Exposé: “I worked for a few months as a sex worker, and this is what I’ve learned.” – Part One: The Industry

*WARNING*

This post contains very graphic, sexual language and descriptions that may trigger any of you who have not healed from any kind of sexual or mental trauma related to it.

Please proceed with caution.

This is NOT MY PERSONAL STORY.

But yes, some people think I am a sex worker because I’m a woman who makes bank *insert eyeroll*

“Women can only make good money on their backs“, is what I am hearing. Way to objectify us, treat us as inferior, and a commodity.

Other idiots, think my job is so easy that anyone could do it. Okay, so go ahead and do it then and leave me the fk alone.

In the past that I have been called an escort in hiding because some guys in the past have also concluded that because I traveled a lot, stayed in hotels a lot, and made a lot of money, so I clearly had to be an escort and that calling myself a consultant, was just code for the fact that I was a sex worker. /sarcasm

Consultants by the way, DO travel a lot, and DO stay in hotels. So.. not sure what they were trying to prove there by triumphantly pointing out those facts to support their theory.

More recently, a stay at home mother on Instagram, told me it was “shady” that I wouldn’t reveal what I did (I only say “STEM Consultant”), and as a result, because I was so cagey about my profession, I clearly had to be a sex worker because I make way too much money, I work with all sorts of different departments/industries, I have meetings with executives, and I make way too much money.

So.. again. This is what consultants do. They work on various projects with different clients, and make a lot of money. I don’t know what else to say except that I couldn’t ever be an escort for two main reasons:

1. I am too lazy for that – do you know how much they spend on their own personal upkeep, including going to the gym (not happening here), eating certain a diet to stay fit, etc? This is not my destiny.
2. I am too independent and strong-minded for that – having to sit and talk to someone all day long I have absolutely no vested interest in, and pretend like I do, sounds like a special version of hell to me

I mean, Little Bun is a bit of a chatterbox, and some days I have to whisper to him that Mommy needs QUIET MOMMY time. So you can imagine my tolerance for pretending to be interested when I am not, is very low.

My only real question is:

If I were a man posting what I do, would you ever assume he was an escort?

I can answer that for you – No, you wouldn’t because you would assume he’s a business man, consultant and overall boss.

—-

On to the story.

I got all of the following with her permission because I posted something about how I was too lazy to ever consider becoming a Sugar Baby, or an escort, and how much work it was.

It sparked one of the most interesting discussions I have had in a long time.

I then asked for her permission to post her messages to me because it shows a completely different side that I wasn’t aware of before.

See, there’s the one side I am against – vilifying women in the sex industry and ignoring that the demand is clearly there from the men who do it, and then there’s the side I THOUGHT was a better option, which is that women should be able to do what they want with their bodies, and safely. Their choice, right? As long as they’re both consenting adults, what’s the harm?

Well, I certainly learned a lot more, and now I am far more cautious in saying this, but for the sake of the women.

To bring you all up to speed on terminology:

• Sugar Baby: Someone who takes money from a Sugar Daddy (usually just one), in exchange for company, perhaps sexual favours, etc. I liken it to a demimondaine as learned in this fascinating historically-based fiction The Paris Apartment. There are no set rates per se, and no client roster from what I know.
• Sugar Daddy: The one who pays for his Sugar Baby.
• Escort: More than just a streetwalker or prostitute, ‘escort’ denotes women (usually) who are very well-paid for their sex and company. I guess they can also be demimondaines in a way, but they do it more as a career, rather than a Sugar Baby who may have only one Sugar Daddy to funds her. Escorts have clients (?) and meet with them regularly if they have such an arrangement and it’s more business-like. They set rates by the hour, night, etc.
• Camming: Where you perform sexual favours or acts via a webcam that they pay for by the hour, act, etc.
• Sugaring: When you are in an arrangement of being a Sugar Baby
• Dox: When someone reveals the private identity of someone else who was trying to stay Anonymous as revenge.

Begin: What the industry is like

Note: All of the following are her words with some minor editing done to preserve her identity, or to spell out acronyms like “idk = I don’t know”. Anything I am adding or asking, is in bold, italics or in another colour completely so it’s clearly separated and I usually put “Ed” as in “Editor”.

My friend is in the sex industry and has done this, and I’ve had my own brief stint in it. It’s SO much work, holy shit.

So, my sugar babying was atypical because I had absolutely zero physical or sexual contact with any of my peeps. I met all of them on Seeking Arrangements. 

[Ed: This is a website I believe, for sugaring, like that Ashley Madison one for extramarital arrangements except this one is focused on sugaring.] 

I think I made about $2500 in a span of a couple months, which is decent considering there was no sexual contact. One guy even did my taxes for me (he wasn’t suspicious at all and was an accountant). But it was like being an on-call cute girl.

[Ed: I don’t even accept projects that require me to be on-call or carry a beeper of sorts. LOL…. that sounds like hell.]

You spent hours fixing your makeup and hair just to talk on Skype or whatever. I always used aliases as well, so no one knew my real name. It was actually pretty devastating sometimes, though, because you’d meet men who were just normal, heartbreakingly lonely persons who didn’t know how to reconnect after a divorce or something similar.

[Ed: This is something I observed as well in my reading and watching documentaries/shows. It seems like a chunk of them are really just nice guys who are lonely and have demanding jobs. Which makes me sad for them.]

My friend who is actually in the sex industry has made unbelievable amounts of money, but kind of regrets some of it because she has slept with some nasty people.

