I got into the sex industry at the age of 18, spending ten years working full time as a porn model/photographer/webmaster/cam girl, another couple of years part time as I got into a new career, and then fully retiring 7 years ago.
My reasons for leaving were varied, from creative burnout to anger to a simple desire to do something new. I felt like the porn I was making of myself was repetitive. No matter how many colors of duvet covers and lingerie you own, there’s only so much new stuff you can do. I was bored of the scene. I’d incorrectly assumed the point of the “sex positivity” sphere of the ’00s was as a first step towards organizing for broader social change on topics related to sex, labor, power, and gender, but instead it was just same people congratulating each other for being so liberated as to know what a butt plug is. I was sick of seeing women from privileged backgrounds briefly dabble in lite sex work and then spin it into well-paid mainstream careers as experts on the industry. I was also aware of the passing of time. On a practical level, the jizz biz is a young person’s game, with a smaller market and less money to be made as you age.
Importantly, I thought that if I had done such a good job of developing a successful small business in porn, then surely I would be able to create a successful second career in a new sector where I assumed that my intelligence and work ethic would be better appreciated and rewarded. I’m a 7 at best, and the way I was able to support myself for so long in porn is not because I had some phenomenal body or face, but because I was taught myself everything it takes to run a small business by myself. Whether bookkeeping or marketing or creating web sites or getting just the right shot I wanted of my ass by holding my camera behind me with my feet, I could do it all.
After leaving the adult industry and having plenty of time to reflect on my life, I’ve come to realize that my time as a sex worker will always hinder me in mainstream work — but not for some dramatic reason like being outed in the media or having a criminal record.
Coinciding with COVID exploding in the spring, I lost my most recent job in the Real World. I was being given far more and more difficult work than same-position colleagues. I was tired of feeling excluded and disliked by several snotty people. My direct supervisor had an infuriating habit of refusing to specify how he wanted something done, getting mad at me for not doing it how he imagined it, telling me to re-do it but refusing to clarify exactly how, and then becoming more upset that I still wasn’t producing what he wanted. I finally got up the nerve to write an email to him that I would like to have a workload at the level of my job description and that I felt that some of his criticism was unfair. This was not the epic fuck you letter I wish I could have written, my complaints wrapped up in (bullshit) praise about how I was learning so much from him and was very grateful for this opportunity. The next day he replied with a quick email, probably sent from his phone while he was on the toilet. “It is clear to me that we will no longer be able to work together moving forward.” He wanted my building keys returned immediately and I could see I’d already been removed from our website.
This was not the first time I lost something or suffered a serious consequence in the Real World because I stood up for myself. New things always start off great because I get a ton of work done and pick up new skills quickly, but then it crashes and burns the instant I disagree with someone or ask to be treated fairly. Contrast that with the countless more privileged people I’ve known who have been allowed to be caustic, unproductive, freewheeling fuckups who never seem to experience any sort of reprimand and have spent their lives failing upwards. Even when I carefully consider my words, try to not be confrontational, and express just 2% of how upset I actually feel, my impertinence still shocks people. How dare this ungrateful little bitch gripe about the crumbs we threw at her? Doesn’t she know her place? Whether I spend months groveling and bringing home baked treats to meetings or show up on the first day with a baseball bat and smash everyone’s workstations, the outcome is the same. They don’t need to be explicitly told my life history, they can smell it on me. I’m not one of them.
As a small business owner in porn, I set my own schedule and made my own rules, so I got a lot done. I was in complete control of my time and labor. I never had to re-do something over the weekend in an attempt to meet someone else’s exacting-but-unstated standards. I would go through bursts of working 18 hour days and then take time off to read books for a week, or maybe reward myself with a long weekend away, visiting friends in New York City or San Francisco. It suited me so perfectly. If I had a vacation coming up or something for which I needed extra money, I would just put in more hours, and like magic, I had the money I needed. It wasn’t always easy, and I was hurt by the recession of 2008, but overall things made sense to me, following the logic of the American Dream that I had been indoctrinated to believe since childhood. Work, reward. Effort, outcome. Time, money.
Sex work fucked me up because it led me to believe that there was a relationship between hard work and success.
I’ve learned that in the Real World, hard work does not lead to success, it leads to people deciding that you’re disposable. I’ve learned that about 99% of whether or not someone is successful is due to the circumstances of their birth. Born white, born able-bodied, born in rich and stable countries, born into families with money and connections. Born into well-paying jobs for which they’re not qualified but will get hired for anyway.
In porn and sex work, I met successful people from every walk of life, from people like me who didn’t graduate high school and had experienced homelessness, to people with graduate degrees who got tired of poor pay and working too many hours in more respectable fields. Although I held three minimum wage jobs briefly as a teenager — including telemarketing and food service — sex work set the standard by which I would learn how effort and income are related.
For all I’ve read from the pearl-clutching commentariat who are so very worried/titillated about how sex work and porn supposedly breaks our self-esteem, makes us anorexic, coerces us into plastic surgery we didn’t want, traps us in degrading and traumatizing work, or brainwashes us to think sexual assault is okay — none of that was the case with me (or anyone else I know). Something much worse happened: I was shielded from a personal understanding of how most of society functions and how profoundly the game is rigged.
