No matter how much I try not to tie my self-image to what clients think of me, I cannot help but do so. If I start to have less people interested in paying me for sex, I begin to feel as though I’m unattractive. I’m not sure how many other sex workers feel this way, or to what extent.
I update the pictures on my escorting profile every time I get a haircut or dye my hair, or when any significant aspect of my appearance changes. Obviously the pictures of me are curated to show me from my best angles and to make me look as attractive as possible. Sometimes when I change them, I get less client interest. That could be because the picture doesn’t highlight my butt and that’s what catches the clients’ eyes, or it could be because my haircut makes me look ugly to them, it could be that my weight has fluctuated slightly, but there’s no way for me to know for certain which change ultimately changed their interest.
I obsess over comments that clients have made about my body. Interestingly, any complaints about my sexual performance are easy to brush off, because I’m simply reflecting their desires and following their lead most of the time. If a client seems like they want me to be more dominant, I will, but generally they want me to be submissive and agree to their whims and their complaints amount to me having boundaries. It’s not the way I act during sex with someone I like and am attracted to. My appearance, however, is consistent in both scenarios.
Throughout my life, I’ve had psoriasis. It’s a skin condition which goes through periods of more activity (flares) and periods where it’s less bad. Sometimes, I get patches of it that last years in a spot. In the last few years, it’s steadily gotten worse. I’ve always been insecure about my skin looks; as it gets worse I get more comments about it and less interest. I feel bad about even advertising myself when my skin is bad, because if my advert makes it very obvious I will get less inquiries but if I hide it then I’ll get much more negative reactions when people meet me in person and it’s unexpected.
Whether I sold sex or not, I’d be insecure about how a lot of my skin looks. Selling sex merely amplifies it. I have sex with a higher number of people by far than is typical, and so more people I’m sexually intimate with will see it. Instead of just dealing with an insult or disgust reaction from one person, I have a huge number of moments where I wonder if a client left early or couldn’t get it up because they find it so unattractive or if there’s some other reason. Sometimes clients would have erectile dysfunction or would have masturbated before seeing me and be unable to get it up, and in the past I could feel relatively sure that’s what had happened, when my skin was mostly clear and I knew that wasn’t a factor. Now I second-guess myself.
A lot of men are insecure about their inability to maintain erections. Whether someone has that issue consistently or not, it can happen to anyone and most men will experience it at some point throughout even the peak of their sex life. Older men practically all do. I’ve noticed that they have a tendency to project this insecurity onto their partner. If he can’t stay hard, a client is very likely to attempt to reassure me that it’s not something I did or that they don’t know why it’s happening. Upon being told that when I started selling sex, I wanted to roll my eyes – I know it’s not me, in many cases it’s clearly a common issue they have, and I don’t actually care if they find me attractive!
When I was selling sex presenting as a woman, I assumed all sex workers would be similarly able to brush off their concerns about whether clients thought they were hot. All I cared about was whether I could get enough of them to earn money to survive. Then I started to sell sex under a public persona as a man and I realized that the less separation there is between your sex worker persona and your real self, the more you internalize any criticism or comments about how you look.
In terms of my gender and desirability, it’s impossible for me to ignore that I get far less clients since I came out as trans. I knew that it would. There are more straight men who are only interested in cis women than there are men of any sexuality who are interested in men. Some gay and bi men are uninterested in trans men, whether because of the genitals we might have or simply bigotry against trans people, and the subset of self-proclaimed straight men who are interested in trans men is very small and often only includes us when we haven’t completed certain steps in medical transition.
Knowing the reasons doesn’t change the fact that having less people interested in you makes you feel less attractive. Unlike trans people who intentionally surround themselves with mostly other trans people and those who are supportive, or who spend most of their social time in queer environments where their desirability is higher (though they are also subject to fetishization on this basis still), because the client pool for sex work is almost entirely cis men there is a bias I experience. If I open Grindr, I’ll get plenty of messages, but my escorting ads get far fewer responses than they used to and I have to make peace with that.
Early in transition, I had a number of clients who were interested in me and specifically obsessed over my breasts. Some were chasers who wanted to make me uncomfortable while others were into the idea of a tomboy and viewed me as such. Getting top surgery meant losing that chunk of clientele. I felt so much better in myself afterwards, and this is one of the few ways that I became desired by less people that didn’t make me feel bad. People who were into my breasts were actively obsessed with part of my body that I didn’t want them to like and didn’t feel comfortable with.
One thing I had to accept before I underwent medical transition was that I would not only be less desirable broadly, but also that I might get less attractive by my own standards. Before transition, I was attractive. I felt that I was. I didn’t like how I looked because it didn’t feel right, and I was upset at being seen as a woman, but not because I was deluded about my physical appearance. People found me attractive and I looked in the mirror and thought that I’d be interested in someone who looked the way I did. At the beginning stages of medical transition, when I first started T and cut my hair and wore a binder all the time, I simultaneously felt uglier and also more comfortable with my appearance. I looked like a young boy at first.
I’m less desirable now, in terms of the total number of people who are interested in me. At the same time, I’m happier and more comfortable with my appearance. Both of these factors impact how insecure a person is. So, what impacts is a lessening of my desirability having on me? I’m more concerned with what clients think of me, and also with what people I hook up with in my free time think of my appearance… with regards to my gender largely because it’s no longer an act. My appearance is aligned with myself in a way that makes compliments and insults feel far more genuine because I’m not putting on a mask that isn’t true to myself.
