Sex Work is a Bad Idea

Even when it's voluntary

A friend asked my opinion about sex work. She’s a therapist, and like many therapists, had a challenging [as in seriously messed up] family life that she expects to be processing until the end of her life. She has sisters who engaged in sex work for income and it had to be hard to hear about that.

As a young woman in my 20s, I was always hard up for money. I had a college degree but disliked being an employee. I’d done a fair bit of that in retail and was a hard worker. But I didn’t like the work at all. My degree was in psychology, and I’d started graduate school only to realize that rather than being a therapist, I needed to be a client. And I HATED some of the classes I’d taken in grad school. ‘Group process’ was especially annoying in that it was utterly unclear what we were supposed to get from watching people form subgroups and gang up on each other.*

So I used the rest of my student loan to buy a horse and went about enjoying my life while I figured out what I wanted to do. Not the best financial choice for sure, but then I’d had no one to coach me on what a good financial decision might look like. Most of my life included very little guidance of any kind, which left me often short of resources.

I had a reasonable housecleaning business, thanks to my BFF who taught me how [her sister taught her] and a niche that was working well for me, so it took some extra stupid spending on my part [because I really didn’t need that new saddle and bridle, etc.] before I started to slide into debt that I couldn’t handle.

While I never acted on the thought, I did consider prostitution as a way to make money. Ultimately I rejected it and found other solutions. And it’s good that I did. There are sound psychological reasons why someone like me would not only be at higher risk in sex work but also attracted to it. And that attraction isn’t a good or healthy thing.

80% of prostitutes are female. There are statistics on male prostitutes, but I’ll not cite them here. Female prostitutes are far more likely to die by violence than male prostitutes, and other statistics are equally tragic.