Sex workers are a profoundly diverse group of individuals, with wildly different backgrounds, circumstances, and work tactics. But I’ve been around the block enough times to know that within this corner of our lives, our experiences often coincide. On a near-daily basis, I recognize another escort displaying the signs of an attitude I too once held. So without further ado, here are five common hooker states of mind that I suspect most of you will recognize, in others if not in yourself.

Everyone Must Know — The most embarrassing, cringe-inducing mindset is also one of the earliest to appear among a subset of privileged, politicized, very young sex workers. Think about the worst qualities of most middle class college kids: their naiveté, which they’re (naively) convinced is actually a very sophisticated and hard-earned understanding of the world; their youthful earnestness; their awkward, hyper-self aware social skills or lack thereof. Throw in a job at the local strip club/jack shack/full service incall and it’s a recipe for humiliating disaster. I was convinced that I could single handedly eliminate at least, like, 50% of the stigma around sex work by making it clear that I — a white, educated, intelligent young woman! — was selling sexual services and was TOTALLY EMOTIONALLY FINE and THRIVING and indeed, STILL WHITE AND EDUCATED in spite of it.



I told my hairstylist. I told potential new friends when they were still only acquaintances. I told former teachers while I asked them to write me recommendations for my grad school applications. I even announced it once to a roomful of classmates, apropos of practically nothing, and was so proud of myself for doing so. (“Look at me, I just blew their closed little, non-handjob-selling minds.”) I loved dropping the “sex worker” bomb for its inherently provocative qualities, even though the wind was regularly knocked out my sails by ignorance. (“So what exactly is a webcam?” a doctor asked when I told her I worked on one. She definitely thought I was making my living through a rarified form of tech support.) It is so excruciating to think about now, I can barely handle it.



Maybe someday I’ll have more sympathy for the young me, whose heart was so entirely, if so cluelessly, in the right place, who recognized and defied the injustice of prostitution’s criminality and stigma, albeit in a clumsy way. I wanted validation as someone with something important to tell the world, and as someone who sincerely wanted to make a positive social impact. Sadly, this made me the type of idiot “ra ra sex work!” brand new worker who irritates the wits out of everyone else in the field. What can I say? My memory of this time is fittingly painful punishment, I assure you.



I’m Hot Shit — While my “everyone must know” phase died out well within a year, the “I’m So Hot” attitude seems to be a more persistent and reoccurring one and, sisters, don’t even pretend I’m alone in this. This one is easy to recognize from afar because it’s present in pretty much any escort who self identifies as “high end” and “exclusive” and “very expensive” outside of her own ad copy, in emails to strangers or on her personal blog. (And really, those terms are pretty played out for marketing, too.) She might be charging the regular market rate, but she feels very special about it, which is kind of cute, so she keeps dropping those phrases into any and every discussion about her work. This “I’m Hot Shit” mentality is linked to youthfulness, and I think it’s often sparked in a sex worker who’s realized her sexual power for the first time. Adolescence, for every woman and man I’ve ever met, is a time of crippling insecurity around one’s ability to appeal to another person romantically/sexually. So giving an 18 or 19 year old money in exchange for the honor of looking at her naked body — the naked body she has regularly doubted anyone would even want to look at for free — is like a speedball of power and affirmation. When it’s in the bloodstream, everyone better watch out.

I’ve seen these lil’ hookers at work, and they cannot take no for an answer because they’re too high on their own hotness to recognize no could ever be an answer. They are perpetually flexing their sexual charisma, even in situations where they’re not going to earn any money. This is often accompanied by a lot of authoritative, unprompted advice-giving on business, most of which is not very good but hey, I’m hot shit so everyone else should listen up. The times when I felt hottest and, not coincidentally, richest, were the times I was still seriously fucking up at work, muddling along with poor boundaries and ignoring my instincts in favor of a few hundred bucks, making far less than I would five years later with a less ego-tripping head on my shoulders.

