Finances and Sex Work
Starting out or working in the sex industry can be daunting in terms of the financial aspects. Money is coming in, sometimes more than you’ve ever made or even seen before. It can be a bit overwhelming to plan and handle your money. I am not at all a tax professional, financial planner, or really anything but a whore with some experience. This is just advice from me to you, not intended to substitute for professional (well, that kind) advice. It was also not intended to help you avoid the system. Pay your taxes!
First and foremost, you need to plan your budget. How much money do you need to pay rent, utilities, credit card payments, loans, car payments, food bills, and so on? How much money do you need each week or month in order to cover the necessities? Figure this out first. Everything else after this amount is disposable income.
Based on your budget, some market research, and the guidance of other sex workers, calculate your rate. I’m not an expert on this. There are others who can help you, like the book The Internet Escort’s Handbook by Amanda Brooks. Similar principles apply, no matter what type of sex work you do.
Set up a book-keeping system. Having no way to track how much money is coming in and going out will end up hurting you. You’ll have no way to know what you’re averaging and how much you’re spending. This can be as simple as a writing down everything you make in a notebook or as complex as a color-coded spreadsheet or financial software. A good, basic system is the date, the number of or type of appointment or job, and the amount made.
Figure out how to handle your cash. If you are working for a club, dungeon, or company that issues you a paycheck instead of you dealing with cash, skip this.
Decide what you want to do with your cash. Keep in mind that anything you deposit in a bank account, pay bills with, or buy large items with leaves a paper trail. If you want to keep your cash handy, one thing you should invest in is a good fire-proof safe. Keeping a lot of cash on hand is risky as a sex worker. If others find out, you can be at risk of robbery. A safe can help. Don’t hide cash in obvious places, like your mattress, the freezer, your toilet tank, and so on. If you’ve seen it in a movie, other people have, too. Consider having a dummy safe. This is a safe you hide in a more obvious place (under your bed, for example) and keep a small amount of cash in. Then, get a good, sturdy, floor-bolted safe or wall safe to keep more in. If a thief breaks in, the thief will quickly discover your dummy safe and leave your main safe alone.
Depositing cash is a good idea. Consider either a safety deposit box or a bank account. It’s a good idea to have three bank accounts: a personal checking, a savings, and a “business” checking. This can just be a personal account you filter all of your money through before it goes into your personal account. Keeping your money separate can demonstrate that you are organized in your business book-keeping.
Now that you have a budget and are handling your money, start some basic financial planning. What are your long term goals? Are you doing sex work to pay for something, pay off something? A really good rule of thumb is to have three months’ of expenses in savings. That way, if you want to take a break, you get fired, transition, the market turns around, you are hurt and can’t work, you’ll have a cushion. You’ll also have money in case of an emergency, like a car breaking down or a medical bill.
If you can afford it, consider basic health insurance, catastrophic only. If you are young and have no major health problems, you can usually get this cheaply. It will have a high deductable (sometimes $5,000 to $10,000), so it’s not for your annual exam or going into the doctor when you have a cold. It’s just in case you have a major event happen. If you get hit by a car or something equally terrible, the medical bills can wipe you out. Having insurance can protect you.
Once you have met your savings goal of three months’ expenses, start a savings plan for other things. If it’s for school, for a car or a house, or something else, think about your investments. This is my weakest area because, to be honest, having enough money to invest has never really happened to me before. But consider seeing a financial planner for this service, or someone like the Financial Madam. You can make low risk investments, like a savings account with interest, savings bonds, or certificates of deposit. You can also make higher risk investments, like stocks. Having a long-term retirement plan is an awesome idea.
In general, try to be smart with your money. If something is a business investment (like a computer to check your email on, a car, or sometimes clothes), talk to your tax preparer about what is deductible. Otherwise, try to avoid the impulse to spend all of your money just because it’s there. I went through a period like that when I first started working. I had an awesome time and got some lovely shoes, but when I needed to get out like right now, I had absolutely nothing to fall back on.
On the issue of things to do with your money, consider reinvesting in your business. Again, some of these things are tax deductible. Setting up a business model is a good idea. Decide what your long-term goals with your type of sex work are. Use some of your income to place ads in the right places to tap your target market. Get professional photographs. Set up a website. Make little investments to set yourself up for long-term success.
