Do you love your job?

 We lie there in the afterglow of the fuckfest that just ensued, and we start to talk about other things.

It’s often my favourite part of a booking, our guards are down and the conversation usually evolves past the niceties and the ‘what are you doing at the weekend’s. We talk a little about my blog, she knows writing, and she appreciates my blog and confesses it is part of why she booked me. It’s nice to receive the feedback, a little market research if you will. So I know she’s coming from a good place when she suddenly asks me, ‘so do you love your job?’.

It strikes me as an interesting way to phrase the question. Few people want to know if I love my job, the question is usually centred around if I like my clients or if I ever have bad experiences - questions that make me squirm (I’ll never understand why people ask me to relive potential trauma for their amusement). We are lying in the sweaty remnants of a threesome that was fun and a perfect ménage à trois by any standard. In this moment I’m thinking, ‘fuck yeah I love my job’. I can feel the question has come from a place of care and curiosity, so I take a moment to really think about it.

Do I love my job? I think it’s a layered and complex question, more so than they realise. I’d love to just answer yes, and it be true without any ‘but’s. Moments like this? Hell, I think I have the best damn job in the world. Very few, if any jobs on the planet can offer the kind of highs I get with clients. Sure, there’s the obvious fun bits - orgasms, nudity and the physical type things that most (usually male) clients think are the most important. That’s really just the surface layer of things I love about the work. But it’s rewarding professionally in ways outside of sexual pleasure. If you’re a person who enjoys work in personal service - say nursing, caregiving, childcare, you’ll understand the kind of job satisfaction that I also feel when it comes to looking after people and taking care of their needs. They might be very different needs, but all the same, the nurturing aspect to it is there and there is very real job satisfaction in taking care of clients. A happy client makes me happy, and that’s part of why I always strive to be good at my job, it’s not so much about reputation and return business, though those things are important, it’s just that it feels good to make people feel good. That job satisfaction is highly rewarding.

But it’s more than that too. And this doesn’t apply to every booking - hobbyists who book frequently, as often as some of us order Uber Eats - this doesn’t really apply to them (and that’s fine, they’re fine clients and we all usually see quite a lot of them). It’s the clients for whom we know we are a little more than that, that really give us a sense of purpose. There’s a deep sense of ‘calling’ that happens for me when I see clients for whom our time together is special. Sometimes it’s a client who is very inexperienced in sex and wants a little guidance from someone more experienced or at least, kind enough to accept a little fumbling. Sometimes it’s a person who is exploring or affirming their sexuality. Sometimes it’s a person with a disability who hasn’t been touched in a long time. Sometimes it’s a couple indulging in their first fantasy. Sometimes it’s someone who is in a sexless marriage who feels unsexy and just wants to feel alive again. Sometimes it’s just that I’m someone’s first sex worker, or just anyone that craves and truly appreciates the intimate level of service I provide. 

These people make my job amazing. It’s knowing that I’m giving someone a little of something special. Nothing reaffirms my place in this industry more than receiving a message from someone telling me how much our time together meant to them. In times when maybe I’ve had some shitty clients, or just clients who probably forget me in a week because they shag half of Brisbane, these clients keep my fire burning. Making people deeply happy is the best feeling a person can have.

But even in those moments, it’s hard for me to outright say ‘yes, I love this job’. Because I think, it overlooks so much. I am quite afraid to let people know, hey, yeah I love this job, because I never want to gloss over some of the things we endure to exist. I don’t want people to think it’s all glamour and fucking and cash. Loving the work still has a cost. People always assume the cost is the risk of violence - which yes, obviously exists. Being a woman, I live with risk every day regardless of sex work or not. Domestic violence rates in this country are genuinely scary, and yet we don’t assume all of our friends are victims of violence, even if statistically they possibly could be. Sex work can come with risk, for the reason that we deal with men on a regular basis, not because the work is inherently violent. 

Some of the biggest prices we pay to be in this work are outside of the actual in-person parts of the job. For example, I can’t put this job on my CV. And that doesn’t sound like a big deal on the surface, but from every other career you can usually continue or further your career after 10 years in any job, except for this one. Coming back to the civilian world from sex work with a big hole in your CV is hard, when none of the skills you’ve acquired as a business person are easily accounted for or explained. You can apply for a minimum wage job and find you’re too old or overqualified or you can aim too high where they’ll screen you beyond where your lies can realistically take you. Even if you’ve studied, or had children, or travelled, that gaping hole will still limit your employability. Quite simply, putting your mouth on genitals for a business, even if legal, will not be accepted as relevant job experience and most likely will see you culled immediately, probably as the office joke for the day.

Beyond employment challenges, there’s the real world stigma of being a sex worker. From my own experiences, even under New Zealand decriminalisation, I had my bank accounts shut down after a lifetime of being a customer, because they deemed my job too ‘high risk’. All I’d wanted to do was shut down a joint bank account after my painful separation and ended up with a small office swarming with men leering at me, telling me basically that I was a hassle and they shut my accounts on the spot, when I had no other bank accounts anywhere else active. It’s almost like they didn’t want me to be legitimate in my business even though they claim that was their main concern. They didn’t decline a loan, I wasn’t asking for money, they just shut down my day-to-day banking because of my job. And legally, they could do that as businesses are allowed to make their own choices about the risk they deem customers to be, even if it’s discriminatory. Hotels and AirBNBs will also turf you out and even ban you for life for similar reasons. I lost a very close friend after her partner basically banned her from hanging out with me, I can’t get insurances, I have family members who won’t speak to me (they aren’t the ones I care about thankfully), I have to lie on rental applications, and every time I tell someone what I do, it’s a ‘coming out’, because there’s always a risk that I kill that friendship or that they have a big mouth and it kills other friendships or opportunities in my life. I’ve had significantly less blowback in my life talking about my polyamory and sexuality than I have being a sex worker. Feminist circles are divided, which means many people in otherwise progressive pockets of the world either hate me or rule me unable to speak for myself. The online world is a minefield of hate and misogyny, and that’s where I have to advertise and find clients. My daily life involves wearing blinkers, whether online where people spew hate about me or people like me, or out in the world where people sometimes creepily stare at me out of recognition.

So I guess, I have to love my job. Because if I didn’t have these moments, resting my head on these (really quite lovely) boobs, with a man half asleep on my thigh, I can’t say it’d be worth it. I don’t know if I could mentally endure the prices I pay if I didn’t have great clients, and these perfect little moments. The reward of the work, the feelings of service, the joy of nudity and free-spirited loving and all that glittery happy stuff really needs to be there. I hear all the time, clients and spectators and even naïve partners saying they’re jealous of my work, and it does get to me, even if they’re right in seeing my joy for the work. Because the degree of resilience, street smarts and emotional labour that goes into living through the shit stuff and turning up with a smile on your face to these moments, is beyond what most people really are capable of, which is why being a sex worker is a talent, worthy of it’s hourly rate (and more), and no-one should expect anything less for us, than to have a fucking good time doing the job we sacrifice so much to do.

I hear myself, nearly a bottle of Moët down, starting to deep dive down this convoluted rabbit hole and I stop myself. This is their fantasy, their moment, and even from a place of care and curiosity I’m overwhelmed by the words it would take to make someone fully comprehend, post-coitally, the complicated love I have for this work. I nuzzle into her breasts a little more and bring myself back to this moment, one I want to savour, and I say, genuinely - ‘of course I do, look where I am’.

PETRA FOX

Twitter: @foxandthefeline

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Web: petrafox.com.au