So you’ve met a hooker…

Tags

discrimination, friends and family, Love, mother blame, personal stories, rants, Relationships, safe sex, sex industry, Sex Work, stigma, whore shame

So you’ve met a sex worker. Maybe someone has recently “come out” to you, maybe you met a sex worker at a party, maybe a friend or lover has just told you about their sex work or maybe you’re a social worker and one of your clients is a sex worker. You might not be sure how to react, you might have some questions or concerns or you might not have an issue and want to let the person know. Maybe you have seen the Shit they say to sex workers video and the Shit they say to strippers video and you don’t want to be a cliché. This post will help guide you through those first few moments after someone tells you they are a sex worker. Take note because you never know when you are talking to a hooker.

First of all, stay calm. If the idea of sex work shocks, excites or upsets you, just relax. Don’t say something dumb in the heat of the moment. Give yourself a moment to compose yourself and  consider this post before you open your mouth. If you are not at all shocked or concerned either way, then feel free to act normally.

Take a moment now to think about every stereo type you can imagine relating to sex workers. Think of the pretty woman, and the bodies in dumpsters on Law and Order, of high-class call girls, and desperate drug dependant street workers, about sex slaves, pimps and dangerous clients about sex workers childhoods, their reasons for working, their lifestyle. Every stereotypical image you can think of and then some.

I want you to understand that every single time we tell someone that we are a sex worker, we do so knowing the person we tell may have one or all of these assumptions about sex workers. When we tell someone we are a sex worker we risk having  them instantly apply and compare any or all of those stereotypes to us. Imagine how we might feel when we disclose our job to you, or anyone. If its hard for you, it’s hard for us.

Its important that we see that our job doesn’t change anything for you. That you don’t presume anything about us just because we are sex workers. That you don’t judge us. If you want to respond in ways that demonstrate this, here are some hints from my personal perspective:

1. Just because I tell you about my job, doesn’t mean I have told everyone else. Please don’t parade me around the party expecting me to play the role of happy hooker for the amusement of all your friends.

2. Our job is not inherently violent, it is not an accepted part of our job, and many of us work our entire careers without experiencing workplace violence. Some of us have experienced violence at work, but it’s polite to wait for appropriate safe and supportive spaces before bringing up sensitive past events. What I’m trying to say is when I tell you I am a sex worker, don’t let the first or second or even third question be ‘so, how often do you get hit’.

3. Sex work doesn’t always include penis and vagina penetration. Sex work can be anythingand everything related to sex. Massage with a happy ending, stripping, bondage and discipline services or any number of things. Dont presume you know about the service I provide unless I tell you.

4. Don’t presume anything about my sexuality, my sexual boundaries, my sex drive or my sexual preferences. The sex I do for work is work and is not necessarily related to the sex I do for pleasure. Me being a sex worker doesn’t preclude me from also being in a monogamous relationship, or being celibate, or dating, or being fussy, or being promiscuous or being gay, or being sexually adventurous or being shy in the bedroom. All on my own terms. And just because I sell sex at work, doesn’t mean I’m always working or that I will sell it outside of work, and it doesn’t mean I’ll fuck you. But it doesn’t mean I wont either.

5. No it’s not OK to ask me if I was abused as a child, If my dad loved me, if I have any self-esteem, or what I spend my money on. All I did is tell what job I do, not ask for a psychological/financial assessment. My relationship with my parents is hardly relevant, I can bore you with my childhood stories some other time when we all start talking about childhood and daddy issues. My bills and finances are none of your business and my personal stuff is my personal stuff. Right now I’m trying to tell you about my job, and I am judging your reaction. These questions show me you are looking for reasons and needing an explanation or excuse. Your questions may seem innocent and harmless but have a look at your assumptions behind them or  at the  least remember the stereotypes that i deal with and  understand how it makes me feel when you respond to my disclosure with questions like that.

6. If you have known other sex workers, feel free to tell me about it, particularly if you hold those sex workers in high regard. I don’t need to hear about your ex who was a hooker who you hate or about some hooker you saw in a movie who was hot. Dont bunch us together or pretend you know anything about me just because you once knew a hooker. If you are telling me about another sex worker you know, make sure its because it is ether relevant to the conversation in some other way or because you are trying to reassure me that my job is no issue and I am welcome in your group. But don’t break someone’s confidentiality. Dont point out the other hooker at the party or tell me that Dave’s girlfriend is a stripper. That’s not cool and you just made me wish I never told you.

7. Dont feel sorry for me, ask me about other jobs I could be doing, ask me what my goals are in life, offer to help me with a resume or lecture me about my future. If I need help in career planning or employment pathways I will ask. If, by the way, I do want to consider other options outside the sex industry, dont presume it’s because I hate the sex industry and am ready to repent.