When things get more complicated, there are many more issues to consider, like becoming incorporated or becoming an LLC. These are things I know nothing about at all, hence, talk to a financial planner, an attorney, and definitely your fellow sex workers. Being smart with your money is the best way to gain your independence.
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Tags: finances, financial, money, sex work, taxes
Ableism and sex work
I have been thinking lately about disability and mental illness, part of which is inspired by Amber Rhea. I came into sex work activism from mental health activism. I wanted to fight the stigma of mental illness. Now, it seems to me, couching mental illness in the framework of disability is beneficial. I don’t think it’s exactly parallel, but it’s helpful to me.
I’m writing this to call out some serious ableism that happens within the sex work community. Everywhere I look, activists are countering the Farleyist, abolitionist sentiment that all sex workers are victims by saying that they are happy, healthy sex workers. Given all the stereotypes and nonsense out there about how we sex workers are fucked up and damaged and doing this because we’ve been abused, I understand why this is a common defense. However, I think it’s an ableist and privileged defense, rather than countering the real problem with that stereotype.
On a gut-reaction level, it fucking hurts me. You know what, I am a crazy whore. I have dealt with mental illness. To call other crazy whores like me a small percentage or not common is a slap in the face. If you don’t want to be associated with crazy whores, then cool, I’ll find other people to hang around with.
As an activist, I feel like this comes from a position of privilege. It is easy for these people to dismiss mentally ill sex workers because they have not dealt with mental illness.
My mental illness and my work as a sex worker are intimately entangled. This is my point, though, and take careful notes: my experiences with mental illness do not invalidate my choices regarding sex work. My experiences influence my choices and vice versa, but having struggled with mental illness does not mean I cannot make decisions for myself in sex work.
For some people with mental illness, sex work isn’t good. It’s not a good experience or a good choice. But instead of attacking sex work, it’s time to tease out what’s really going on. I’ve made some bad choices in sex work due to my struggles with mental illness, but through lots and lots of therapy and self-reflection, I know which choices were because of being crazy and how to protect myself now.
So, next time you hear someone criticize sex work because sex workers are all crazy or all abuse survivors or all what the fuck ever, please don’t respond by dismissing crazy whores are the marginal. We’re everywhere. We’re part of your movement. Don’t throw us under the bus.
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Tags: abolition, activism, identity, mental health, privilege, sex work
Hester Prined.
It was the address thing that really crossed the line. Had it happened in isolation, I might not have taken it so hard. It was the escalation of events. When the address thing happened, I nearly broke down entirely, not knowing what would happen next. I had quit working by that point. I had gotten a respectable, full time job. I was trying to distance myself as much from my sex work persona as possible. And then the address thing.
I didn’t have a community of whores like I do now. I didn’t have anyone to ask for support. I had friends who knew, who only watched helplessly or made it worse, and a therapist who told me that I opened myself up for this kind of abuse.
It all started with the phone calls. Blocked numbers, on my personal phone, or the occassional unblocked number. They were mostly from people I knew or who knew people I knew. All hours. Usually middle of the night. Sometimes there were messages left. “Everyone knows you’re a whore!” I began to have panic attacks when a number I didn’t know showed up on my caller ID.
I should have changed my number. But I didn’t want Them to win.
It escalated to emails at my personal email address. Slut-shaming, inappropriate questions, whorephobia. How They got my personal email address, I don’t know. I changed it. I suspect that old friends, people I no longer associated with for whatever reason, gave it out. I do know that these people circulated the knowledge that I was a sex worker.
Then it got more personal. People I didn’t know would come up to me at parties or bars, asking questions, making whorephobic comments. I became afraid to go out. I lived in a constant state of fear.
Finally, the address thing. Someone I once knew who, I suppose out of the realization of how fucked up it was, called me. There was a fraternity in another city, several hours away, circulating my information, my phone number and address, at parties. People I had no idea who they were. People who made it a fun game to routinely out sex workers in this manner.
What could I do? Not knowing if shit would escalate to people now showing up where I lived, I moved.
It’s been a long time. I’ve (mostly) moved on. I’ve gotten smarter about protecting my privacy, but I know I’m not perfect. I no longer have panic attacks when unfamiliar numbers show up on my phone.
This level of slut-shaming shouldn’t shock me, but it does. The people who circulated my information didn’t know if someone they passed it on to was a rapist or a serial killer, or just someone who assumed that my health and safety weren’t important because I was a sex worker.
