Were You An Empowered Prostitute?

I remember telling my sister a few months after I first started working as an escort. She was visiting me, and I was taking her out to dinner. I told her in the cab. While I admitted it very casually, it was a moment of too much honesty and she was appropriately appalled, but not that surprised. She is my sister after all, and she knows me extremely well. She said many things, most of them supportive, and some of them concerned but the thing she said first, was the most memorable of all. 

"Are you doing this because you need money?" She asked me. 

I was not. 

I understand why she went there, and maybe I even understand why that would hurt her more than anything else about it. It's the only thing she asked of me, she said that she was happy for me no matter what I did, but if I needed money, she hoped I would ask our parents instead of being a sex worker. That was never going to happen, but the truth was, I wasn't doing it for the money. I figured out how to make money as soon as I left my parents, and I didn't choose to sell sex to do it (even though I am perfectly fine with having done that later), and by the time I turned nineteen I was supporting myself and paying for college by myself as well. I am very proud of that (and there are not many things I feel that way about), because I grew up with a lot of money, and I was always given to understand that if I wanted education (or anything), I would be able to just ask for the money to buy it, but I hated that world, and its ways. When I was stuck there, in what I still consider the absolute worst days of my life, the only thing that kept me focused and sane was knowing that as soon as I turned eighteen, I was free, and I just had to ensure that by the time I turned eighteen, I had learnt how to independently care for myself. I did learn, and then I picked a college, I took the test, I sent in an application, I got accepted and I left. I had been tempted earlier in life to just run away, or emancipate myself legally, but the truth is I would have still been dealing with those legal proceedings today, and I understood that the only way to free myself effectively was to wait, and leave when I couldn't be legally brought back, and ensure that I couldn't be financially lured. 

That's not why I chose sex work, though. I chose it because of an adolescent dream, and honestly, why can't that be it? I can dream of being a lawyer someday. I can dream of being prime minister. I can dream of being a railways announcer ( and I did dream of that, everyone always said "oh that's so cute" but I didn't like that, I was serious about that pursuit). I can dream of being a real estate agent. Why can't I dream of growing up and being a prostitute someday? I did. Prostitutes seemed powerful to me when I was young, and stuck. It seemed like they didn't have to fear things, and later in my life when men started to believe that having boobs meant I was a woman, and they started to take sex from me as if that was their right, sex workers seemed even more powerful to me. They sold it, and I had been robbed. 

I had an endless romantic fascination with the profession, and retrospectively, it all seems very childish now that I am on the other side. My ideas were all extremely naïve, and I believed, and I did believe this, that when I grew up and became a whore, it would be magical. I would empower myself, and all women by doing it. I would be the first prostitute ever to choose this for great reasons and truly demonstrate that you can aspire to be a whore, and have your dreams come true when it finally happens. I would show that smart girls can be hookers too. I was so sure no one had ever thought of this before. 

So was I an empowered whore? 

No. 

I was a privileged one. 

Well, in a way. As I said, and as I told my sister, I wasn't doing it for the money. Not just the money. Like any job you choose because you love it, I chose it because I wanted to do that, I expected to be renumerated for it because it was a job and that's what they are for. I would absolutely love to live in a world where people opt for sex work out of their passion for the project, but that's ridiculous. This is not that world, and every time I write about the empowerment of sex work, I misrepresent the industry. Or at least, I fail to represent a large part of it. I didn't meet a single empowered sex worker the whole time I did this, I met women who were shockingly *young*, I met women in financial distress, I met women who might have been trafficked, I met women who were certainly being forced, but most importantly I met women who would be destroyed if their profession came out in the public arena. 

That was my real privilege. I don't know which part of my life it comes from, it's probably many parts of my life, but the ability to say out loud to anyone that you are a whore, and have it not destroy your life or have you killed, in this country, is a privilege. The fact that I never had to worry about who would marry me, how would I get another job, what would I do if my family found out, all of that, doesn't just happen, you are taught the ability to do that very early. Perhaps it is the privilege of birth, of financial insulation, of caste and class, and maybe it is an amalgamation, but it is that. Most women I met were remarkably secretive, and discreet, and I never felt like I had to be that way. I used my real name often, and when I think about that sometimes I just know that was an idiot move, and it doesn't bother me. I am not afraid because I always figured, if they call me a prostitute, well, I'll be one forever. That's not a bad life to me.  

