(This is part two of Virgin Whore at 44)
After feeding the ATM with my fat stack of Benjamins, I exhaled and walked towards the train station on Market Street, my giddy energy subsiding. I felt this wave of sadness and anger rising in my gut, but I had to unpack in my mind where it was coming from.
I felt stifled. I wanted to call my dad and all my friends and tell them my wild stories and that I had the best first day at my new job, but they knew nothing about Jenna Devereaux. They would be horrified, they would feel sorry for me, they would shame me, they wouldn’t understand.
I had to keep my joy locked inside and keep her a secret, which I would do for nearly a decade later from that day on.
Then I looked across the street where I worked a few years ago for $12 an hour, taking a part-time sales job as my freelance photography gigs were drying up. That company fired me for making an informal complaint about a colleague who sexually harassed me. It was right around that time I discovered “sugar” dating. In my experience after crossing the line to work as an escort, the sugar baby/daddy dynamic was the same emotional labor of being an escort but also playing the role of on-call sex therapist 24/7 with less power, less money, blurrier boundaries all while pretending to be the perfect easygoing girlfriend and walk on eggshells to get paid. Those sites advertised “available hot young girls” came with a shaming warning for us uppity women: “No pros allowed, you will be reported and banned.” They perpetuated the lie that good girls weren’t promiscuous money hungry hookers. That warning kept me in line for a few years— I didn't even know the term ‘sex worker’ then (even though I actually was one! Boy did I drink that Kool-Aid.)
I finally broke through after years of fear and my own conditioning. I studied other escort’s practices through their websites. I created rates for my time that were non-negotiable. I learned how to screen clients. I required a deposit to weed out time wasters. I created a stage name, creating a boundary and protecting my real identity from predators.
By taking back my power and control, putting up boundaries and getting paid upfront, I crossed the line and became a criminal. A whore.
And yes, I’m aware I didn’t have sex with that couple but it doesn’t matter the way prostitution laws take effect (receiving money or anything of significant value in exchange for sexual acts is criminalized in the US) and there’s also the stigma that permeates every type of sex work. I crossed the line and now I was one of those women— the ones I was told my entire life to stay far away from and feel pity for. Uneducated, lazy, psychologically broken, “daddy” issues, Stockholm syndrome, can’t think for themselves, morally bankrupt, sleazy, addicted, diseased, desperate for money. The butt of jokes, especially violent ones that further dehumanize sex workers and keep them on the other side of the line.
The antithesis of an empowered Good Feminist, which is how I saw myself at the time.
It dawned on me that I was fed a lie and I perpetuated this lie, making sure I stayed above an invisible line (good girls stay up here, bad whores go down there) and now and it was shattered. I had been duped. My mother lied to me, my father lied to me, Hollywood lied to me, Gloria Steinem lied to me. I let that line keep me meek, poor and hungrily accepting crumbs of shitty work for years. I was enraged that it took me until age 44 to let myself be a clearly defined sex worker commanding $1200 minimum for my time, a rate that felt good to me. Becoming a professional didn’t just give the me money I needed to lift me out of financial struggle and help me buy a house, which I was so grateful for by itself. It gave me a new identity, a brand new venture I was excited to excel in. Less stress about not making money in my career as a professional photographer, which I was so burnt out trying to survive. I became part of a close-knit underground community of badass women/marginalized people and it drew me in to sex worker activism. Even though I’m not an escort these days, I still struggle with my own internalized whoreaphobia and shame. I hope by sharing my stories I can educate and change the perception of who a sex worker is and why we need to de-stigmatize, decriminalize, free the secrets, let go of the shame and celebrate all forms of work and sexual self-expression. Sex work can be fun, empowering and it can also suck just like any other job we do to pay our bills.
Sex work is work.