I never even took the SATs and college culture was a mystery to me, my uptake of it mostly limited to seeing it play out in the lives of fictional characters. Vassar! I know what that is! That’s the one Sue Ellen lied about attending to impress people in I Can’t Believe the Babysitter’s Dead. Harvard! That’s where Elle Woods goes in Legally Blonde! As someone who didn’t come from a family where college was seen as terribly important, especially not for a girl child whose only job it was to get married and raise children, I missed out on learning that being an alumni of a prestigious university would ensure an upward life trajectory. Two people I’ve hated in different spheres of the Real World were Ivy League grads who never hesitated to shoehorn that fact into whatever else they were talking about. Both of them were terrible at their jobs, their continued employment constantly reminding me of how differently my life could have turned out if only I’d thought to plan ahead and… be born into an upper crust east coast family that scored me a legacy admission at an elite school. If you went to a fancy college, you can coast on that for the rest of your life.
Despite my self-image as an outsider and independent thinker, I fell for a big con: that if I worked hard, I’d have something to show for it. I was a staunch adherent to the American Dream without thinking of it in those terms. I was a homeless teenager who later bought a small condo at the age of 24. I had made it on my own once through hard work and innovation. If I could go from eating garbage to taking international vacations, I was proof it was possible. I didn’t understand that sex work is unique in that it’s uncontrolled by a wall of conservative late-career gatekeepers who are determined to make sure you can’t get in unless you have the right credentials from the right universities and come from the right family that has the right friends.
The only sectors in which there is a strong relationship between hard work and success are sex work and crime. These are jobs that most people don’t want but for which there remains a strong consumer demand, allowing for a more true meritocracy to exist among those willing to take the risk, do the stigmatized thing, come up with a business plan that can operate outside of the Real World. I’m infinitely more impressed by a person who figures out how to manufacture and sell ecstasy tablets while evading arrest than a person who gets a degree in Communications and then manages their dad’s golfing buddy’s company’s Twitter account, even if they make the same amount of money.
I can feel some readers’ arguing fingers start twitching. “But wait, computer programming is a meritocracy and that pays well!” I will shut that shit down, no exceptions. Yes, I know people from working class and modest backgrounds who now make good salaries as programmers. People like that are precisely why every tech company has been tripping over itself to sponsor free “coding boot camps” — not to raise up the world’s poor so everyone can make six figures, but to dilute the value of programming labor until it’s a minimum wage skillset so they can increase their own already-massive profit margins. As soon as the affluent tech world realized that regular people were sneaking into high paying jobs through the back door, they immediately started closing it. I’m glad some of you made it in and have a good life, but your presence in tech doesn’t prove that class mobility exists, it merely helped the rich identify a bug in their system to be patched. Further, I’d wager that as soon as they have their armies of trained coders that will tolerate being paid a fraction of what they pay you now, the programmers whose parents don’t have vacations homes will be the first to be replaced by the new labor pool.
Over the last year, I’ve come to personal terms with how precarious life is in America and how wide the growing chasm is between the haves and have nots, the pandemic revealing to a sickening degree how many of us are standing on a sheet of ice that’s cracking but we have no direction in which to run. It’s not just the very poor whose lives are unraveling now, it’s a huge swath of society drowning in debt and un(der)employment who have no hope for a future that was easily obtained by previous generations. We’re hurtling en masse towards joining the world of struggling gig workers making a few bucks an hour, living out of their cars and broken RVs, as laid out brutally in the book and tearjerker Oscar-bait movie Nomadland.
This precarity is not just in the big sense, the grand downward slide of late capitalism and a failed empire, it’s a risk in every interaction. If you’re a social outsider who has achieved some modicum of success in the Real World, your success hinges not on hard work (though you surely had to work twice as hard as others for less recognition and pay), but also on enduring toxic workplaces while smiling and maintaining your deference and composure. The instant you complain, the spell is broken and you’re standing there on the street your old torn servant dress staring at a pumpkin and wondering what the hell just happened. (Meanwhile, your upper middle class white male coworker got drunk at work and/or sexually harassed someone again — what a mischievous fellow! Give that man a promotion!)
I hadn’t previously truly appreciated that I have no safety net. There is no option to put in extra hours to get more money when I need it, as there was in porn. You have to put in extra hours by default just to keep a shitty job where everyone but you is profiting off your labor.
A year ago, I was feeling the most financially stable and hopeful I had felt since retiring from porn. I’d just spent 3 weeks in Thailand for the holidays (a budget-friendly country, but still: travel!). I was feeling good about work projects and future prospects, and thought maybe this time things were going to work out. Now, after losing another job (and making an enemy in a field where personal references are everything), having some unexpected problems pop up and burn through a bunch of money, plus the whole deadly pandemic thing, my savings are almost gone and I’ve been looking around my home for things to sell, paying close attention to talk about stimulus payments, and my porn affiliate link checks and forgotten rebilling memberships have gone from bonus cash to something I’m relieved to see arrive.
My friend (and former sex worker) Brooke Magnanti has an excellent new blog about labor, poverty, and social breakdown from the perspective of someone living it rather than an interloper journalist gawking at what the poors are doing to make ends meet. She and I have raged together at length about how it’s like people can identify the two of us as white trash at some sort of pheromonal level. It doesn’t matter if we’re in designer dresses and using our big words about intelligent topics with important people, those around us still read us as the janitorial staff. They know they can treat us poorly because we’re not the type of person who matters. There is no escaping that. We have to find our own new ways forward.
I write all of this not to be overly self-pitying or to imply that I don’t know I have it better than millions of other people. I still have white privilege, I live indoors, I am fed, I am healthy… for now. I don’t know what things are going to look like in six months and that scares me.
Sex work fucked me up. It made me believe that it was possible to succeed if I just put in the effort. It took me until the age of 37 to fully grasp that as a social outsider without family money and connections to fall back on, I’m never that far from the bottom.
