Why I Embrace the Term "Sex Worker"
It has taken me many years to embrace the term “sex worker” as an identity, as a group identifier, and for the power the words hold: to invoke, to open, to frighten, to distance, to connect.
Part of my work exists within the formal sex work marketplace, a fascinating ecosystem that is well-established with norms and rules and spaces. However the work I do is different in nature than classic sex services: it ranges from lightly to deeply therapeutic, it comes with different protocols and procedures, and it often doesn’t involve any sex. Even when it does, most of the time sex isn’t really the point—it’s more of a vehicle, a medium.
Because of the differences in practice and purpose, I’m aware that I don’t have to call mysef a sex worker. I could blend in behind the waves of the booming wellness industry and come up with more palatable wording. However to do so would be to distance myself from the traditions that have taught me, kept me safe, and paved the path I walk. It would be to leave behind my colleagues, who are often holding the world up from the shadows, taking on important personal and political work that is rarely recognized. And it would deprive me of the opportunity to spark important conversations about autonomy, labor, and power in my daily life. I’ve chosen to embrace the term, wherever it’s safe and possible, to honor its tradition, align with and uplift the powerful transnational activist movement, and to provoke important conversations.
To honor the lineages of this work
Connecting into this work as ancestral practice, I’m acutely aware of how many centuries it has been outlawed, hunted, pushed underground and into the darkness to even speak of the erotic, let alone practice. Erotic work as healing and spiritual technique has been stripped of its honor, respect and institutional home. I want to honor those who have kept these traditions alive for so long in the face of the impossible. While today we still face criminalization, censorship, and all manners of disrespect, previous generations faced much worse. I speak their names and walk in their footsteps with pride and admiration.
More presently, Mexico City is one of very few places in the world in which sex work has been decriminalized. I could not be here doing this work out loud without the lifechanging activism of those who have fought before me. I take every opportunity I can to honor that fight.
Because I’m honored to be a part of this important movement
Sex workers around the world share a common struggle for dignity, decriminalization, and access to social services and institutions. The movement touches issues not just of gender, sex, and bodily autonomy, but also of the nature of labor itself. Sex workers are fighting against patronizing proposals of regulation, declaring all over the world that we don’t want bosses and we don’t want to be saved, we simply want respect and to be taken seriously in our work on our own terms. It’s a transnational community of brilliant and talented people offering multiple serious and important challenges to the status quo. Sex work is also a topic that’s frequently at the forefront of free speech, censorship and internet legal issues in the U.S., shaping public policy around internet and speech civil liberties in real time. In this moment in human history, the discourse around sex work is one to follow.
To make people squirm, and address stigma where I can
The idea of sex work brings up lots of anxieties for lots of people. It pushes all types of buttons: stepping outside of the prescriptions of sexual “should”s, perceived dangers of intermingling with imagined shady folks, association with human trafficking and common assumptions that no one would ever choose to do sex work if they didn’t have to. And at the very other end of the spectrum, the very challenging idea of work involving pleasure…to name just a few!
Before starting this work, I didn’t know any sex workers or think about them very much. They always seemed abstract and far away, a fringe population. Now that I’m immersed in this universe, I see how central and prolific sex work is across all layers of society, and how what sex workers are fighting for benefits us all. I love going to a perfectly respectable dinner party, answering calmly that I’m a sex worker, watching faces turn white, and combating stigma over appetizers.
Oftentimes, it turns out, I’m the person at dinner who most loves their job.