I dealt better with people assuming that because I was a sex worker, because I exchanged some erotic services for money with some people, that I would exchange all erotic services with everyone. I could not deal with the assault on my privacy, on this public shaming. There is a reason I had a working name.
I know I’m not unique. I know that sex workers everywhere live in fear of being outed. I know that sex workers everywhere face serious consequences when outed, from emotional stress, physical harm, to loss of jobs, houses, family, and friends. But to those who do it, it doesn’t matter because we are asking for it.
I heard the same line when I worked at an abortion clinic and dealt with the fear of my information being circulated by anti-abortion extremists. If I couldn’t handle it, I shouldn’t be doing the work. If I was ashamed, I shouldn’t be doing the work.
There is a difference between being ashamed and being afraid. Not wanting to be publicly outed in such a manner was not because I was necessarily ashamed of my choices (though I might regret some), it was about not wanting to live in constant terror. The unrelenting psychological abuse. The fear that I might be assaulted or killed in my own home.
I don’t know what can be done about this, other than constantly being aware of the threat. Sex workers do the best than they can to avoid being outed. But the people who out us, either out of malice or because it seems amusing to us, they will keep doing it. They don’t care. Even now, there are people reading this, wishing me ill, thinking it would be hilarious to out me. Or that I should be outed because I need to be treated like Hester Prine and be truly repentant for my sins.
The fear of being outed isn’t out of shame. It is out of fear. Just because I am a sex worker doesn’t mean that I am not also a person, complete with thoughts and emotions. I may trade certain erotic experiences for money, but I am not selling or trading all of myself, my body, and my personality. Or, for that matter, my privacy. Like working for the clinic, I enjoyed and took pride in my work. But I did not want to be a target for someone else’s issues.
Sex workers are not public libraries. All of our information is not open and available to all. We are just trying to make a living.
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Tags: out, sex work, violence
The trouble with boots.
One thing I love about being a sex worker is the exciting outfits. I get to dress up in so many different ways and own different, fun, sexy things. Here’s my problem: boots. I have painfully skinny calves. I’ve always had skinny calves. Even when I did weight-lifting and had strong calves, I had skinny calves. Boots seem to be sold in calf-sizes according to your foot size. I can’t ever buy boots because I look ridiuclous with all the extra material around my legs. Someone would make a mint selling boots in different calf-sizes.
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Tags: fashion, random, sex work
Pink slipped.
A pink slip is something you get when you are fired (”down-sized”?) from your job. It is also something you get if you are involuntarily committed. Both are signs of being economically fucked. This is something baffling about the treatment of crazy people. (And again, I use crazy in the same way I use whore. I’m trying to reclaim the label. Is it working? Fuck if I know.) If you are so fucking crazy that you can’t take care of yourself and are pink slipped, your insurance won’t cover your bills. Now, your insurance probably won’t cover your care in the first place. But inpatient psychiatric treatment is expensive as all get out.
I think they call it a pink slip because the form they fill out is pink. It’s a real ego boost to read yours, let me tell you. This is something I try to underscore about the difference between all you sane folk and all us crazy folk out there. Your knowledge of being pink slipped comes from Girl, Interrupted and how sexy Angelina made it.
Both times I was pink slipped, I had to be sedated because the “ruckus” I was causing was upsetting the other patients in the ER. I’m sure it was because I wasn’t going along quietly and they wanted me to be a calm, drooling, complicit psych patient. It’s all about drugs to these people. But I cannot describe without screaming what it feels like to be told by a stranger in a white coat, with whom you have had maybe a total of five minutes face to face time, that you are a danger to yourself and must be treated for your own good.
Then, it’s kind of like being in the zoo, I’d imagine. There is glass. There are robes and slippers because you can’t have things you could hurt yourself with or try to kill yourself with. You are on That side. You have to ask for your cigarettes and your soda. You have to ask to use the bathroom. You sit in a room filled with disgusting old couches and old magazines and television, never cable programming. When you are not there, you are either in your room with whatever other crazy person you are stuck with as a roommate. Or you are in group or individual therapy. You are expected to bare your soul because you are a good little trained seal and you are going to do a back flip for the waiting public.
