Sex Work Gives Me Anxiety — But For Me, It’s Better Than a Cubicle
“I have traded the conflict of the modern workplace for a fortress mentality.”
When I left university, the world of work seemed like a bountiful opportunity, a garden of challenging and interesting choices. I soon found that in the real world, finding work is more often a process of necessity and survival.
For years, I did administrative work in business, politics, and the non-profit sector. Then I fell into the orbit of a narcissistic sociopath. Three years later, I was blessedly free of him, but found myself in a tiny village in the deprived southwest of the United Kingdom, barely scraping by on seasonal work and scrambling to pay rent. I spent hours honing my CV and cover letters and trawling job boards with increasing frustration. I realized that I could keep applying for office work in towns an hour away by unreliable bus, competing with fifty or more applicants — or I could try something different.
After a hard look at my circumstances, I decided to take up sex work. My lifelong anxiety hadn’t throttled my performance in office jobs, but a decade of cubicles had exhausted me. My social anxiety in the workplace outweighed my competence. I was undeniably weird, and in job after job, my colleagues would grow cold. I would lie awake night after night, wondering if tomorrow was the day I would be fired.
After three sleepless nights during my frustrated job search, I stared through bleary eyes at my CV on my flickering screen. I had never actually been fired, but contracts were rarely renewed, and I had wandered from job to job. I had devoured self help books, seen three different kinds of therapists, and tried a medication that gave me even less sleep, a clenched jaw, and no abatement in my anxiety. What use was starting again in a new workplace?
In that moment, shivering from the inner cold of exhaustion, I found my pride and rage. I did not have to try to conform to workplaces where I didn’t fit. The books, the pills, the six different jobs hadn’t fixed it. It was time to work for myself.
I opened a new document and made a list of my skills. There were four items on the list. Writing, editing and transcription paid peanuts; I needed a strong, reliable cash flow. The fourth item on the list was becoming a dominatrix.
Sex work was by no means unthinkable for me; for much of my adult life, I had been an active participant in the BDSM community. In time I had gotten to know some sex workers as personal friends, and over time, I had acquired much of the experience, tools, and skills required to engage in professional kink. Plus, I felt like I had finally found something I was both good at and enjoyed. It’s worked out well: self-employment has drastically lowered my anxiety, but the stigma and isolation of sex work have brought me new worries, and have challenged my efforts to seek mental health support.
I started out with phone sex, where I learned to be the chameleon, helping clients bring their fantasies to life. On one call, I might gently talk someone through the process of dressing them in frilly girls’ clothes; on the next, I could be describing the adventures of a fantasy me, a cheerful cougar who preyed upon delighted tourists and fishermen in my village. I eventually moved in with a partner from the kink scene who had a nice home dungeon. Together, we had loads of equipment and a safe, legal premises. I had what was needed to launch my business as a professional dominatrix. I built my website, and soon received my first client.
My partner — now my husband — enjoys kink as a hobby only. When I have an appointment, we turn our sitting room into a fetish workspace. A session, which takes at least an hour, can involve anything from a thorough thrashing to the most intricate role-play scenario.
Six months in, I remember calling a good friend, an experienced dominatrix who had patiently given me valuable advice on starting my business. My voice shaking with relief, I thanked her for helping me create a steady trade of my own. I felt like until this point, my life had been an exposed house on a hill, and I had finally built sturdy walls around it.
I have lived with anxiety and depression since before I knew a few hundred words. For me, security is sweet, but I have paid a hefty price for it. In the United Kingdom, selling sexual services is legal, but many of the things that would make it safer and more profitable are not. To minimize risk, I work from home, and choose not to offer sexual penetration (though many BDSM professionals do). Clients find me online and I screen them for safety.
Much of what would make my work safer or more convenient is illegal. If I offer services with a friend, we become an illegal brothel. If I rent a friend’s studio, she can be arrested as a brothel-keeper. If I hire a driver or security, they break the law by working for me. And of course, I face the risk that a client will turn out to be dangerous, and he will know my address.
My anxiety is about the leaps not taken, the bridges left unbuilt. It’s meant that I’ve not pursued paths that could increase my income, like getting together with a few other sex workers, pooling our funds, and buying top-rate fetish furniture. There are dozens of extravagant, wickedly appointed studios dotted across the UK, but if I can find them, so can the police. No BDSM studio, massage parlor, or brothel is ever free of the threat of raids. So, I work; free, but limited.
That all said, I am profoundly privileged in my work, because on a day-to-day basis, I am only minimally exposed to the risks many sex workers face from police — not to mention the robbers and predators who sometimes masquerade as our clients. Even as an immigrant I benefit from privilege; since I’m from a Western country, I don’t face the terror, indignity, violence, and risk of deportation that sex workers from Eastern Europe and undocumented sex workers suffer. And because I’m a dominatrix, I experience far less stigma than full-service sex workers.
Though my burdens from sex work are smaller than others, they have affected me — and my health — profoundly.
