"Finding community helped me to not only work through a lot of shame that I held around being a sex worker, but also to develop the skills and tools needed to engage with kink and in-person sex work in a safer and healthier way."
I kind of always knew I was going to end up in the sex industry, to be honest. I became sexually active at a very young age and, despite growing up in a small, conservative New Jersey town, never seemed to possess any internalized shame around my desires.
I thought I’d had a plenitude of sexual experience when I started—I... had a sex blog where I would write about OKCupid and Craigslist hookups—but most of those encounters were things I was hazing myself through.
'Sex work is an eye-opener in the way that it helped elevate my confidence and gave me more reasons to appreciate my body, my beauty, and my sense of self-worth.'
The threats sex workers face are not just from clients or individuals in society; the very system we live within is at the root of much of the violence we face.