It was a bad life to many women who were doing it though. They didn't choose it, not freely anyway, and seeing that world made my ideas about sex work start to crumble. The problem with me is that I just get up and do things. That sounds like a good thing but it's not what I mean. I mean, very often, when I feel like doing something, I just do it. I don't think about it. I don't prepare. I don't do my research even. I don't think about the risks. In some way, I don't think of myself, or the things I do as real enough to warrant any of that, and so while I observe things to death, I don't prepare for them. I didn't prepare for prostitution. I just knew I wanted to do it, and then I did. I seriously just called up escort services until one sleazy guy who looked like a pager salesman agreed to meet with me. I didn't think about what all could go wrong with that situation. I didn't think about that until years later. I just knew what I wanted. A low-medium range escort service that accepted college girls who needed to keep up with classes. I don't know what I expected, and I don't know what my plan was either. I just went and met the guy. Twelve hours later, I was a prostitute. 

It's the only job I regret leaving. Sex works suits me very well. Let me clarify straight off the bat, that I'm not hot, and while I can certainly dress myself pretty, I'm not very good at that either. I have sexual appeal though, and I say this objectively, without any hubris. My sexual appeal lies in a very specific form of madness that shows in my eyes, and in the way I talk. That's what I thought. The "manager" (he seriously told people this is what he did for a living, he was a "manager") was much more blunt with me about my appeal. He said it didn't matter than I was "little fat" because South Indian guys like fair-skinned young North Indian girls who speak English. That's closer to the reality of sex work than any ideas of empowerment. Everything is a commodity. All these beautiful ideas I had about sex work, bullshit (at least, on a large scale), in reality, it was just a modern adaptation of men making money off the bodies of scared, objectified women. 

That being said, I still loved it, because it suited my sensibility. I like meeting people in a sexual set-up where my personality is irrelevant. Honestly, I tire of pretending I have a personality with endless quips and personable little jokes. I tire of presenting myself as appealing, and interesting, and this job didn't require that of me. I could be just a body. I never had to tell anyone "my story" (though I sometimes made them up for my entertainment and gave myself backstories just for fun), and I could always access the part of human beings I am genuinely interested in. I like people's sexulaities, I would really only engage with that if I could, and that is more true than I would like it to be. This detachment i feel from people is very old, and I don't know how old exactly, but I know that I don't know any other way. Yet I insist that it's not a cold detachment, it's indulgent, and it enjoys people tremendously, but mostly in a specific setting. I understand sickness inside people. I really do. Ultimately, all my regular clients were people who needed something *weird*, and I never advertised as that, it just happened, because I have spent so much time playing in the pools of desire that I understand the minutiae of how it presents. In the little things. 

I liked the invisibility of being a whore as well. Arguably you are very visible, physically, as an object of pleasure, but in reality, you are completely hidden. They don't care about you, and even if they grow to care, it's like falling in love with your therapist, it's just projection. I enjoyed the secrecy of leaving my house and going into the unknown with strangers who would pay me. I enjoyed being the "weird girl" who should have been more uncomfortable making jokes with hotel managers. I enjoyed keeping track of all the phones. I enjoyed building narratives with people who bought my time, because it was most real, most performative yet personal form of storytelling I ever experienced. Ultimately it turned out that the voice inside me that told me I had to do this when I grew up, was looking for that. 

It had to, however, also see reality. 

I never expected or thought about "bad things" happening on thay journey, and they absolutely did. I had beautifully worded conversations in my head about how things would go, and the reality of those conversations was often men saying things I never thought I would hear in my life. I had all these characters and ideas, and a triumphant ideology, but the reality of sex work was crass and sometimes dangerous. That's the truth. I want it to be safer, of course I do, but it's not. I want women to get up and be prostitutes because there is no stigma, but there is, especially from the men who will hire you. I want nothing bad to ever happen, but it will, and like me, you will normalise it, until eight years later when you think of it in terror and wonder why the fuck you weren't thinking more. 

The truth is I still wouldn't think. 

That's my privilege. 

The privilege of being able to choose a profession that really suits me and exercise it on mostly my terms. Privilege is not empowerment, and I worry, because sometimes, talk of empowerment masks the issues, and sex work is a lot more issues than it is empowerment. A lot. It's drugs, coercion, death, being sold and hidden. Of course, the internet is changing the nature of sex work, but it's never gotten more backlash than once the women took charge of their own bodies, and the business of objectifying them. Everyone hates Amazon Wishlists and OnlyFans, and everyone feels pity for the hooker on the street corner. What's the difference between them? Women in charge. That's the difference. That's the world in which I want to be a whore. That is not this world. Not yet. 

But I miss it, you know? 

It's the only job I regret leaving. 

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Disclaimer: I did not mean to imply women on OF are prostitutes, they can be or they can't be, and sex work can take many forms and some of it is not sex work at all. I just needed to say that to make a specific point about why I believe women who make money off their bodies or sexual appeal on the internet get more moral backlash than others. I also believe your experience can be different than mine. This is hardly an exhaustive discussion of my experience, so please bear that in mind, and also that not all countries have the same culture surrounding sex work. 

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