8. Dont tell me if you think its hot that I’m a hooker or I’ll charge you by the hour. Its my job, I’m not at work. If you were talking to me as a hooker, you’d be paying me by the hour.  In my personal life I like people who like me even when I’m not a hooker.

9. Dont compare me to other sex workers, either positively or negatively. You don’t make me feel good by telling me I’m smarter than other hookers, or that at least I don’t work off the street. You might think you are giving me a compliment, but it’s very backhanded. Not to mention, what if I do work from the street, or have worked from the street. Your judgements are showing again.

10. Dont ask me about the intricacies of my work unless its necessary or I give you permission to ask. It’s like a doctor doesn’t want to start looking at everyone’s skin irritations and swollen glands when they are at a BBQ. Also when you ask me if my clients are gross or dirty, or if I kiss, or how often I get tested, or how many clients i fuck in a shift, I know your making those judgements about me. Why else do you want to know about the attractiveness of my clients or how many of them I have sex with? You’re being grossed out and it’s offensive.

11. Dont tell me you couldn’t do it. Yes you could, you just choose not too. I’m not superhuman, I wasnt born with a whore gene. I find it insulting when someone thinks there is something inherently different about me. I would rather not work as a plumber cleaning shitty sewage pipes, but I COULD do it. Obviously.

Now, obviously there will be times when some of these questions feel relevent to you. For example if you are in a sexual monogamous relationship with someone, their sexual practices at work, especially their safe sex practices, may be important to you. I am not saying you have no rights to ask those questions, I am saying it’s probably not a good time to ask those questions at the time of disclosure. I am suggesting that you listen, trust, show your non judgement first. Then at a different time when you have had time to consider what you really need to know and for what reasons you can have that conversation. Be clear though, that your insecurities or concerns or lack of awareness are usually your issues. We may be willing to help you work through them, but it’s important you own it.

If you want to ensure that people feel comfortable and safe enough around you to disclose their sex work status, or share stories or information about their work, there are some things you can do to help make that more possible.

1. When you hear stories about sex workers anywhere ever, speak up! Show your support. You never know who around you might do or might have done sex work. Maybe it’s them telling you the story, testing the waters, checking your reaction before telling you about their own sex work.

2. When someone discloses let them know that you are cool about their job and then follow their lead. How you do this will depend on your relationship if you just met someone at a party  “ok, cool, im a teacher/nurse/student/etc” should do the trick. If its your partner “ok, thanks for telling me, i love you/ I really like you/ I support you/etc” and then let them make the next move. If you don’t get all your questions answered right then and there, it’s ok. By providing a safe space you are increasing the likelihood of getting the information you want.

3. Try saying something positive. Like “it’s great you have a job that fits around your studying/parenting/other interests or responsibilities” and just see what they say. You are all of a sudden giving us permission to talk about our job both the positive and the negative. You have shown us in one sentence that you hold no judgements. In fact I really really recommend you try saying this to someone when they tell you they are a sex worker. Let me know how it goes.

Of course all of this only applies to those that have any desire to have the person  in their life in any capacity in the future and for those who want the person disclosing to feel safe in their presence and those who wish to behave appropriately and respectfully. You may have some concerns or some feelings about the issue and that is ok, you may even be unsure about your feelings. But there is plenty of time  to work through any whorephobia you may have lurking later. If you are willing.

However if you have a big problem with sex work or sex workers and you have a severe reaction to the disclosure it might be best if you quietly leave the room without making a scene. Try to say as little as possible so as to not incriminate yourself any further. I just told you what my job is, not that I’m about to murder someone. I don’t need to explain myself. I don’t need your permission. I don’t need your judgement. I have heard  it all before and I was expecting this. If you stick around and show me how you really feel either purposefully or inadvertently,  I will react in one of two ways 1. I’ll answer your questions say what you need to hear, respond in the ways i need to get your approval and make it stop  or I’ll defend myself, stand my ground, put you in your place. And you don’t want to be  put in your place by an angry hooker. for real.

After all of this, if your still looking for something to say let me suggest “can I get you a drink?”

The many wigs of a whore

Tags

clients, discrimination, escort, friends and family, Love, money, mother blame, parenting, personal stories, sex industry, Sex Work, single mothers, south australia, stigma, the boss, whore shame

I was pretty keen to return to sex work after doing the dutiful wife thing for a while. During my semi retirement from the sex industry I had found other work and done some study. I did enjoy my ‘straight job’ but as soon as I separated from my children’s father I was planning my return to sex work.

