I, a feminist, have arrived at ground zero. Like Gloria Steinem infiltrating the Playboy mansion in the 1960s, I’ve encountered my fair share of the “ugly” side of my profession; but at the same time, I wasn’t at all surprised to read Playboy’s insistence that Steinem’s exposé of Hefner’s hare harem actually boosted bunny recruiting.

To put it bluntly: I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side of me, I have my supportive sex worker constituents. I am a strong, independent woman, doing what I please with a body that belongs to me. I am advancing myself economically, utilizing the very qualities of myself that a patriarchal society would seek to shame me for: my sexuality, my confidence, and my autonomy.

On the other side of me, I have my “radical” feminist critics, who insist that I am a brainwashed instrument of my own oppression. I am reinforcing a patriarchal standard of women as objects, and contributing to the enslavement and oppression of my entire gender as a whole.

So which is it?

Both through my lived experience and my study of feminist thought, I can only reach the conclusion that there is far more to the story.

The solution to this false dichotomy lies in examining this situation from a much broader perspective. The pros and cons of my profession are bigger than the sex industry. While I can’t deny that the commodification of my sexuality is problematic, I don’t believe that the sex industry is to blame.

In fact, I think the sex industry has the potential to do a lot of good in the world, especially when it comes to healing certain collective wounds that lie gaping before us.

Margaret Atwood described these wounds well:

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

What I’ve come to understand is that these two true statements do not exist independently of one another; really the former causes the latter. Everything that’s problematic about my line of work speaks to a larger problem in our culture.

Yes, women are afraid men will kill them, and the murder statistics suggest that we have a good reason for that fear. But why do men, who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars just have us sit on their laps, want to kill us?

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and it’s because of this they’ve been conditioned to see us as beings that are perhaps, not quite human, not quite deserving of the same respect as a man. It’s easier to deal with rejection if you don’t respect the person rejecting you.

Historically, this has been the only way for men to correct the imbalance of power created by women being the choosers of the sexual marketplace.

This is more true for sex workers because we aren’t even quite women, let alone humans, are we? After all, we’ve devalued ourselves, our perceived youth, chasteness and innocence of our own sexuality being of value to our male counterparts in the sexual marketplace.

Why are such qualities considered valuable? Why does Stefan Molyneaux feel the need to tweet his thoughts about the viability of Taylor Swift’s remaining eggs?

I believe that what we are seeing here is an amplified version of what Freud called the Madonna-whore complex, an inability of men to concurrently experience sexual attraction and the attraction of a committed loving relationship.

Freud wrote:

“Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love.”

As Naomi Wolf pointed out in Promiscuities, this Madonna-whore dichotomy extends from the microcosm of the male mind to the macrocosm of social perceptions of gender.

Women are either good and chaste, or bad and promiscuous.

To truly love a woman (apart from her nipples) a man must make himself vulnerable to rejection. The fear of this rejection is so great that it has often led men to violence and even to murder– a dead woman can’t say “no.”

Men in strip clubs are indignant that they can’t touch my nipples because their knowledge of the world has led them to believe that they are entitled to. I have left the territory of “good, chaste,” and entered the territory of “bad, promiscuous,” where anything goes.

Really, in a world ruled by Madonna-whore thinking, women take the short end of both sticks, relegated to fulfill either the archetype of “wifey” or “thot,” with no room for nuanced character or humanity in between.

What men pay for when they visit strip clubs, brothels, or porn websites isn’t sexuality in itself, or the essence of the woman herself as the “selling-her-body” cohort seem to suggest.

By selling our time and attention to men, we are providing freedom from the fear of rejection. Strippers will laugh at your jokes, even when they aren’t funny, and the girl in that Pornhub video doesn’t care how tall you are. We are offering an opportunity to experience the whore without that pesky Madonna in the way, slapping your hand away from her nipple.

Paradoxically, the power of sex workers lies almost entirely in providing the illusion of power to others. Like the stripper who pays to enlarge her breasts because of the cards she drew from life’s stack, the sexually unappealing man will have to pay (by one means or another) if he wants to enhance his appeal or even his own belief in it.

This is why I believe the sex industry, which has existed since the dawn of human civilization, will always exist, in some form or another. Humans will always crave attention, affection, and acceptance. It’s vital to our physical health as well as mental– as shown by the fact that newborn babies will die if they are not touched.

In a perfect world, we’d all feel safe and valid in the embrace of our mother archetype: loved, cradled, appreciated. In reality, life will never be that simple.

Even removing the capital from the equation, a crucial problem still has not been solved. There will always be sexually unappealing people, so what exactly do we “do” with them?

Should they sit at home alone and contemplate dismembering those who have rejected them? Also, some people are very good at making unappealing people feel good about themselves, which can even help them to become more appealing. Why not let these people form symbiotic relationships?

If we remove the variable of coercion, which is what separates sex from sexual abuse and sex work from sex trafficking, what we’re left with is two consenting adults making an agreement.

One could argue, as Marxist feminists do, that the participants in this arrangement could never have full agency over their decisions, due to capital being used as a form of coercion. However, by that logic, all labor is a form of enslavement– and that’s a topic for another essay.

The root of how women have been marginalized for centuries is something that’s bigger than the economic and political structures of cultures. It transcends race, class, age, and circumstance.

It stems from the inability of men to see women as both “whore” and “Madonna” or both “sexual being” and “being deserving of respect.’’

It is the reason why my coworkers and I have taken to calling each other “slut” and “whore” in a way that is anything but pejorative.

This cognitive dissonance is the problem worth attacking, not teenagers masturbating in their bedrooms or Jennifer Lopez pole dancing at the super bowl. We must learn to integrate these two images, or at least find a way to allow them to coexist in our perception of women.

Until that day, I expect that I will continue to swat rude hands away from my nipples.