People will visit you. They will give you horrified eyes and a fake smile. They may try to bring you things, but you can’t have the things until the things are approved by someone else. What do you say to a person who has been pink slipped? It’s almost better to have no visitors than have visitors. They will only make small talk or ask in a haunted whisper, How are you doing? or Why didn’t you say it was this bad? And you will sit there in your stupid gown and robe and slippers and be silently angry as they walk out the door. You will hate them for their patronization and their worried tone and their sanity.
Then you go and you sit on the disgusting couch and you watch the basic television programming and you wait. You wait for dinner. For group. For bedtime. For your medication. You wait around. Time has no meaning, really. You are in a perpetual state of waiting. There’s nothing else to do but wait. You might write in your journal, sure, or talk to the other crazy people. But mostly you just fucking wait around, doped up, waiting to smoke or push around your terrible food or get shuffled into your bed.
Eventually, the doctors will discharge you. This is some kind of glorious event. You grin at the other patients and you will be excited that you are going to be free. They will review your discharge plan because you will have to follow up with someone on your therapy, your drugs, your whatever, so you don’t end up pink slipped again. Not that you can afford it. You get your things back that were confiscated when you came in. This is like your very own This is Your Life the Night We Locked You Up, You Nutcase!
It’s funny. The first time, I went to lunch after I got out. It was like we were all conveniently forgetting the reason I was there in the first place. And then I went back to my life and lied to everyone about where I’d been and why. What would I have said? Yeah, yeah, I was in the loony bin, it was fucked.
And then you wait for the bills and the fall out and the feelings that will inevitably come. Because you will know that you have crossed through a door into a world that so few other people have crossed over into. You’ve come back from the dead. You were in Limbo, waiting for the heaven or hell judgment, only to be yanked back into the flesh. Why don’t they put that in the movies?
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Tags: crazy, mental health
Geekery.
I watched The X-Files growing up, even though I wasn’t allowed. It was one of the only cult television shows, until recently, that I really followed closely. I was much younger then. In middle school. During my “I’m going to read everything on black holes and pretend I understand it” phase. (I think I did, in part. I think I’ve just gotten dumber as I’ve gotten older.)
Then puberty and all the fucked up stuff that happens typically in middle school and high school, and to me in particular. The kind of stuff I used to be rabid about became shameful to me. I’d mention things about fantasy or science fiction or television shows in passing, as a joke, or as street cred. But I was afraid to indulge.
I’ve never been afraid of being nerdy. I’m a smart person. I love to read and think and talk and argue. Getting good grades and being generally nerdy and intellectual was never the problem. I think it was always more the geekery that I shied away from.
Recently, I’ve had to stop and reassess my feelings toward geekery. I’ve always had some fondness for the truly geeky, the dress up and go to ComicCon kind of geekery. But a distant fondness.
The first time I watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I will tell you exactly what I was thinking: fucking seriously? this shit is going to be silly. And now I have debates with people on the internet about whether Topher is more like Xander or Warren. Under my culturally groomed facade of disdain, I admired people who loved these kinds of geeky delights. I still do. And I’m learning to get in touch with my inner geek again. (I’d love to do a whores only viewing of Dollhouse.)
I think it harkens back to one of the most terrifying periods of my life. (There have been Three Great Epochs of Terror in the Life of Jane.) I was very young, pre-pubescent, verging on it. I wrote a lot. Lots of worthless shit. Not good. But it was more of a way for me to construct an elaborate fantasy life to escape my unpleasant reality. That kind of fantasy seeping into all aspects, inability to distinguish reality, that was terrifying. I would be afraid to be that kind of geek again.
But I now see the geeky kind of passion and devotion for cult television shows, books, movies, whatever else, not as something to be associated with a character flaw in order to protect myself, but as something to almost envy. People should have things that they love passionately and that make them happy. And my god, if it’s going to be Battlestar Galactica, then rock the fuck on.
(And you thought I only think about whoring.)
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Tags: culture, entertainment, geekery, mental health, random
Present, mind or body.
Someone who once hired my services asked me if I dissociated from my body during said service. To which I replied in some typical fashion in order to avoid the question. (When I am asked political questions on the job, I have a hard time biting my tongue. Case in point, a recent conversation I had in which I informed a client about prostitution laws.) Despite how much it annoyed me, the question put very succinctly what many people want to know when they talk about sex work.
I find this question incredibly frustrating and insulting. Why ask it just of sex workers? I’ll be frank. Yes, sex workers do detach themselves from their bodies sometimes during the act of whatever it is they’re doing (sex, lapdancing, etc). However, this is not further evidence for the pathological nature of sex work in general. Rather, I think it is a job skill.
