A Therapist You Fuck

Using sex workers to address mental health issues places an unfair burden on an already struggling and marginalized population of people. Regardless of whether having sex can help lonely clients to address their intimacy issues, sex workers are not generally trained therapists and cannot be expected to provide that sort of care.

Physical touch is important for mental health. When it comes to sex specifically, having a longing for it that you are unable to fulfill can be painful and contribute to low self-esteem. Paying for sex allows a client to meet resolve that longing, in theory, and many sex workers have anecdotes about clients who say their mental health hugely improved by seeing them and being able to work through sexual dysfunction or play out fantasies without judgement. Not everyone who sells sex will be able to offer good advice about sexual issues or provide that kind of judgement-free comfortable space to their clients, so this ends up being a claim that only a certain subset of sex workers can make. This does not mean it’s automatically untrue that any instance of paying for sex is beneficial for mental health issues, but does tell us that it’s not inherently helpful.

If we examine these individual anecdotes, in many cases the supposed mental health improvement comes from clients viewing the support as genuine. If someone lacks intimacy and feels like no-one cares about them, paying for sex with someone they are well aware doesn’t really care about them and is merely giving them good customer service isn’t going to feel better. This becomes a service that relies on clients being deluded about why the sex worker is there, or clients seeing workers who are wealthy or (relatively) privileged enough to be able to pick clients they feel comfortable with and to make real connections with their clients. My experience selling sex, and those of most sex workers I know, is one where we tolerate our clients only because we need the money badly enough, and we dislike most of them.

A client who pays a street sex worker for sex over the hood of his car isn’t getting anything approaching genuine intimacy, nor is a client who pays for a five-minute blowjob from someone working in a brothel. The most that could be claimed about those encounters is that they serve as a form of stress relief for the client, perhaps, but it’s decidedly a different experience than other clients are having with escorts who they book several hours with and who pay for a prolonged and sensual experience with a lot of talking. I’ve worked in all those settings and the behaviour of the men paying for sex differs wildly depending on the situation.

Are clients are made less depressed by sleeping with sex workers? Does it apply at all, or does it only work when a lack of sex is their main complaint as to the cause of their depression? As far as I’ve seen from most people who claim the their lack of sex life is harming their mental health, sex is either only one issue stemming from the broader issue of lacking intimacy and feeling alone (which paying for sex alone won’t fix) or they feel entitled to sex and are angry and upset they aren’t getting it.

Prostitutes are not generally trained in any form of therapy and aren’t equipped to provide this kind of mental health support. Seeing a sex worker isn’t going to make anything worse, but it’s not a solution and shouldn’t be treated as one. Although some people are well-meaning and feel, sort of intuitively, that lonely men would get some benefit from seeing sex workers, the people really pushing this idea aren’t doing it for the benefit of men with mental health issues or whose disabilities correlate with barriers to intimacy.

One reason this idea of prostitution as mental health support is being pushed is that there are many men who are appeased by having access to sex workers. Many cultures will no longer see that as acceptable, to outright admit to a desire to use sex workers that way, and so reframing it allows the practice to continue. If you want to gain and maintain power, and a lot of that power is held by men within a patriarchal structure, providing them with a class of people to act their sexual desires upon is a way to maintain their favor.

There’s a long history of sex workers being offered up to appease men. On an individual level with wealthy people paying for their sons to see sex workers and to keep their violent habits focused on sex workers who are viewed as disposable. Many Korean, Chinese, and Filipina women (dubbed “comfort women”) were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army, to supposedly provide soldiers an outlet for their sexual desire. None of these situations are of a mental health benefit to the men involved – not that it would justify the harm done to these sex workers, who were predominantly women, either way – but these scenarios are used to incentivize certain behavior from the men who are given access to these sex workers.

Not everyone who makes these claims is doing so for such nefarious reasons. Among sex workers who claim this, there are many who believe they’re helping people because of testimonies they’ve gotten from their own clients. Beyond that, some make these claims as a form of marketing to bring in more clients whether they actually believe it’s helpful for mental health or not. While I find these kinds of advertising practices to be distasteful, I’d liken them to industries which push consumption of certain “superfoods” or buying gemstones to supposedly boost your mood with their energy, on a much smaller scale. It’s not my primary concern. The main part of it which bothers me is the way it contributes to a misunderstanding of the purpose of therapy or how it words.

Therapists maintain strict boundaries with their clients for a reason. To be able to be truly honest with a therapist, you cannot also have a close friendship where you worry about disappointing them or losing them due to what you say. A therapist cannot be impartial if they’re fucking you and being affectionate with you all the time. You cannot learn how to navigate a healthy sex life focused on mutual pleasure when you are paying someone who is incentivized to pretend to enjoy the sex so that you keep booking sessions with them.

Paying for sex is a leisure activity. It’s not a necessity and it’s not a cure for loneliness. That being said, like anything people do for pleasure, there can be stress relief and satisfaction as a result of sleeping with a sex worker. People do it because it’s a release and they enjoy it. It’s not healing people, but it also isn’t damaging them.

Some people who pay for sex will be misogynists who use paying for sex as an excuse to dehumanize the women they sleep with, and others will be paying men for sex because of a deep shame about their sexuality and a need to keep their proclivities discreet. Those scenarios aren’t healthy or ideal – they’re also notably not created by paying for sex, while instead seeking out prostitutes is used as the coping mechanism. A misogynist who can’t find any sex workers who will meet him won’t suddenly be cured of his misogyny and a closeted gay man won’t hate himself less if there are no men for him to pay for sex.

When we come across clients who clearly have issues, the goal is usually just to get through the interaction without being harmed and whilst keeping our payment. I’ll say whatever I need to say to keep my client happy so that the risk is as low as possible of him getting upset or aggressive, particularly if he seems unstable. I’ve offered advice to them many times, sometimes giving my actual thoughts but usually just telling them what I think they want to hear just as I tell them the position I think they want when they ask me what my favourite sex position is. After all of that, they’ve maybe de-stressed, but they haven’t resolved any deep-seated issues.

A sex worker isn’t a therapist that you fuck. They’re a person you pay for sex, and if you feel that you need therapy then you should see a real therapist.

Using sex workers to address mental health issues places an unfair burden on an already struggling and marginalized population of people. Regardless of whether having sex can help lonely clients to address their intimacy issues, sex workers are not generally trained therapists and cannot be expected to provide that sort of care.