These days people write far less reviews about me, or at least they don’t write them where I can see them. The review boards are very hostile to anyone who writes about their experiences with trans women, and reviews of trans men are almost completely non-existent. The boards are populated by almost exclusively straight men who view paying for sex as a hobby.
Back when I did get a lot of reviews, they talked about me in fairly awful terms. The comments were objectifying, misrepresented things I’d said as an excuse to mock me, and sometimes detailed things they’d done to assault me and then complained about my reaction to it. Most of my insecurities were related to being seen as a woman, though I couldn’t articulate it at the time, so comments about my figure and feminine demeanor were the ones that got to me the most even though they were ostensibly compliments.
I’ve known sex workers with eating disorders who spiral into worse periods of illness because a review calls them fat. Others obsessive over hygiene to the point that they’re scrubbing their skin harshly in the shower between every client and irritating their skin with such strong soap, due to a combination of comments in reviews and also anti-prostitution stigma that claims sex workers are dirty.
There are men who target sex workers to mock them and destroy their self-esteem, with “pranks” like showing up at their incall location and then saying they’re uglier in person and turning around and walking right out. They never intend to go through with a booking in the first place and do this to dozens of sex workers whenever they’re in the mood to humiliate someone, but if you’re not aware of the practice then it’s believable that they just found you to be repulsive.
If I were to advise new sex workers on how to cope with the insecurity many of us feel as a result of what clients say or how many want us, I’d suggest a few things.
Don’t look at reviews, have a separate work persona that looks different from how you regularly dress, and keep a strict separation between your personal sex life and your work sex life.
Keeping a separation between your personal sex life and your work one is the piece of advice that I give out that I find the hardest to personally follow. I find myself faking enthusiasm with partners as if they’re clients, on autopilot, instead of expressing my desires or telling them what I like. Clients want me to pretend to enjoy whatever they do, which is why they’re paying instead of seeking casual sexual partners. I don’t need to worry about telling a casual partner that I don’t like a certain sexual position or need a different type of stimulation to orgasm. Yet I continue to do it on occasion, without thinking.
As I start to see my hook-ups with guys on Grindr and my interactions with clients blur, the views of my clients on my attractiveness seem more worthy of consideration. I see people who’ve paid me for sex on dating apps searching for guys similar to me, or who seem to be seeking out specifically cis men (having rules about dick size in their bios) who aren’t like me at all which makes it clear I was a novelty. My clients are within the pool of people I might have sex with in my personal life. Most of them I’d never pick out, because they don’t meet my personal tastes, but some clients are my type and even those who aren’t tend to have opinions on attractiveness that are mainstream in communities of queer men.
Back when I was very attached to a lesbian identity and exclusively dated women, men’s sexual opinions of me were irrelevant. I spoke about this lack of concern as if it was universal for sex workers, instead of the truth which is that it was specific to my circumstances. I didn’t know enough other prostitutes to realize the ways in which their experiences were different from mine.
Sex workers are simultaneously framed as desirable and as disgusting and dirty and diseased. We’re not considered marriage material, but it’s understood that people want to fuck us and for that to be true we must be desirable on some level. If the person talking about us doesn’t personally find us attractive, then those who pay us for sex are assumed to be fetishists of whatever trait that person dislikes (being fat, being trans, being Asian, being Romanian, being visibly disabled); if the person talking about us does find us attractive, then we are supposedly capitalizing off of our desirability in a way that is destroying it and we will eventually become undesirable.
I’m working on my self-image, which means getting more in tune with what I like in others rather than focusing on myself. I like a huge variation of people. I find a lot of traits to be attractive, then inexplicably a trait will be a complete turn-off for me even when I otherwise find the person very attractive and like the trait on others! I’ll find someone more attractive because of an eyebrow piercing – and on another person it lessens my interest hugely. I like red hair on one person and find it diminishes the beauty of someone else to me. Sometimes I find someone to be incredibly gorgeous and I show my friend a picture of them and they don’t understand my interest at all! There are broader trends in what’s considered attractive in the culture I grew up in that I don’t agree with at all. The fact that I find feminine men to be attractive definitely subverts what’s classically considered attractive, but there are massive numbers of people who are into that. For things I find attractive that are more niche, my desires aren’t diminished by the fact they’re not shared by a large population.
I’ve found far more security, in the face of waning desirability, from recognizing that other people are just as capable of having atypical attractions as I am. A majority of people seem to have one or two things that they find attractive that aren’t the norm, or to not be put off by things other people find unappealing. All of these things are subjective. Though we have trends, each person’s interests vary wildly.
When people tell me they’re attracted to me, I believe them unless given a reason to believe otherwise. An exchange of money used to feel more clear-cut, because why pay for sex with someone you’re unattracted to when you could just pick someone else? I eventually accepted that there are a plethora of reasons someone might choose me, from convenience to novelty to a lower chance of catching feelings, and so I don’t concern myself with trying to work out clients’ reasoning. I believe men who say they find me hot on Grindr and I believe women who say I’m their type during some awkward flirting, and it gets easier not to worry about the volume of admirers once you trust in the sincerity of those who do express their interest.
To say I don’t want to tie how attractive I feel to how other people see me is always going to fail, because even how I view myself is made up of other people’s ideas about attractiveness that I’ve absorbed throughout my life. However, I can shift my focus so that I only care about how attractive I am to the kind of people I want to be involved with. Outside of that, I can have a work persona tailored to client interest or one that’s more niche and makes me less money but is easier to keep up… and see that as otherwise unimportant except for how much money it makes me.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 