When you’re getting paid for your appearance, it can leave you with the highest, most unwavering confidence. Or it can leave you feeling gutted, out of breath. Like you’ve been stranded for death in a ditch. The change comes quickly and isn’t immediately unnoticeable. Sex work stigma is a harsh reality of the job.
When your entire job is marketing your looks, your sex appeal, your desires, fantasies, your creativity and personality, and the utmost personal parts of yourself, what happens when it’s met with stigma and cruelty?
I’ve been a sex worker since October 2020, when I joined the online financial domination community. Almost immediately, I was hooked. My confidence instantly skyrocketed, my finances were better than they ever have been, and I felt like I finally found something that felt natural, exciting, and like I could express parts of myself I couldn’t before. By February 2021, I had already moved into my first apartment, quit my day job, and never looked back. Everyone in my immediate life knew what I was doing for a living now and they accepted and praised me for it.
The impact of sex work stigma on my relationships
I knew there was a stigma around sex work but never having experienced it firsthand at this point, I didn’t see how it could ever affect my personal life, especially if I knew how much I loved this work. How could someone else’s opinions about my job hurt me, if I knew it was coming from a place of ignorance?
I knew that I loved my job. It gave me more freedom, stability, and self-love than anything in my life ever had. The fellow sex workers and creators I had met were some of the kindest, most intelligent, and sweetest people that I had ever known.
I felt untouched by the dark cloud of stigma that surrounds the field. But what you logically know, and how you feel, can often start to contradict each other.
Last year, I matched with a guy on a dating app who, upon finding out exactly what I do for a living, suddenly changed his entire opinion of me.
His immediate response was, “If you want to be my girlfriend, you have to get a real job. You can quit this, take out a loan to support yourself while you go to school and get a degree.” In one conversation, he had decided that just because I was a sex worker, I was uneducated.
Sex work stigma makes people offensively bold
I’ve had other potential partners find out that I’m a sex worker… and then that’s all they see when they look at me. They begin to view me as a sex machine. Not a person, but something they can cum in and go as they please. They assume that just because I am in the industry, that automatically means I want to sleep with them.
Even recently, a classmate from high school contacted me and say that he was surprised to find out that I was such a slut. He then asked if I would pay him to make content for the supposed Onlyfans pages he wants to eventually create. For the first time, I was facing the harsh reality of the job.
Internalizing (and deconstructing) whorephobia and sex work stigma
Being in your early twenties and trying to figure out who you are is hard enough. You’re trying to meet new people and find your own little corner of the world. The difficulty of it all increases by a hundred percent when you have most of the world inserting their unwanted opinions and telling you who they think you are just because of what you do for a living.
Sex work went from being this constant source of joy and liberation for me to almost a dark secret I began to wish that I kept hidden. For a while, when someone would ask me what I did for a living, I found myself trying to justify my answer and correct their bias before they even put it on me.
I would say that I am a sex worker, specifically a financial dominatrix. But I’d quickly follow it up by including that I am also a writer that has published two poetry books. Like I was trying to prove myself. As if I was trying to prove that I am also creative, intelligent, and had more to offer. Almost as if I wanted to prove “I’m not like the others!”
Subconscious whorephobia
I did not realize that I was doing this. I was subconsciously adopting the beliefs of others that did not align with my own in an attempt to save face. By hiding what I did for a living, by always trying to justify it and separate myself from it, I was feeding into the idea that it’s not a “real” job.
I started viewing myself only as the negative insults that were thrown at me, instead of seeing myself for the entirety of who I am. So much time was focused on the anxiety and the fear of what others might think of me because of my job, that I stopped paying attention to why I fell in love with the work in the first place.
Rejecting shame and negativity, finding joy
I allowed the negative and ignorant opinions of people I barely knew and definitely did not care about to impact the way that I saw myself and how I viewed the job that I love so much. Now, I’m constantly trying to deconstruct that tired narrative that was placed upon me every single day.
Sex work is not something to be ashamed of. I am proud of what I do. I cherish the total freedom it has given me, the stability it brought into my life, the co-workers that became friends, and the unmatched confidence it provides.
Whenever someone asks what I do for a living, I do not hide away. I do not stutter. I say it, proudly.