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 had always been curious about this sex work – I was lucky to, for whatever reason, keep out a lot of the negative messaging people around me growing up received about their sexuality.
I think we live in a world that hates poor people and sensationalizes sex in a really nasty way. I feel that ideology constantly harms sex workers and excludes us from social liberation movements by objectifying our labor while rejecting our existence in the same breath.
"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 think the public could learn a lot about sex workers and how we have positive impacts on clients. We are gifted improvisers, resourceful in ways I never knew possible.