For her, meeting people was easy since she worked at a strip club. It was hard for me on seeking arrangements because 50% of guys are just bots and then 45% are looking for cheap prostitutes instead of an ongoing financial relationship. My friend said stripping was preferable to her because it’s literally way easier not having to pretend to care about someone for weeks on end.

Did these normal guys enjoy the experience of talking to you?

No. I think if anything that it tore them down more, mainly because they feel as if they’re just ATM machines and it teaches them that that’s all they’re worth. That’s actually why I only lasted a few months in the industry; it felt like I was actively destroying someone.

Either I was having to pretend I cared about someone just to use them for money, or they wanted me to be the “other woman” and were secretly married (which I couldn’t/didn’t get down with).

There were, of course, odd balls: rich young men wanting someone hot to sleep with without the effort of emotions (and could flash their dollars), rich old men who wanted arm candy for Berkshire Hathaway-styled events, etc.

But the niche I experienced were lonely, relatively well-off guys with daughters my age that were going through a rough divorce, and although they wanted sex (which they never got from me whoops), they actually just wanted to tell someone about their daughter’s first year at college or how work was stressful.

I don’t know. It seemed to me like the guys I knew worked in pretty isolated industries (self-employed CPAs, surgeons) so I think they truly lacked any intimacy of any sort.

This sounds all so sad.

Yeah, it’s pretty sad. It’s also interesting watching what the sex industry does to women. I 100% support women being their own damn people and doing whatever they want consensually, but I’ve seen the other side of it so it’s hard for me to be supportive.

What do you mean by that?

It turns people awful. That’s the nicest way to say it.

Obviously, that’s a really harsh statement to an incredibly broad population, so I should be more careful.Before anyone starts throwing stones, let me explain: I know plenty of women in the sex industry through my best friend, and I watched the sex industry obliterate every single one of them.

I’m being super vague here so give me a second to explain: So, a very broad and generalizing way to put it is that women who work in the sex industry work with some of the worst people in our society.

Doctors and lawyers all the way to gang members and rapists. So naturally, people in the sex industry tend to become extremely hardened and cold people internally, even if they don’t come across that way. They become emotionally closed off and even if they’re externally sweet and giving, they typically become consumed by self-preservation.

This results in a pretty stark personality change.

I also have seen almost every single woman in the sex industry get wrapped up into drugs of some sort at some point, which is pretty devastating. Thankfully, not everyone gets addicted.

But the part that bothers me most is that the majority of those in the sex industry were previous victims of sexual assault or rape, and they enter into this industry as an attempt to regain a sense of control and understanding of what has happened to them.

Except what they really need is therapy.

I 1000000% stand for women’s sexual empowerment, but I want to see TRUE empowerment that stems from their own desires, not from the trauma inflicted on them from men.

[Ed: I did consider this!]

I actually have come to know many women in the industry who began after being lured in—love-bombed by an attractive older man, given beautiful and expensive gifts, extraordinary international travel—at a barely-legal age, or sometimes even before they were legal as an (oftentimes very successful) grooming attempt.

Every 16-18-year-old wants to believe they know themselves and have life figured out, and this money gives them the confidence to do so. Unfortunately, that just isn’t the case, and developmentally people’s brains literally don’t finish forming until they’re 26-30.

[Ed: I can imagine this. I was a teen once, and very impressionable.]

So, you get these young and impressionable women (some still girls) who have whopping amounts of cash thrown at them by a charming older man who tells them they’re beautiful and how mature they are for their age, and they’re hooked.

They love the money.

The older man loves the money they bring in as “innocent” (air quotes used because they’ll 100% be marketed this way) barely 18-year olds, oftentimes thrown into cutesy school girl outfits with minimal makeup to make them look disturbingly younger, sell well. 

I know some women who entered into the sex industry at 18 as just a stripper, but were then pimped out and gang raped before they even knew what happened to them. They had never consented to anything more than just taking their clothes off and dancing, they were coerced, forced, blackmailed, or sometimes drugged into sex.

But they’re trapped in the industry: the young women nose-dive into expensive leases and car payments and they tote Louis Vuitton hand bags, and then they’re stuck. They’ve procured such a pricey and untenable lifestyle that, outside of the sex industry, they’d never be able to maintain.

As they age and newer, younger (therefore more “desirable”) girls come in and they become old news, they begin to recognize this and panic. I do not speak for everyone, and I can only speak to what I’ve seen, but I’ve never seen anyone in the industry not stuck in a significantly physically, emotionally, or financially abusive relationship at some point of their career in the sex industry, often the beginning when they’re the most naive, or because the relationship is what caused them to enter the industry and stay in it.

[Ed: This is extremely telling.]

It becomes a pair of golden handcuffs.

They don’t feel like they can leave because the money is too good (and they have a lifestyle to maintain) but they don’t necessarily want to be in the industry either. They become pretty ruthless as they’re only looking to milk as much money from someone as they can, and they begin to see men as walking ATM machines.

Since they deal with the some of the worst people in society, they begin to see all men this way—as someone to solicit something from. And since everything revolves around your appearance, it forces you to pay mind to very shallow aspects of yourself which is inherently depressing when someone is always pointing out your flaws.

By the end of their career—usually 26 to 30—I’ve seen many women dependent on a substance, in copious amounts of debt due to lifestyle creep, or in a deep and concerning depression. And, devastatingly so, I’ve known women in the industry who have died by suicide. The trauma or debt or emptiness they collected since they were young became insurmountable.

[Ed: Financial abuse is this.]

Stay tuned for tomorrow for this post: Part Two: The Aftermath