I missed the money and the flexibility of sex work. Obviously. But it was more than that. I missed hanging out with other sex workers, I missed providing indulgent pleasure, I missed the compliments, I missed the feeling of being my own boss, even when I was working for someone else there is power in knowing you are (or your service is) the ‘product’. And Ofcourse I missed playing dress ups! Wigs, lingerie, costumes, sexy shoes, red lipstick, pretty nails… the best excuse for a usually plain looking busy single mum to indulge my girly side!

Besides stopping sex work was never my idea in the first place so I had  no doubts about returning.

But things had changed since the last time I worked. I’m mother now. I had to rethink my happy hooker image this time round. So for the first time I went into the hooker closet where I stayed for a long time. I wanted to protect my children from the stigma that my job carries, and I needed to protect our family from the discrimination that we might have otherwise faced. Through sheer determination my separation with the father had been fairly painless, there had been no custody battles and I certainly didn’t want to jeopardise that. Not to mention, sex work is STILL ILLEGAL in South Australia! I didn’t want to make our family vulnerable to attacks from any of the possibilities I had considered or the ones I hadn’t. So I invested in a wig.

I reduced my hours at my straight job, took my wig and started working at a very small escort agency. Originally I only kept my straight job as a cover so my friends, family and the whole world wouldn’t find out my dirty little secret but it turned out I really enjoyed the variety of the different roles I had or the different hats I wore in my day-to-day life. I was a stay at home mum on some days, I had a respectable day job on some days, made wads of cash on other days and, with my kids spending every second weekend at their dads, I had a chance to act my age and spend my wads of cash on the occasional night out on the town. I even kept up with a little bit of study throughout it all, it kept me busy between bookings.

And busy I was. The escort agency I worked at was very small with not many staff. I mainly worked  during the day sitting alone with the receptionist while she worked the phones trying to secure bookings. When she got one the owner/driver would drive me to my booking and bring me back to the office to wait for the next one. Day business for escorting was pretty quiet and that was fine for me because it meant I was the only worker on shift. But it also meant I was pretty much the only one making money.  Businesses need more than one worker to make a profit. So when the receptionist left, the owner decided not to replace her.

Fine by me, I started answering the phones. I could do a better job of selling myself anyway, plus this way I get all the day bookings PLUS the receptionists cut!

Now here is where I let you client types in on a little secret. I know many trade secrets, most of which I will never tell.  But some are harmless and make for a good story.

I’m sure this will not come as a surprise to those experienced punters, but many sex industry businesses find very creative ways of marketing the workers they have available to potential clients. While mostly it’s just a case of finding enticing ways to describe the workers using rose-tinted glosses and sexy adjectives, there are some businesses that will take it further. Everything from exaggerated measurements and optimistic age ranges to completely made up characters are used in an attempt to get a bite from potential clients. Some places are worse for this than others, I once worked at an agency that had standard adds running daily in the local paper that read “Eva Italian brunette lingerie model” or “Candi the blonde beach babe” and when a client called up looking for Eva or Candi the agency would send out any blonde or any brunette available. And if there is no blonde to play the part of Candi, no problems, we have wigs.

A common trick is to ask the caller what kind of worker they were looking for. If they tell you they want a mature redhead – Hey Presto!  That’s what we invent.

And so with only one worker (me) answering phones and doing bookings I quickly adapted to this sales technique. I had 2 different wigs, 3 different names (4 if you include the receptionists name) and a couple of different life stories.

I was Nikki the 21-year-old bubbly blonde, busty and cute

I was Bridget the brunette in her early twenties with the hourglass figure

I was Melissa who was 27 with a platinum bob and long legs.

And I could pass for all three descriptions easily. I enjoyed playing the game, it amused me. As a single mum I already had so many different hats, and now one of them was wearing a bunch of different wigs.

Pimping out my three characters worked well for a while, they all got repeat business and we all made money. And  then the inevitable happened. One of Nikki’s clients wanted a booking with Bridget. And he was quite persistent.

Well I had felt pretty clever up until then, but the gig was up.  I was a good mattress actress but I couldn’t pull that one-off (so to speak). The client was disappointed to learn that both Bridget and Melissa had run off into the sunset together never to return, preventing him from ever meeting either of them.

Not long after, I took Nikki off the market and went looking for greener pastures.

Mother and a Whore

Tags

discrimination, feminism, friends and family, Love, mother blame, parenting, personal stories, rants, Relationships, Sex Work, single mothers, stigma, whore shame

I also wanted to title this post:  Wont somebody think of the children!!

