Part 1: Selena the _____?

Have you ever encountered a moment where you looked in the mirror and felt like a stranger? It’s easy to take for granted the multitude of minute changes that happen so gradually they’re imperceptible. I looked down at my breasts and noticed an array of freckles, hairs and moles I hadn’t noticed before. I rediscovered details of the body I inhabit, my body, the one I’ve always had and always will have to some degree. Sure, I’ll stretch and sag, things that work now won’t work forever, but I will still be me. I’ve been rediscovering myself over this past year in a way that has been at times antagonistic and unsettling.

My rediscovery began with injuries. When I sprained my wrist and couldn’t dance, I realized how easily the fragile life I’d built could fall apart. Disability isn’t something most people think about until they find themselves disabled, and yet almost all of us will end up disabled at some point in our lives. I’ve watched my mother go from a formidable enemy, to a shriveled, helpless woman. Sometimes these shifts happen suddenly, other times it’s a gradual erosion. I’ve always been terrified of being helpless, which has manifested in resolute, dogged determination to be completely self-sufficient, by any means necessary.

The drive for total self-reliance led me to pursue grad school. While I’m passionate about understanding the mind and providing mental health support to my community, the secondary reason I wanted to pursue a degree was to have a steady occupation I could theoretically perform through disability. My body might break down, but so long as my mind remains able, I can be a capable therapist. I feel a bit like I'm playing a game of chess, trying to outsmart life and the many uncontrollable variables I might encounter. But what about when I’m the uncontrollable variable?

I have been in non monogamous relationships for the past eight years, and for a long time, I was wholeheartedly convinced that I was poly. I believed poly was an inextricable part of my identity. It was as deep as a sexual orientation, and you couldn’t convince me otherwise. However, a series of poly-potholes over the past year forced me to reconsider my capacity to be non monogamous. The most recent happened last week. It’s difficult to write about these things, because they are intimate, and my blog is open for my partners to read. I’ve noticed myself diving more and more inward since January, and I worry that I’m building up a wall of silence because of fear. The irony or writing a blog that is divulgent and rife with the scandalous details of sex work, is that I’m a very private person, particularly when it comes to my personal life. But privacy be damned, sometimes it’s relevant to talk about the fragile internal workings, otherwise the rest doesn’t make sense.

While Evan and I have hooked up with plenty of other people over the duration of our relationship, he has not up until this point seriously dated anybody else (aside from his now ex partner). Initially, he hadn’t pursued anyone because he was processing the end of a very long relationship, and he hadn’t been ready for anything too serious. However, recently he began seeing a woman that I’ll call “Eve”. The poly world is not perfect. I think poly people are a bit hesitant to critique certain elements out of self-preservation. Because it is a stigmatized relationship orientation, many of us would rather focus on countering negative arguments rather than internal critical analysis. One issue, or “quirk” if I’m generous, that seems to come up across the board is that in hetero poly, the women/femmes involved in the lifestyle tend to lean younger. This is not always the case, and I know a number of women over forty who are poly; however, my partners past and present have all noted that most women they encounter who are available and interested are in their early to mid twenties. Is this inherently a problem? No. But does it get a little weird when the men in the pool are pushing forty or fifty and they’re still dating 25-year-olds? I have my own biases in this matter, knowing that I’m another data point confirming this trend. Evan is in his mid forties, and yet the women he’s able to date all seem to be 24-29. Eve is no exception. I’m no exception, even though I’m perhaps getting a little long in the tooth, pushing 30.

While I was away on a camping trip, Evan invited Eve, and my cousins, to take a trip to Coachella. He informed me day-of, and I felt blindsided. I didn’t feel like I could say anything, but I had a lot of negative feelings about the situation. Trips were something Evan and I had only recently begun exploring together. The weekend prior, he and I had taken our own trip to Coachella, and when he announced his second trip, I felt that what I’d thought was special suddenly was a lot less special. I didn’t like that my cousins were meeting Eve before I’d had a chance to meet her. I was jealous over the intimacy of Evan and Eve sharing a hotel room together for several days. I felt so overcome with jealousy and confusion, I couldn’t think straight. When I got back home from my trip and learned more details, I had an internal crisis. Was this crippling jealousy going to be the norm? Deep down, was I unable to share? I wanted to support him. I wanted to be a partner capable of compersion. I wanted Evan to be able to form additional partnerships. I didn’t feel entitled to the negative feelings that were bubbling in my gut. Evan had never wavered in supporting my non monogamous explorations and full service sex work. Didn’t he deserve the same graceful support?