Living with anxiety is often a matter of choosing the least of two panics. The chance that a client might try to assault, rob or blackmail me in my own home makes my heart race with each first meeting, but I choose that panic over the fear of the police descending on me, knocking on the door of a studio far from home, seeing me dressed up in my fetish gear and my client in one of the most vulnerable moments of his life.
Although I am less likely to experience the terror and chaos of a police raid on my private studio, I fear interacting with them. If I am threatened, cheated, or assaulted and I choose to go to the police, I become known to them as a sex worker.
Being known as a sex worker in the eyes of the law has consequences if I ever need help from the police. A friend who does full-service sex work was raped and robbed by a client. She encountered a patronizing, unsympathetic cop who told her to get a different job — and had to threaten legal action in order to get a rape kit taken at the hospital. Another friend, cheated out of hundreds of pounds by a party organizer, couldn’t go to the police because bringing the law down on the host could drag other sex workers and clients into the limelight.
Although I am a legal resident of the UK, paying taxes and working within the law, sex workers here and worldwide know that police officers and departments can act based on stigma rather than the law. With this constantly in mind, I am wary of contacting the police. For me this is a particular burden because I have an active stalker. Instead of seeking legal recourse, I’ve had to become a near hermit, avoiding the parties and clubs of the kink scene and making sure I never advertise my plans on social media.
I’ve become isolated in other ways too. I am a cold ocean away from most of my family, with whom I rarely speak. It feels wrong to manufacture a false life for them, when both my living and writing revolve around sex work. They may celebrate my writing, which appears in publications they might recognize, but would almost certainly regard the sex work that supported me to write it as distasteful and horrific.
There are only two people nearby who I can trust enough to share anything about my life as a sex worker. Most of my closest friends are online, people who I have met in vibrant communities of feminist writers and socialist thinkers. Most of the time, this small support system is enough for me, but there are limits. If I get involved in any activity — politics, hiking, even a book group — I must choose between staying in the closet and risking discovery or being up-front about my work and facing stigma.
My response has been to withdraw; saying no to new activities that involve meeting people, and keeping things light when I must meet them. I have traded the conflict of the modern workplace for a fortress mentality. I am safe within my walls, within the narrow life that doesn’t make me anxious, but when I venture out, I am terrified.
So many sex workers face so much worse every day, but my modest burdens of isolation, alienation, and fear take a toll on my health. Sometimes, I can’t sleep, particularly before meeting a new client. When something bad happens to me, I tend to catastrophize, to blame myself for circumstances outside my control. I cancel social engagements at the last minute, unable to face the prospect of wondering for days afterwards if I said or did the wrong thing.
And then there are the barriers to accessing healthcare. Risk of physical disease is low in my particular line of sex work, and anonymous clinics here test anyone who walks in the door. But if my National Health Service doctor were to learn that I do sex work, that information would go in my file. Colleagues of mine report that doctors can attach a number of stigma-laden assumptions to patients who they learn are sex workers. One reported that she could not get opiate pain medication after an operation, as her doctor feared she would sell or abuse the drugs. Another told me that her doctor refused to prescribe benzodiazepines for panic attacks, saying that if she wanted not to panic, she could stop doing sex work. So I keep my work to myself and lie to my doctor, rather than risk having to argue over my treatment.
If I were to seek mental health care from a therapist assigned by the National Health Service, or found randomly online, I would risk finding one who views sex work as disgusting or alien. Too often sex workers find that anyone, upon learning what it is that we do, might see their own distorted image of a sex worker, rather than seeing us. An experienced sex worker I know, a dear friend who has struggled with lifelong anxiety, tried three different therapists last year. She walked away from each of them after a single session. One suggested she quit her job; another insisted, without any prompting, that my friend had been abused as a child; and the third believed she was a sex addict. “I don’t even particularly like sex,” my friend had told her.
I’m lucky that I found — and can afford — a good therapist who works privately over Skype and is friendly to sex workers. Speaking with him has been a godsend; although my work itself doesn’t pose problems to my mental health, the fact that I can be open about it in therapy means that I can get help fighting back with healthy thinking patterns when being isolated and stigmatised gets me down. I told him recently that I feel like I live in in a shell of fear and politeness, planning and orchestrating every interaction, thinking everything through twice. Like any armor, it protects me while restricting me. Eventually I will dismantle it and walk free, but for now, it is an ark against a flood of anxiety.
But though I count my blessings every day, I am always aware that no matter how close I come to curing my anxiety, the real threats and struggles of sex work may not fade in my lifetime.
Even with its hazards and limitations, I am grateful for my life. I am ever more clearly focused on the goal of conquering my anxiety entirely. My life has rigid boundaries, but I work, write, love, and plan for the future. The taste of creative pleasure and success makes me eager for more, wondering how I might think and write without my anxiety. In the world, I fight for the full decriminalization of sex work, and from my fortress, I wage an inner war against my worry and fear.
Photographs by Laura Stevens for The Development Set. // The Development Set is made possible by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We retain editorial independence. // The Creative Commons license applies only to the text of this article. All rights are reserved in the images. If you’d like to reproduce the text for noncommercial purposes, please contact us.
