The line between financial dependency while dating and sex work is blurred from the moment you ask the question: what if I stopped having sex with my partner?
It is clear-cut for me to say that someone who exchanges sex for money or resources is a sex worker. There are boundaries around the transaction. Both parties agree on what is being purchased. Laws are built to define it as prostitution, ultimately forcing most people who sell sex to understand themselves as part of the whore class regardless of the language they most prefer to discuss it.
Romantic relationships, particularly when legally sanctioned through marriage, create conditions that obscure the nature of transactional sex which may occur within them. Boundaries are less clear, couples disagree on the ties between financial and sexual expectations in their partnerships, and desire suddenly becomes an important factor in drawing distinctions between prostitution and love-making.
For as long as the financially dependent partner doesn’t think about what might happen if their sex life dried up, they can follow their own libido and say yes or no without fear. Once the question is asked as to whether the relationship (and the money that comes with it) would endure without sex, the pressure begins to build. How many times can they say no before money stops being given? What impact does it have on your choices to have a financial motivation to agree to sex?
People who are otherwise completely uninvolved with discussions around sex work will openly say that they see certain attitudes around dating as prostitution-adjacent, as will feminists who are more interested in the broader conversation. You might have heard straight people arguing about whether women owe men sex if their dinner is paid for on a date, followed by feminists of all sexualities pointing out how manipulative it is to insist a woman has a moral duty to fuck any man who decides to spend money on her – a decision she has no say in, if he makes a point of reaching for the check.
Those with money can extract sex from their partners this way without concern for the transactional nature of the relationship; the only reason they don’t pay sex workers instead is that they want more control. By paying for gifts rather than paying directly, they can keep whoever they’re sleeping with from achieving true independence. Whorephobia they express is either performative or based on disgust over perceived STI risk from non-exclusivity. We continue to see this in relationships far more serious than the casual dating which is the focus of conversations around hooker mentality and transactional sex.
Rich men create institutions to legitimize the control they seek over women, and one of the more intimate and long-term ways of locking a woman into lifetime servitude is marriage. Exchanging money for sex is encouraged through descriptions of wifely and husbandly duties which slot each partner into gender-essentialist roles. Religious leaders introduce the idea that a failure to provide sex to keep a breadwinning husband happy is also a failure to live in accordance with the word of god(s).
Make no mistake, the average rich person who seeks a less wealthy spouse is entirely aware of the dynamic they are creating. It is why they spend the courting phase offering designer clothes or trips away – things they know will not allow their partner to amass wealth that they could use to live independently. Rent or mortgage payment made for shared housing will often stay in the wealthy partner’s name alone, supposedly because they have the better credit and financial standing to landlords or banks, but the end result is that their partner cannot prove a rental history if they want to move out.
While creating this lifestyle and luring a poorer partner in, sex might still be spontaneous and fun. Being spoiled with luxuries is exhilarating. It can be a turn-on. Combine that with the sense of relief that comes with being certain of where your next meals are coming from and you’ve made ideal conditions for sexual intimacy. This only lasts for as long as the partner who is gradually becoming more dependent has not fully fallen into the trap. Once they are there, their ability to leave is curtailed even if they open their eyes to what has occured.
The realization might come from a night when a husband pesters his wife for sex despite her headache and brings up his own aches and pains from a long work day of providing for her. A teen could notice when she’s a few weeks into recovery from childbirth and the father insists on fucking her despite the open wound inside that is prone to infection, only to delay buying necessities for their baby until she gives in weeks later. The question “what are you going to give me in return?” might spark recognition in a man whose boyfriend has only ever kept him from spiralling into further debt when their sex life is good. Whatever the catalyst, whatever denials are made later, awareness cannot be neatly supressed once gained.
Sex that might have been fun before becomes a chore when you know that you’d be destitute if you didn’t consent.
Not every case where one sexual partner is substantially wealthier will include this sort of intent to leverage this for sex, nor will the wealthier partner always be rich at all. Pressure can be applied accidentally. Scenarios where money and sex are exchanged can involve people of the same low socio-economic class, as long as the living situation of one is more precarious than another, and working class people are unlikely to realize the financial power they can wield.
A couple might have a perfectly equal relationship until they develop this power dynamic years in, when one loses their job or inherits money from a relative. They might have this skew from the start and not have concerns. Two or more people may care for each other and have a mutually pleasurable sex life without any of them ever thinking about whether they would break up if sex was no longer a feature of their relationship… or whether their money would leave with them.
It is these scenarios where a partner is oblivious to the pressure that could be placed on their partner for sex that are some of the most uncomfortable to talk about. Acknowledging the dynamic at all can result in extreme defensiveness because the coercion inherent in agreeing to sex purely for resources can make them feel like a rapist for being a financial provider. In the same way I argue vehemently that clients paying for sex does not automatically qualify as rape, I argue the same for these wealth gap relationships on a base level, and so I hope that anyone who has ended up in this role can push past that defensiveness to consider the topic earnestly. We are all coerced by capitalism into forms of labour, domestic or commercial, and we must understand our interpersonal relationships with that context as their background.
A person who works to provide for a disabled partner who cannot work, who is unable to stay employed/is under-employed due to discrimination, or who is caring for children, is likely to feel pressured to remain working at a job they would otherwise not tolerate. I am sympathetic to how upsetting this can be and the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from long shifts. Sex may not feel like so much to ask for in comparison to the hours they spend doing something that exhausts them. What these workers must understand is that they are still the ones with the power to decide whether money comes in and how it is distributed. An employable person can obtain their money through a much wider range of sources than someone who relies solely on their partner, and it is that narrowing of options which can turn previously loving interactions into trauma.
Loving your partner does not take away the discomfort of fucking through a migraine to preserve your access to housing. The jaw pain from giving oral for an hour isn’t satisfying when it builds to a backdrop of irritation that this is the price of your education, which your partner pays for. The sex feels more like work as the connection between it and the funds you are given grows stronger, both materially and in the mind of the person earning a lower lower income.
Sickness is one of the more common causes for people to re-evaluate the transactional nature of their relationships. Men end their marriages when their wives get seriously ill roughly six times more often than women do the reverse. I cannot help but think of this fact every time I am paid for sex by a client who is cheating on his sick spouse or has recently left them, mentally reviewing the data as I dissociate through the pre-sex conversation where he tells me he has sexual needs that were unmet. By the time we finish, I am thinking about how the money he has spent seeing me has directly paid for the sex his partner is too sick to want. I wonder what his partner is going without as a result. On forums, I find clients who could be these same men stating that hiring sex workers is a frugal act compared to the cost of supporting a stay-at-home partner.
I know that if I became ill enough to lose my sex drive while reliant on a partner, I would choose to sell sex to other people before I would push myself to provide maintenance sex for the survival of the relationship. Of course I know that I feel this way because I already have a history of selling sex. Better to be paid for it in clear amounts and not tangle my romantic feelings with those I have about wage labour. Resentment would burn away any fondness I had left.
Wealth gap dating or the sharing of finances whilst only one partner works is not always doomed to fail because of this, nor is it restricted to only being ethical if both partners could easily afford a total separation. We tackle the problem by asking the question and working through any entitlement a partner might feel.
What would happen if you said no to sex every time you wanted to? What if your partner did, and what if they were uninterested in sex most of the time? Even if you and your partner don’t want to say no now, there may come a time that you will, and it’s a conversation you should have before you’re in the situation. Transactional sex should be something you decide to engage in without pressure, not a decision you’re led to without time to consider. Your client should be able to admit what it is.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 