-roller up until then. My defenses cooled slightly. I told him it’s one of my favorites.

I don’t want to recount the grimace-inducing details of his apology and how he feels so immoral and twisted for paying for sex. He said it goes against his spiritual principles and family morals. He said that he hates to see young women doing this ungodly occupation and wants to help me get out of it. The he told me a story of how he used to see a Polish girl and he ended up funding her to escape the horrendous trade. Blah, blah, fucking savior bullshit. I tell him he has no idea the gravity of what he has done tricking me because someone had previously taken advantage of me and this reminded me of that. Tears welled up in his stupid eyes. I told him I should report him to the blacklists and never see him again. But the hustler in me… I told him to give me my hourly and I will think about seeing him again. I took my gift bag, wad of cash, and beelined toward the train station amid bright red Santa hats and drunken Manhattanites I was floored. I should’ve blocked him. But there was a lingering voice of a former swer mentor who taught me some ends and outs of hustling. The voice of my former mentor advised me to milk the situation for all I could. This same mentor told me that the real test of a “good” sex worker was the amount of money one can procure from a john without ever touching him. I considered this on the train ride home. I had finally done it- I had taken money from him without even having to touch his shoulder. But at what cost?

Weeks went by and I carried this sentiment with me. I finally made the decision to get a few more bucks out of him. I agreed to meet him for a nice lunch during a weekday, hear his wretched apologies again and take the hundred dollar bills with me when he footed the bill. I won’t lie, a great sense of accomplishment swept over me when he handed me the envelope and I got to walk away coldly.

I started seeing him for sessions in the following weeks. I did felt guilty for taking advantage of him even though he put me in a shitty situation. Upon every session, he started presenting me with various Kate Spade jewelry. It was not my thing, but in a messed up way it was validating to receive gifts on top of my hourly. It is rare that a client gifts me something- even tips. Which I know other girls got all the time and this made me jealous. I wanted to know that I was as good as them.

Amid the validation, my deep resentment lingered toward him. Silently, I tried to ignore the resentment but, following unusually bad depressive episode, I was forced to see the connection between my misery and our scheduled sessions. One day, I saw my chance to run. After our session on day, he asked my birthday. At first, I started to tell him my actual one but what kind of hustler would I be if I said it was seven months away. So I tell him it’s in two weeks. “I will tell him it’s my birthday, I will agree to have a nice lunch with him to celebrate, collect his birthday gifts, and make it clear I will not be sleeping with him after lunch. Then I will call it off with him a few days later, telling him I got a good job in the film industry.” Today I executed the first part of this plan. I faked being a Pisces for a few hours and received a duffle bag of gifts and a wad of cash. 

During our lunch, I tried not to be phased by his shirt that said HERO on it in big bold letters. I tried not to be phased by his description of big donation he likes to make on the mornings of his birthdays or yet another mention of how his parents’ high expectations oppressed him growing up. In the way he talks to me, I can tell he thinks of me dumb, naive, and unaware of how the formidable trials of life can really shape a man. I know his type. He is most likely a dad and married to a woman who also despises him. He probably has teenage kids that see right through him. He sees himself as someone stands atop the rigid mountain exposing himself to arduous weather in order to shield the weak- a sacrifice very few people can really understand. I hate him. I breathe deeply on the subway with a duffle bag in my lap, thanking God that’s over. My gaudy Kate Spade gemstone necklace peeking out of my winter coat. 

I probably seem spoiled to you. And you may be right but the reality is that my soul was absolutely drained by this man’s presence and I had enough. I gave him more time than he deserved. That’s what I tell myself anyway. He is a shining reminder of how money is not everything. Though it is to a certain extent, but once the bare minimums are taken care of, money stops having so much value in the face of constant feelings of disgust and resentment. 

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1. We ALL sell our bodies in varying degrees when we work

2. Sex work is NOT ONLY work but ALSO goes beyond work

3. Sex work evolves constantly and looks like so many things

4. What you will read will be limited to MY experiences working in the industry

5. Sex work is ancient yet so disruptive to our current economy and political realties

6. For a “progressive” country, the US has little conversation or meaningful representation of sex work and the diverse array of people’s experiences

7. always wipe front to back

I am inviting you into this space because I have no answers for anything. And if you feel the same way, I find it is so hot that so many of us are confused. One of the reasons I am jumping in on this Substack trend is due to the frustrating lack of media representation of swers (sex workers). And I should clarify- I am a cis white female who was born in the United States, so parts of my identity are systemically overrepresented. However, I theorize that this generation has a unique relationship with sex work as opposed to other generations. This is all the more reason that sex worker representation needs to increase in proportion to its growth! For instance, we saw an explosion in the creator platform OnlyFans. Currently, OnlyFans has over 2 million content creators and is worth around 3 billion USD. That’s not to say that all creators are producing sexy content! And it is not to say OF is the ideal ethical platform for ppl in sex industry! It’s also not to say that harmful legislation did not affect this trend. It’s just something to chew on. What the pandemic did for lots of people is re-imagine how we spend our time and what we want work environments to look like. What work environments do we want to create for ourselves? (but honestly, how long are we going to be in denial about what we actually want, which is to not work at all!)

So I hope that by sharing my experiences, sex work could be destigmatized  to some degree and that more people in the industry will share their experience as well if they feel it’s beneficial for themselves. And let’s create community. I worked in isolation for awhile out of safety but also because I didn’t know anyone else doing what I was doing. Sex work can be a lonely lifestyle sometimes, and sharing my experience makes me feel to more connected.