Want to share your NSFW money story? Send it to submissions thefinancialdiet. If you are a successful businessman in New York City, and you are usually of a certain age and a certain level of unattractiveness, you have probably paid me a visit. You have probably at least Googled me. I perform a service that lives on the very limits of a lot of things: legality, acceptability, morality. My spa is one that has extremely strict rules around cleanliness, conduct, and clientele. We are protected, and charge very highly by the hour, and are well-tipped.
For this, all of the women in my spa are like me: educated, sophisticated, and mostly white. Part of the problem with sex work is that it recreates a more intense version of the castes that exist everywhere in a capitalist society. Because I am white, college-educated, speak a certain way, etc, I will be treated as more human and more dignified almost inherently.
And I am in the class of sex worker who can perhaps even perform the mental gymnastics to say she is not one. It will enable me to do all the things I want to do take a sabbatical to travel and write, teach in another country, afford a studio apartment in a neighborhood I love, because I hate living with roommates.
Neither of us would trade places with the other, and each of us has our boundaries. But I have big dreams for myself, and those dreams will require taking a lot of risks.
Sex work has enabled me to understand my privilege, even in my disadvantage. Would I recommend my job to a woman in a similar position to me, who wants to pay down her debt as quickly as possible? Maybe, it depends on the woman. I know that doing what I do takes a certain amount of swallowing your pride and getting over your squeamishness, and not everyone is capable of doing it.
