After Client Aftercare

People who sell sex each have different routines for after they’ve seen a client. These routines vary based on the context, like whether they’re selling sex in a brothel environment with other workers to spend time with between clients or they’re going on an outcall at a hotel and returning to an empty flat. Some don’t have them at all.

There are times after seeing an easy client that I am filled with excitement and energy, or times a client crosses a boundary and assaults me and I spiral into an episode, which are outliers. They need their own unique types of aftercare.

My average experience after seeing a client is more… subdued.

After I see a client, my first and most pressing need is usually to take a shower. I feel gross. I’ve got someone else’s spit drying on me at minimum (and often other fluids). These days, I’ve usually taken public transport home after a quick wipe down in the client’s bathroom and getting dressed again, so I have an itch to properly wash myself. I get home and strip off the uncomfortable but somewhat fashionable outfit I wore out, dropping it onto the floor of my bedroom, scrub myself in a hot shower, and put on my comfiest clothes.

My next need is to decompress. If I’m particularly frustrated by something the client said or did, I’ll text a friend or another sex worker for someone to complain before I’ve made it all the way home. Other times I’ll comment something about the booking casually to my nearest housemate, who indulges me. When I don’t want to share with one of them, I’ll write, or I’ll watch a film and lose myself in it as a distraction. Putting on an act that I’m enjoying sex is tiring and it takes a while for me to get back into my own skin, from piloting the robot version of myself that plays a moaning track on a loop and calculates what the client would find it most arousing for me to say.

I get cosy in a part of my house until I fully feel like myself again. Despite how many years have gone by since I became aware of my own internalized whorephobia, I still feel like people can see that I’m a prostitute just by looking at me, in the period right after a booking. While it’s still fresh and I’m thinking about it, I imagine other people can see into my head and view the client I just slept with who I was bored or mildly disgusted by. It makes me feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. I feel like they’ll view me as tainted by it.

There’s no shame in me selling sex, and I know that, but in the moments after I’ve just seen a client I sometimes can’t stop myself from thinking about the way the outside world views me. My close friends who aren’t sex workers won’t ever fully get it, I don’t think, and so being seen by them afterwards makes me worry. I don’t go into detail, don’t discuss the depths of my emotions about it, because what if they react negatively?

After I relax and collect my thoughts, I count my money again. I’ve always done so already, before I slept with the client, shoving it into a pocket, and I’ve checked it on my way home, but this time I properly enjoy it. I mentally re-plan my finances, adding the money in my hands to what’s in my account, and let the stress I doubtlessly had over my bills that month melt away. I do some arithmetic on how many more clients I’ll need to see that month, if any, to make all the money I need.

Unless I have something pressing to do outside my home, I’ll lounge around for most of the day, doing work on my laptop or playing a videogame. I’m gentle with myself. Seeing a client takes up most of my day, even if it’s only an hour long booking, because between the anxiety beforehand and the time to decompress afterwards, I’ve lost many hours either side of it. It’s beneficial for me to see more than one in quick succession, so that I only need to rest and recover once. I miss being able to see 5 or 6 or 7 clients in a day, when the feeling of fragility afterwards would be contained to a 24 hour period.

I use this kind of aftercare most of the time in place of my ideal, which is more effective yet not always viable.

What I want in the immediate aftermath of a booking is to be around other sex workers, insulated from stigma and judgement. I don’t feel fragile, no matter where a client had his cock even 10 minutes ago, because I know with certainty that none of them care. I get to bitch about the annoying little things a client did, like asking me what I do for a job and to which I wanted to reply I suck dick for a living. When I say my client kissed by swirling his tongue around like it was in a washing machine, they laugh with me instead of looking at me with pity as if I’m supposed to be traumatized by that. If I whine about how the client went down on me awkwardly for almost an hour, then expected me to act grateful as if it wasn’t a profoundly unarousing experience, they commiserate with me.

Sometimes my need for aftercare has been due to a client harming me. Far more frequently, I need it to insulate myself from the stigma which makes me feel alone and ashamed and far more resentful, than I otherwise would be, of an experience which is usually more on the side of annoying than traumatic. Being around other sex workers frees me from those feelings. I get to be mildly annoyed, then let it go, as I would in a world where sex workers weren’t the object of disdain.

I know a great number of people won’t believe that my reaction has the causes I attribute it to. Instead they’ll say that it’s a reaction to trauma, that every time I’m with a client it’s an assault from which I’m recovering. If that were true, why is it that I’m only upset and dissociated when I feel the weight of judgement on me and not when I’m around people who get it? Why is it that this aftercare works and I’m fine the next day, but that on occasions I have been assaulted the feeling sticks to me and is not so easily washed away?

Those who are insistent on not believing that the part of selling sex which causes me the most distress is the stigma; prove me wrong. Eradicate the stigma and let’s find out who’s right. Let’s see if I still need after client aftercare then.