When I started selling sex, it was my last resort. The stigma around sex work in society means that it often takes an extreme event (homelessness, the inability to pay for food, the need to pay for urgent healthcare) for someone to start. Once you’ve been involved in sex work, that threshold becomes lower. You’ve already taken on the stigma that comes with selling sex, and whether you’ve seen 10 clients or 1000, society sees you as a prostitute just as much as anyone else selling sex. Telling people about your history won’t be any easier because you did it for 3 months on one occasion instead of several periods of that length over many years. The factors that continue to be a concern are the continued risk; violent clients, police, people finding out what you do and making you lose housing or a vanilla job.
Sometimes the lowering of this threshold frustrates me. If I am desperate for money, I sell sex rather than asking anyone for help, even if friends would support me if I asked. At first, selling sex was something I did to pay for necessities, and the longer I did it the more I would see clients to pay for more than my basic needs. Of course no-one should have to live with the bare minimum forever, but it’s hard to judge if the trade-off of the worse clients is always worth the gain when I’m saving for things I don’t necessarily need.
Recently, I found the lowering of this threshold freeing. I went back to work after months on furlough and found my work environment had grown much more hostile. For my entire retraining session I was deeply uncomfortable. It was clear to me that people had an issue with me being trans. The workload was going to be huge because we were understaffed and suddenly the bar would be open for all our usual hours, with three of our staff being new. My boss wanted people to take on extra unpaid work, like running the social media accounts for the bar. Beyond that, I was quickly realizing that given my various joint issues and pain, I wasn’t capable of doing the kind of hours of work that my boss wanted from me. It was overwhelming and miserable. Then I realized – I can quit. I can increase the number of clients I see and still make rent.
Between working 40 hours a week and being in constant extreme pain from being on my feet all day as someone with joint problems, while being misgendered and mistreated by my boss… is worse than selling sex for 8 hours a month. I can make the same amount of money from seeing 8 clients in a month, or from seeing a few regulars for a few times each. The risk is higher, and it wouldn’t be worth it overall if I had a series of violent clients or became unable to work for some reason, but barring those scenarios it would actually be less uncomfortable than my bar job would be. Or at least viable compared to it, because I think I’d have a breakdown if I couldn’t quit the bar.
Another benefit of selling sex is that it’s so flexible, and I can look for work that’s part-time and viable with my body’s needs. I can find a way to make an income from various sources, with seeing more clients as a fallback plan that’s always there. I can take more risks, don’t have to have another job lined up before I can quit a bad one.
Even if I end up overdrawn in my account, if I see a client I can have cash to pay for immediate needs like food without that money being eaten by my overdraft. Finding a job that pays immediate cash is always going to be harder than finding an individual client from a sex work ad.
So often I’m focused on how dangerous sex work is, or how extreme the stigma is. Those are very real problems, and the dangers are significant. When things go wrong and clients get violent, it’s extreme. Frequently I’m so focused on the dangers that people have trouble understanding why I’d do sex work at all. For people like me who are already disowned from our families and have already started sex work, sometimes the other options capitalism gives us are even worse. Slowly destroying my joints and causing flares of my arthritis, while being treated poorly at work and having to walk home at 3am from the bar while visibly trans, is worse than a typical week selling sex to a few clients.
It’s hard to know how much it’s reasonable to talk about the parts of sex work I like – so much quick cash – because inevitably I’ll have criticism directed at me that I’m glamourizing. If I only discuss the negatives, people push a victim narrative and suggest I need to be saved from myself because I’m making poor choices. My choices are reasonable given the shitty circumstances I find myself in. This recent moment at the bar made me realize that.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 