offhand wistful comments such as, "If you weren't already married, haha....”
Olivia asked my advice on one of these guys, who was clearly falling in love with her from the start. She mentioned that she'd already talked to another sex worker about it. The other worker's reaction was, essentially, "What problem?" As Olivia put it: "She told me that the guy is basically a locked-in regular now, so what am I so bothered about?" But after a while, Olivia couldn't take how guilty and anxious she felt around this guy, what with the feelings she couldn't return. She stopped responding to his messages, but didn't tell him clearly that it was over because trying to phrase the email felt so awful.
"I was so unprofessional about it," she said. "In the end, he sent me this incredibly sweet note asking what he'd done to hurt me so badly. So my husband helped me write a 'it's not you, it's me’ breakup email. I still feel bad.”
Another facet of emotional difficulty arose when Olivia's husband started taking a medication that decreased his libido. This put the couple in the odd position of Olivia having sex with other men, but not her husband -- with her husband's full knowledge and consent. Although her husband tried to reassure her, she began feeling less secure and stable at home. And sex work is stressful enough that home security can really, really matter. Indeed, at one point Olivia mentioned: "One of my friends is tempted to get into sex work. But she says she doesn't think she can deal with it, emotionally, unless she has a partner at home who loves her and will back her up. So I'm not supposed to let her have sex for money until she's in a good solid relationship.”
Finally, as Olivia fielded other life stresses, she flatly realized that she couldn't have anything extra going on. What with all the above conversations, we saw signs that the change was coming, but when it arrived it was both sudden and intense. "One day I just knew I had to stop,” she told me. "It's bad, because we're behind on rent now, but I had to stop. My husband pointed out, gently, that we need the money. But of course he accepted it when I said I was done. Anyway, I managed to line up a good temp job, so we're okay for now."
I tried to show in the original interview that Olivia is very privileged compared to most sex workers. She's got race privilege for her whiteness, class privilege from her background; she's pretty and young and "valuable," and has tons of education to boot. She doesn't have a drug habit or some other truly debilitating issue. Although she's under some financial stress, she's not desperate.
And that leads me to this question:
If even a woman like Olivia -- who was well-treated and made a lot of money and didn't feel trapped; whose life sounded like the glam fantasy of today's high-end call girl -- if even a woman like Olivia eventually needed a break from sex for money, then what could this imply about the experience of less privileged women? I've got a bunch of sex worker friends, and I would never say that a woman can't be a 100% consenting adult sex worker who enjoys her job. But what I'm trying to get at, here, is that even on the "high end,” sex work can be incredibly demanding. Even when sex work is as pleasant as it possibly can be, it's often very hard.
I'd like to see more conversations that acknowledge the reality of sex work as
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018616