But What About The Men — We all contain multitudes, and the fact that my “what about the clients?” brain came out so closely adjacent to the “I’m hot shit, watch me give this businessman a boner with a single look while the poor guy tries to buy some coffee” is a testament to that. I know you can’t tell anymore, but once upon a time I had a tender heart that was genuinely touched by how sexually rejected and lonely many of my clients felt. I was surprised and moved by how sweetly they could treat me, how sincerely they sometimes seemed to care about my comfort and happiness, and it hurt me to know they were slandered by the world at large because of their choice to pay me. I was so bothered by the unfair reputation they’d earned as violent and misogynistic monsters that I wrote a passionate essay about it.

I stand by everything I said in that essay. Now more than ever, my clients are incredibly generous, good men who have enriched my life in countless ways. But to insist that clients are truly in it with us is to ignore the Grand Canyon-sized chasm between how clients suffer and how sex workers suffer. There simply is no comparison when it comes to who is targeted for police harassment, arrest, assault, rape, and murder; no comparison between how being outed as a client impacts one’s career (see: David Vitter) and how being outed as a prostitute does (see: Suzy Favor Hamilton.) The more I think about it, the more I suspect a consuming concern about client stigma is a tactic to avoid dwelling on one’s own disadvantages as a sex worker. It’s hard to think how reviled and targeted you are because of your work, and easier to focus on how crappy it is that the sweet widower who always brings you a hot lunch at your incall is demonized by some feminists.

I AM A SOPHISTICATED PROFESSIONAL — This one is the worst because of how profoundly humorless its holder becomes. SOPHISTICATED PROFESSIONALS are those escorts who have decided that 95% of their fellow hookers are classless and confused and just generally not doing it right, though the qualifications for “doing it right” are entirely subjective and unique to each SP. This is where “courtesan” gets thrown around a lot, and snooty comments about “finding another job” are par for the course when any other sex worker complains about a booking or makes fun of a client. SPs are very offended when another escort will take long appointments but not adore every moment of it, or see more than one client in a day after claiming they don’t. Because of their weird, hooker-policing attitude, SPs resemble the most sour, sexist, review-writing clients. You know the ones: the guys who like to drone on about how “real” providers love every man and every cock with every fiber of their beings while greedy, frigid, bad providers are just in it for the money. SPs might be right about how creatively and intelligently they treat their business, but their egos are still about 100x more inflated than is warranted. I think this attitude is inherently unsustainable, more than any of the others, because it’s so goddamn lonely not to vent and laugh with other sex workers. SP’s might interact with other escorts in order to give holier-than-thou, unsolicited advice, but they’re incapable of fully connecting to their peers. (They don’t have any peers, remember?)

Righteously Angry — Somewhere relatively late in a hooker’s career (ten years seems to be about right, though some of you anger savants get there sooner) comes the powerful intersection of years of servicing entitled men and mulling over the shitty power dynamics that taught them to be so goddamn entitled. These twin experiences unite like the peak of an arrowhead inside the soul of the righteously angry sex worker, who has realized she will no longer take shit from anyone, no matter how much they’re paying her. Not everyone who reaches this point will identify as a misandrist, but there’s usually a healthy dose of fed-up-ed-ness with men accompanying the rage at an entrenched and unjust social system. Radfems, rescuers, and irresponsible journalist also receive their fair share of ire. Don’t worry about exhausting your anger supply; there will be plenty to go around.

The righteously anger hooker has, one hopes, come full circle, back to the “tell everyone” phase, but this time equipped with a more solid sense of self, infinitely sharper political awareness, and years of experience to inform her that many aspects of sex work are problematic and need examining, with sex workers themselves at the head of the table. It’s not about self-disclosure (and self-exposure) anymore; it’s about educating people who need to know better. Though plenty of people, even fellow hookers, are going to pull tone argument bullshit on you — e.g. “you just said ‘bullshit,’ which is a bad word, therefore you’re too foulmouthed and déclassé to have anything valuable to say” — they can go fuck themselves with a silicon life-sized fist. The whore revolution will not be polite and palatable. Can you tell which headspace I’m in right now?