But pushing down the fear and insecurities did nothing to quell the increasingly loud voice in my head shouting, You aren’t poly! It’s all been a selfish lie! You’re just afraid of settling down! Are you doing this to spite your mother? I looked out over the edge and asked myself if the voice in my head was speaking the truth. I can’t say that I’ve ever had a fully functional, kitchen-table-poly relationship. I haven’t met my metamores, let alone built healthy relationships with them. When I’ve introduced partners to each other in the past, there has always been lingering tension between them. Jealousy is part of most relationships, but it’s especially present in poly. I know poly people will say that jealousy is present in almost all relationships, and monogamous people are notoriously jealous. But there is something different about adding additional people into a relationship where you really can’t escape the feeling. It’s processing the unknown, projecting insecurities upon someone who is in a way your proxy. Eve is a person all her own with her own motivations and agenda, and yet internally I was concocting elaborate fantasies rooted in fear. I wanted to focus on the good that Evan was experiencing, rather than threats to our relationship, but I could not. That jealousy seeped into my work at the club.

After a day spent intermittently sobbing in between dutiful self-care rituals, I girded myself for a night at the club. The strip club is a place full of temptations for strippers and customers alike. The customers are tempted for obvious reasons: pretty faces, tits and ass displayed in glorious abundance, all available for the right price. But as a dancer, we have our own temptations. One is extras. I hate that people are shamed for having a variety of boundaries, but unfortunately extras are a hot topic. The longer you stay in this industry, the more likely it is that your boundaries will fluctuate. Mine change depending on how I feel in my body and how secure I feel in my relationships. As I grappled with my vulnerability, I felt tempted to revenge fuck my way through customers. The option is almost always there, but I have to weigh the temporary catharsis I might enjoy against the possible repercussions. How would I feel about myself? How would it affect my relationship to my clients and their future expectations? How could it jeopardize my employment? Would it hurt my romantic relationships? It’s hard to close the door once it’s open. I’ve found that it’s best not to work when I’m emotionally vulnerable. It’s at these moments when I’m most likely to be taken advantage of. I try to pause when I feel like I’m on the verge of making an impulsive decision, but nobody is perfect, least of all me. Plus, there’s a monetary carrot on the end of the boundary-blurring stick. Full service sex work pays well. I felt soggy going into work on Tuesday. My eyes were red and puffy. I was grateful for the dim club light. I knew I could hide how I was feeling with enough makeup, but I carried heaviness in my body. And desperation. If I didn’t do well, I knew I would slide into another tailspin. Would fucking a few customers help center me? I wasn’t opposed to trying it and finding out the hard way.

It’s not easy dating a sex worker, particularly if you’ve never performed sex work before. Even then, not all sex work is equally demanding. There are all kinds of jealousy traps depending on what kind of work you or your partner does. Jealousy is particularly difficult when your relationship is at a low point. Hearing your partner talk dirty to a client when your own personal sex life is at a standstill can scratch a wound you didn’t even know was open. Watching your lover dress up to seduce customers when you’re horny and know your needs will have to take a backseat to their work can make you feel forsaken. Saying goodbye to your partner, knowing they’re about to fuck a client, while you’re feeling depressed or anxious can trigger even the most securely attached person. Sex work and personal intimacy are two very different things, and yet the acts can look the same. You still have to share the person you love, even if you know it’s completely transactional. The difference is in how sex workers feel about sex work versus personal intimacy, and that nuanced distinction can be impossible to recognize in the heat of jealousy.