The idea that when you’re bodily detached in sex work it’s bad without examining other ways you can withdraw from your body is suspicious. I can’t imagine than marathon runners are completely bodily aware for every step of their 26.2 miles. When I ran long distances, when I took dance, I found that kind of mental mastery over the body to be highly adaptive. I don’t care if it hurts, I am going to keep going.
I waited tables and tended bar for a while. If I had been completely present in my body for every minute of those shifts, I would have fucking killed someone. Aching back and knees, sore arms from lifting heavy trays, hurting feet. Yet no one who employed my services ever asked me if I dissociated.
It’s an adaptive strategy. Every encounter a sex worker has is not going to be glorious and fun and full of mind-shattering orgasms. But that doesn’t mean that adaptive job skills like being able to shut off your mind-body link make the job morally repugnant. This is, of course, in the context of regular, consensual business. A sex worker who dissociates in the course of violence from a client, agent, or pimp is not practicing a job skill, but an adaptive psychological mechanism.
There’s some fascination with sex work that constantly tries to pathologize it. The question posed to me was no exception.
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Tags: sex work
Too Serious.
I have been taking things Too Seriously. The only place I don’t is in my work. I am not one of those posturing kind of professional dominants. I just love to play. Getting paid for it makes me so happy.
It’s everything else. I think, as an activist, as someone who takes seriously the matrices of domination present in everyday life, everything is just so goddamned serious all the time. A lot of shit has gone down recently for sex workers and continues to go down as we’re scapegoatted endlessly for everyone else’s agenda. We have to fight tooth and nail just to be able to have a voice, let alone be listened to. Everything we say has to go through a great deal of privilege-awareness and anti-opression internal screening.
Every time I open my mouth or post on a blog, I wonder how I’m being oppressed, who I’m privileging and oppressing with my words. I wonder who would have my ass if I got outed for whatever fifty things I could be outed for. I do a lot of self-surveillance because I want to talk about the things I care about.
Plus, I just filed my taxes. In no small part due to my anxiety (which is fixated on money, often), I have been having waking nightmares. My car is making this odd rattling noise. It’s rusting. My car isn’t green enough. It gets twenty miles to the gallon. It’s old. I should walk more.
My life is filled with a lot of Deep Thinking on Serious Topics. What it amounts to is that I take myself too seriously. What do I ever think about? I think about how my history as a person battling mental illness puts me in a place of oppression. I think about how so few other people in the world have seen the inside of a locked ward.
And it’s just so fucking ridiculous. I take myself too seriously, it seems, to the point where I am frequently so crippled by self-doubt that I take up as little (metaphorical and physical) space as possible. And to what end? What is the fucking point of that?
Maybe I should have more sex. Maybe I’ve been topping too long and need to have some nice, dirty bottom fun with someone I trust.
I’m declaring today Quit Talking it all So Fucking Seriously Day. At least for myself.
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Tags: activism, mental health, seriousness, sex, sex work
There was an exotic dance venue in the surburbs busted recently for prostitution. It’s billed as providing one on one time with an exotic dancer. Two women were arrested on charges that they offered sex for sale to an undercover officer. In true, slut-shaming fashion, their pictures and names were published in the news.
It’s disgusting and shows such hypocrisy to publish photos and names of people arrested for prostitution. If you want them to leave sex work, how is publicly branding them as sex workers going to help? They go in for a job interview at a “straight” job, and the interviewer says, oh, I know you from the news, (you whore). It’s so clearly not about helping people and all about publicity for the cops.
Well, these women are fighting back, and I would love to know more about them. (Ladies, if you are reading this, drop me a line! I and everyone else in the sex worker rights activist community is in your corner. It doesn’t matter if you are or aren’t “really” a sex worker. You were arrested as one and that’s awful.) These two women went on the news to deny the charges against them. What I think is interesting is that the police have admitted they don’t have the supposed solitication on tape. That makes it about the cops’ word against the women’s.
That happens more than it should in prostitution cases. I’m sure the police are banking on these women rolling over out of shame and pleading out.
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Tags: law, news, sex work
Oh, the irony.
I noticed that Jacqui Smith “accidentally” expensed some pay-per-view porn. Prostitution is exploitation, but not when it’s on film, apparently.
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Tags: abolition
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