He’s a white man in his 40s, a professor at Georgetown University and is just aggressive enough to come off as suavely assertive. He tries to touch my ass, only to get his hand slapped away with a playful “You have to pay to touch that, sweetheart.” We chat for a few minutes about his job, I convince him that I’m really a college student, and then I explain just how much he has to pay if he wants to touch me again. He resignedly agrees to come upstairs with me, takes a few hundred dollars out of the ATM and hands me two fifties. I start my dance slowly, trying to gauge what kind of customer he is, and then proceed to make his night, allowing him to touch me only in the areas I specify.

My next customer is a Ben Affleck look-alike out with his business buddies on the company’s dime. Each man has paired off with a dancer, and we’re each doing our best to charm them into a sale. It’s later in the night, the club is louder and the crowd is more drunk so our conversation is mostly limited to sarcastic witticisms and exclamations over certain body parts. My customer finally takes the bait and convinces the rest of the group to take the party into a paid private room. The bottle service is brought in, the bill is signed, and the dancers are busy creating the foundation for the next hour’s fantasy. Ten minutes in, my client starts grabbing for my pussy and trying to de-bra the dancer next to us, ignoring our protests. The sexual harassment continues throughout the hour including multiple too-painful ass slaps, dick flashing, unwanted licking and racial slurs.

What neither of these men know is that I worked around their respective transgressions because I’m behind on my car payment, rent is due and I need to buy an iClicker before my lecture next Monday. They’re also unaware that my expressions of pleasure during our dances were just as fake as the alcoholic drinks they bought me beforehand. As a sex worker, part of my job is to perform for my client by cultivating a space of empathy and relatability around our interaction. Sometimes this includes feigning interest in a particular type of eroticism or conversation topic. It also involves asserting sexual and professional boundaries (two separate sets of boundaries, sometimes overlapping) when needed.

The Affleck look-alike’s unfortunately common belief that payment translates to unconditional consent is obviously problematic. But many people would look at these situations and say that I can’t consent to either of the sexualized interactions because of my financial pressures, or that my agency is invalid because I harbor no sexual desire for these men — I’m only allowing them to touch me because I desperately need their money. But this idea that consent cannot exist within a sexual interaction where money is the motivation naturally implies that every single paid interaction is nonconsensual. Violation of my consent is then par for the course, accepted as an unfortunate and inevitable tragedy. This makes it impossible for sex workers to be taken seriously when we report that our consent has indeed been violated.

Conditional consent is the idea that one can negotiate consent within the bounds of a predetermined agreement. In sex work, we negotiate our consent based on our personal boundaries as well as the boundaries of our clients’ wallets. We don’t sell our lives or our bodies, we sell a non-expendable service.

The idea that monetary exchange invalidates my agency is preposterous. The reality of our lives is that we live in a capitalist society and most of us regularly consent to perform some sort of work for money. Choosing to single out sex workers from everyone in this system and trying to negate the credibility of our conditional consent is whorephobic in that it invalidates the legitimacy of our work. It’s like saying that a salaried worker willingly sitting in a cubicle all day is unable to give full consent to participate in the daily grind because the financial pressures of everyday life cloud the purity of their consent.

As a woman who is part of a marginalized community, I need the support of people outside of the industry, especially feminists and social justice warriors, some of whom assume to know the needs of my community without considering our voice. For the most part, the rest of society sees these groups as more legitimate and worth listening to — in order to remain true to their own respective ideologies, sex workers need them to step back and let us have the mic.

Trixie Mehraban writes the Tuesday column on sex. Contact her at [email protected].