I have never really had a traditional job. Besides a few months of bar work and babysitting when I was a teenager—which were both cash in hand—I’ve always done sex work. I’m unfamiliar with contracts, sick pay, HR, as well as workplace etiquette, which is ambiguous and unknowable to me. Why can’t I say the lighting person on a set is hot if they are hot and I don’t even want to get with them? It’s just a truth, and everyone else has been whispering about it anyway. Why must I ask for someone’s email to approach them in an appropriate way about something? Given most people contact me for work on a burner phone without even knowing my real name, an Instagram message feels exceedingly professional to me. This lack of formality, and at times overfamiliarity, has meant that I’ve occasionally inadvertently crossed boundaries. Some people are charmed by it.
Sex work workplaces are both intimate and casual. There are some rules but they are clearly defined, often written on signs on the wall, not assumed. As a contractor, even my managers have never technically been my boss, and we work in a hierarchy that’s shifting and amorphous. In a way, as a sex worker you’re beholden to no one, able to walk out at any moment, disappear for a year and come back again if your brothel is happy to have you. It’s transitory work.
Recently, I co-created and performed in a show for a festival, where for the first time I worked within a set structure: there were chains of command and people to be deferred to, and things you couldn’t say. For five weeks I worked nine to five, and got to experience how other people live, catching public transport at peak hour and having to be somewhere “contractually”. “Contractually” was a word I kept saying because it sounded chic and felt camp to be bound by a legal document—I was playing at normativity. Of course, I have verbal agreements with clients, to perform this service for this much, but I’m not their employee.
It was fascinating to me to see all the personal and professional dynamics in a space like that, the closest I’ve been to the corporate world. I couldn’t help viewing the workplace through the lens of sex work. Having a director felt, to me, like having a sub/dom relationship; to be watched closely by someone all day and then told what to do by them is the height of kink. Everyone else told me that was normal though, to have a boss bossing you around, and no one else was excited by it.
A dominatrix friend of mine says all relationships are about power, even friendships. I felt that was a reflection of her occupation rather than a reality. Yet here I was, also unable to separate my interpretation of a theatre environment from my work as a hooker. I think about how all the BDSM clients I see are men from intensely bureaucratic and corporate workplaces, who have to constantly consider their behaviour, who have to toe the line, who have to manage, all in ways that I don’t. I suspect they use an interaction with me as escapism, as a way to relinquish authority, whereas for me, a freelancer, the taste of that push and pull of power at work, the dance of hierarchy, felt like flirtation.
The other thing that felt freeing was the act of collaboration. As a writer and a sex worker I’m always operating solo, and am responsible for every decision I make. But during the five weeks of the show, I was in a place where tasks were delegated, where the responsibility wasn’t all on me, where I could be propelled by other’s impetus. Where I could tap out of some things and lean into others if I chose, where I could be carried along by the construction of the contract rather than relying entirely on my own self-motivation. I could see how that could be both intoxicating in the short term and suffocating in the long term. It was titillating because it was a step outside my everyday reality. It was a novelty, in the same way that a booking can be for many of my clients.
