A space where I can talk openly about sex work, without being a client-facing account.
The first time I heard about the existence of punter forums was when I started working in a brothel and the manager told me he checked the forums regularly to get an idea about potential complaints from sex workers in his properties.
As soon as I found out about the forums, reading them became an obsession.
Every now and again, a client comes along who is abnormally wealthy and who wants to spend some money buying sex. Rinse them of all they’ve got or play at Pretty Woman for a while.
It’s easy for sex workers to get stuck in a mental loop with hook-ups, viewing them as if they’re clients and acting the same as they would for paid sex which only reinforces these learned behaviours.
Subscriber-only: Once you’ve been selling sex for a while, you amass a lot of strange stories. Depending on how precarious of a situation you’re in, they might skew towards weird and horrifying or weird and funny.
While there is much discussion about the objectifying ways many men view women, often blamed on them watching or meeting with sex workers, there is far less about the way selling sex can change how sex workers view men (who are the bulk of our clientele).
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.
The juxtaposition between being hungry and unsure where you’ll sleep that night and spending an evening in a lavish hotel room with room service is an extreme one. Finding sugar daddies, when I first began selling sex, caused me to experience that first-hand…
You might have heard a story before about a client seeing a sex worker after his wife has died who looks similar to her, and I’ve seen those kinds of situations played up as heart-warming and sweet. I have had a couple of clients who’ve told me I look like a partner they lost, mostly early in my time selling sex, but most of the people I’m told I look like aren’t quite so charming…
I hear “I hate men” fairly frequently, within certain feminist communities. I once said it often. To be completely honest, I think what opened my eyes to how hating men is useless bigotry was actually selling sex.
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,Continue reading “Desirability and Insecurity”
Jack Talks About Sex Work