There will sometimes come a time in a persons life when they fall in love and ‘settle down’. And I quickly realised that for a lot of people ‘settle down’ means I am expected to stop sex work and find something else to do to make money and fill my time. So when I met and started dating  Jack I knew it was just a matter of time before he voiced a problem with my job. Things got serious and we moved in together and sure enough it wasn’t long before Jack told me that he loved me so much that I had to find a new job. I had been through this before and so I pretty much gave in to his insecurities straight away. I stopped sex work and started applying for ‘straight work’.

Skipping through the long and not very interesting story, Jack and I had babies, fell out of love and separated.  I immediately went straight back to sex work. It was a choice. Yes it was a choice made by a single mother, but it was my choice just the same. I reduced the hours I was working in my ‘straight job’ and started back working for a local escort agency while my kids were either at school, childcare or at their fathers. Instantly I felt the judgemental double sting of mother blaming joined with whore shaming. Those who always knew and supported my choice to do sex work, had a different opinion now that I was a mother. There are people who believe that being a sex worker automatically makes me a bad mother. Maybe even the readers of this blog have questions. So in order to continue telling you my stories I thought I should get these questions out of the way – upfront.

What will you tell your child?

How would you feel if your daughter turned out to be a hooker?

What happens when your son finds out you fuck for money?

What will their friends think of them at school?

Im going to answer these questions here and now, once and for all, in response to all those well meaning people who seem to struggle to get their head around me, my work, my relationships, and my family. I may follow this post up with answers to other popular questions such as “Is there a difference between sex work and ‘real sex’”  “how can you ask me to be faithful when you’re fucking all those other men?” “do you have any self respect?” and my favourite usually asked at completely inappropriate social functions…..“will you fuck me if I pay you for it? What about your friend?”.

But for now im going to start with the ones that I find most offensive, and that’s the ones that involve my motherhood.

What will I tell my child?

I, like other working mums, tell my child age appropriate information that describes what mum does for a job. Unfortunately, I have to be careful, because I don’t want my little tacker running off to school ruining his social calendar for his entire school life because he told Tommy who told his mum that his best friend’s mum is a hooker. So I choose my words carefully. Mum works at a massage centre. At a young age they don’t know enough about the world to say much more than that anyway.  When they get a little bit older and the conversation comes up or when they ask, I might say something more like: mum gives sexy massages. Over the years each time the topic comes up I will tell them a little bit more. After all I don’t see this as any different to what I vet might say… “I fix animals when they are sick” The vet doesn’t say to her 4 year old that sometimes she has remove a uterus or cut off testicles or give lethal injections to cute kittens etc. There is no need for that child to know the finer details yet, but as they get older, they will be given more information. No different to my plan, except of course I have to deal with the fact everyone else thinks im a bad person. So at some point I have what I see as a harder discussion. Those are the discussions about what everyone else thinks of my job. These are discussions that are hard and hurtful to my family.

How would I feel if my daughter became a hooker?

I hope my children grow up to be happy, healthy and respectful adults. That’s all I wish for them. I know for a fact that being a hooker doesn’t mean you can’t be happy, healthy and respectful. However I do know that everyone else’s attitudes to sex work can create barriers to a sex worker being happy. But I feel those are my children’s choices to make. If being a hooker made my daughter or son happy, I would not have any concerns. What would hurt my son or daughter and our family, all sex workers and their families, is the attitude everyone else has to sex work and sex workers.

What happens when my son finds out I fuck for money?

To be honest I can’t imagine my children using those words with me. I do expect there will be some words about my job thrown at me during different phases of rebellion as I imagine most parents deal with..…even non whores. If I try to be honest with them, my children will grow up respecting me and sex workers. It is possible that the attitudes of other people may encourage resentment in my kids towards me or my work, but if that ever happens I am confident that once they move through the rebellion phase they will again see that my job was a positive thing for our family, that it was just a job and that the rest of the world is unfair in its discrimination of me and my work.

What will their friends think of them at school?

This is an area that I have no control over. It is an area that I have the most sadness about and the area I wish my kids didn’t have to deal with. However I don’t see other people’s attitudes as my fault. My kids have never suffered because of my work, to the contrary, they have a happy, healthy respectful mum who has a well paying flexible job that allows me to be the sort of mother I always wanted to be. In my own way I try to educate people to see sex work as work, nothing more or less than a job. Once again I see other people’s stigma and discrimination about sex workers as the only innate problem of my work. It all comes down to what other people think. It means I have to have conversations with my kids about being careful about who exactly they say what to and about other people’s bad attitude. I might even have to teach them to lie so they can protect themselves from your stigma.

It is because of other people’s ignorance that my children may suffer. Not because I am a sex worker.

You feel sorry for my kids? Do something about it and examine your own discriminatory attitudes.