When I began sex work, I was 20 years old. I’d moved away from home to live in a city for the first time, and I wanted a job that would afford me ample hours for writing and completing my graduate school coursework. I also felt the pull to exploit the anonymity and freedom of being away from home, the quintessential American desire to re-make myself. In the small town where I grew up, I’d been regarded as bookish and quiet, predictable and practical. I knew there was more in me than people at home could recognize, and I wanted to prove it. I wanted to experience every glamour and success a city could offer. I wanted to know what it was like to be sexually powerful and I wanted to know what it was like to have men want me.
Admitting as much feels shameful since it denies the primacy of external pressures that might have pushed me toward labor so in demand yet so reviled. The notion of the modern-day happy hooker, the vapid middle-class girl who starts “selling her body” because she thinks it’s fun and harmless, is a mainstream media-spawned nightmare haunting every heated discussion of sex work. I had no dreams of designer handbags or weekends in the Hamptons when I started sex work. I was an awkward near-virgin who had never owned a sex toy and had experienced only a few sexual partners. But I had the instincts of an anthropologist and an inexplicable sense of invincibility—not because I thought I was untouchable or special, but because I simply didn’t register situations as dangerous no matter how shady the circumstances.
[For more of this story, written by Charlotte Shane, go to http://www.psmag.com/business-...g-my-work-what-it-is]
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