A cancellation from a sex worker is a minor inconvenience to a client. The non-essential service they were seeking is denied to them, they keep their money, and they can book another sex worker or forego seeing one without any significant consequences. If a client cancels on a sex worker, that cancellation may be the difference between being able to afford food or rent.
Clients cancel on me semi-frequently. There are times I get a text a few hours before a booking I didn’t want to go to, when the need for money isn’t urgent. Then there are times like this week, when a client cancelled on me while my bank account is in an overdraft I don’t have and my credit card is maxxed out. Unlike in my teens, I’m in a living situation where I have friends who will cover the cost of food when I’m in this state and I have a second job which will pay me before rent is due, but it’s still nightmarish.
If the client who cancelled on me hadn’t booked out my time, and I’d kept seeking another instead, maybe I’d have been able to get another in time to meet my minimum debt repayment or cover my electric and gas bill.
Any time a client cancels on me, they treat it like it’s no big deal because it isn’t to them. I get a text telling me that they’ve got a “family emergency” or that they’re sick, claims I know are lies, and I have no choice but to take it and agree we can reschedule because I can’t afford to be mean. If they book me in the future, I have to hold down my rage over the position they put me in because if I piss them off and they stop paying me for sex then I’ll be in an even worse situation and this time it’ll be my own fault.
Men will jump from excuses that don’t have an expiration date right into rescheduling, as if they know when they’ll be well again, or they’ll cancel and never respond to my text about rearranging a time. It’s hard to work out which ones are cancelling because they got cold feet, which are cancelling because they can’t justify they cost right now, and which ones are out of Viagra and don’t want to see a sex worker on a day they can’t get it up.
Resenting them is a reflex, knowing I can’t even afford to leave a booking when I’m actively uncomfortable, let alone to skip out on one because of something as petty to me as a lack of arousal. It puts our experiences into sharp contrast in my mind.
I’ll happily complain about seeing clients and whine to friends about how I don’t want to go to a booking I’ve made, but the second it’s cancelled I have far greater issues. Unlike a cancelled shift in a traditional job where the issue of pay will become apparent on payday at the end of the month, sex work is usually done in a more immediate way. Survival sex work for basic needs is the most direct – outside of that there are still many of us who are falling into worse debt and struggle from missing out on even one booking.
Once I had the luxury of being able to refuse a booking when I was in a bad mood or the jitters took me over too strongly. Circumstances change. Throughout those ups and downs where I struggle less or more for money, a client’s power to cancel remains the same. Clients of sex workers can waste our time and walk away at any moment because of the nature of the power dynamic that comes with the transaction.
Despite knowing better than to do so, I’ve had to go to outcalls without any deposit and while paying for my own transport to get there, because I needed the money so badly. Sometimes, the client stops texting back whilst I’m on the train or in an Uber, never gives me the rest of the address beyond the postcode or doesn’t answer the door of the address he did give, and my debt is increased by however much my travel cost me. A couple of humiliating times, I had to call a friend to beg for the money to get home.
There is no way for me to maintain a flow of clients and charge a deposit for bookings; I don’t have a large enough client pool for that to be viable. Brothels are illegal and the underground nature of them makes it incredibly difficult to find any that would be willing to take on a transmasculine person, if they even exist, so I’m stuck seeking my own clients and desperately hoping they show up at the hotel or the address I’m supposed to meet them at.
Unless a significant legal change happens soon, the recession is only going to make these problems worse. Clients will cancel more often because they can’t justify the cost of seeing me, after less of them even book in the first place. I’ll have to take bigger risks, travelling to a location where without being paid a deposit in the hopes that a client shows up so I can pay my bills.
I find myself envious of sex workers who talk about taking deposits, unsure whether it’s true that they do or whether it’s just the best practice they’re trying to encourage on their client-facing accounts by acting like it’s normal, and I try so hard to be happy for them instead of bitter.
Right now, one client cancellation is the difference between being able to cover my bills and minimum debt repayments and spiralling further into financial ruin. My clients have no idea about this, because I lie through my teeth about being a student or selling sex as a fun side-gig to my full-time career that changes each time I tell one of them about it. They don’t know, so it’s hard to even be angry with them. A cancellation seems like it would only be a minor inconvenience, when in reality it turns my entire week or month upside-down.
Part of me wishes that clients were more aware of the turmoil they cause when they call off a booking. Unfortunately, I know that if they were all aware then they’d be more likely to use the desperation as leverage than to be more considerate. I already get clients offering higher amounts of money for riskier sex acts, or insisting that they’ll book me consistently if I allow them to cross certain boundaries. Certain clients fuck you over much worse if they smell financial desperation on you, for their satisfaction.
A client cancelled on me earlier this week. Another cancelled today. They’re going about the rest of their days and weeks without thinking about me any further and I’m desperately trying to work out how I’ll find another client on short notice and hating them for putting me in this position.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 