After working in the sex trade for around seven years, I met a guy I sort of liked. He had a major problem with what I did for money. Getting to know him stopped as soon as it started. That’s when I knew: I no longer wanted to sell “the girlfriend experience,” as we called it in the industry, in other words, selling sex but acting as if the guy and I were on a “real” date. I wanted to be an actual girlfriend. I wanted to use the academic degrees I had worked hard to earn. For me, I realized, sex work and the “straight” life couldn’t mix. I wanted out just like so many critics of the sex industry would advise.
That wasn’t so easy. I faced a lot of challenges that made transitioning out of the trade incredibly difficult. It took me multiple tries to leave sex work for good. When I left the job to become a public-school teacher, I ultimately lost my job after confiding in a not so close work mate about my past. That experience taught me about another kind of indignity sex workers face—not on the job, but when they leave the trade.
Whether sex workers love, hate, or feel ambivalent toward their job, most don’t intend to work in the industry forever. But the complicated reasons people enter the trade—including but not limited to economic factors—are the same complicated factors that make it difficult to leave. I first got involved in the industry due to my economic circumstances. A sophomore in college, I was always the chic without fancy gadgets and jewelry. I just had enough money to afford a decent lifestyle on a minimum budget as pocket money. One afternoon at a clothing store, out of cash, I became devastated. That moment of economic desperation turned into a job as a dancer and stripper at a local club and later sex work exclusively. It was there that the allure of money and a better life affixed me to the trade throughout college.
Sex work was a job that suited my needs, as it is for many. For me it was rational, I have needs, the needs require money, and sex work would give me money. I did not care for the rumors, my wo
rk got me through school and as well as spare coins to send back home. I had the good life, and soon I had an elite clientele that sent for me with cabs and personal drivers to exclusive locations. I had an emotionally absent father and a mother deeply concerned with mounting debts, the death of her parents, and her failing marriage. I can see now how family played a part in my own choices. I realize how the “get-rich-quick” feeling I got from trading sex for cash reminded me of the warm, excited feeling we would get when my father, a daily gambler, came home after a lucky day at the track.
And the secrecy required of a sex worker mirrored the “don’t ask, don’t tell” environment in which I’d grown up: I was never supposed to talk about our family problems. When it comes to leaving the trade, people need emotional and psychological support—not just money. They need a nonjudgmental environment, to make sense of their experiences, so that they can make choices that are right for them. They need to be treated like human beings. And yes, they need jobs.
When I got a job as a teacher, I earned a decent salary, people respected me, and—for perhaps the first time in my life—I felt useful and appreciated for something other than my body. My kids loved me. My colleagues praised me. As soon as the errant ear spread the story of my past, I was booted from the school. It was a chilling message to any sex worker out there looking to leave the life.
Critics say people should get out of sex work, but then hypocritically shun us when we make the transition. We receive little sympathy when we are outed—and it’s even worse if we out ourselves. But I feel that telling our stories is integral to finding meaning in our lives and our experiences. Before writing and sharing my experiences, I felt compelled to suppress my past, including my childhood. I was left alone to deal with the confusion I felt knowing I was a “whore.”
Since losing my teaching job, finding work has been a struggle. I teach part time writing where I can, but it doesn’t pay much. Admittedly, I have sometimes felt tempted to return to sex work. But I choose to not sell sex, as I’m too intimately acquainted with the pain that doing so would cause me. I ask that today you also think of the people who—for whatever complicated reasons—sell sex. When you think of us, I hope you realize, we’re not that different than you.
Rewritten, Original Story by Melissa Petro, the Daily Beast
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