It can even be difficult as a sex worker to entirely separate the two. While many sex workers dissociate to work or find themselves servicing customers who are far from their sexual preferences, providing sexual services can lead to personal pleasure. That pleasure can be a double edged sword: on the one hand, by definition, pleasure feels good, and there’s no rule against enjoying your job; on the other, it can feel like a betrayal to experience that pleasure. It doesn’t have to be a betrayal of your significant other, experiencing pleasure at work can feel like your body is betraying you. Oftentimes I’d rather feel pain or numbness instead of pleasure when I’m working. Pleasure is vulnerable. Pleasure can feel tinged with a reciprocity that creates imbalance. When a customer realizes they’re giving you pleasure, they can start to feel entitled. They might try to pay you less or treat you with unbusinesslike familiarity. Not all customers are this way, but in my experience, most will use your pleasure as a bargaining chip.

Unwanted pleasure can even creep into sexual assault. As much as we may want to believe that we have control over our bodily responses, we do not, and the misconception that we have complete power can cause sexual assault survivors to feel not only ashamed, but at fault. After my rape, instead of numbing out, I became more sensitive to touch. For a while, I lost any sense of control over when or with whom I might find pleasure. The safety rails that had protected me came off. I opened myself up not only to touch, but also to a wider spectrum of people I wouldn’t have otherwise been attracted to. It was as if my body was counter programming: I’d experienced a terrible betrayal, but instead of shutting down, I met my pain with “promiscuity,” or sexual openness. Maybe it was a subconscious way of reclaiming my pleasure. If it was, I surely wasn’t thinking about it that way. I just reacted. Again, I woke up a different person. My hard boundaries had blurred in an instant. Trauma responses are complicated, and there is no single way to cope with sexual assault.

Pleasure isn’t something we can entirely control. Yes, there are plenty of sex positive educators who work to empower people to “take control” of their sexuality and tap into their pleasure, who say, “You are in control of your pleasure,” but this is more of a positive affirmation than a complex picture of the reality. Lots of people deal with sexual dysfunction. Many because of physical issues. Others, because of internalized sex negativity, because pleasure education is nonexistent in conservative societies. But the flip of trying to access pleasure is wanting or needing to turn it off as a survival mechanism. If I was constantly present in my body while performing sex work, I’d be overwhelmed. It is work. While there are many romantic clients, there are just as many clients looking for a casual experience with someone they don’t have to feel responsible for. They treat purchasing intimacy like any other bit of business: haggling prices, pushing to get more for less, complaining when things don’t meet their expectations. If I was physically receptive while navigating this complexity, I would get hurt much more often.

Rates are a sacred covenant you make to protect your body. They guard your boundaries and secure your feelings. Being underpaid or stiffed for a service can strip you of your dignity. It feels like rape, and many people argue that it is a form of rape. Unfortunately sex workers do not have the privilege of reporting these breaches in trust. Instead we suck it up. We toughen our skin, maybe take a break to recover, but oftentimes we must press on with our work. I’ve built up a very tough skin working in this industry. I’ve been stiffed, treated roughly, accepted more than I was comfortable with because I couldn’t find my voice to speak up. It wasn’t fear of a client that kept me quiet. It was fear of losing a tip or a sale. Capitalism kept me quiet, as it does so many other people.

Sex workers are champions when it comes to puffery and bravado. We have to be. We’re fighting against being perceived as scum. We’re fighting against being perceived as victims. We are compensating with puffery to avoid all of the damn conversations that bring us down into existential crises. From the outside, it looks like we’re all just paid to be pornographically slutty, and maybe there’s some truth in that. Porn is performed sex. Great porn performers fake it really well, but at the end of the day it’s the duration. It’s having to do more than we would do for our own pleasure. It’s having to pretend to have an orgasmic time when you’ve just found out another unarmed Black person was shot in the back of the head by a police officer during a traffic stop. Less dramatically, having to work when you’re tired and insecure. Even the strongest sex worker falls into these holes from time to time. We hit a personal low and start taking those condescending questions too seriously. What am I doing? Do I actually want to be here? Am I pathetic? On a good day, it’s easy to poke holes in these paternalistic inquiries, but what if you’ve been going through a terrible month? Or year? It’s not the sex work bringing you down, but the sex work isn’t helping. It isn’t joyful. It’s just the labor that puts food on the table and keeps a roof over your head.