When it comes to sex work, there’s no shortage of lessons to be learned about oneself, including what “sex”, “work” or even what the term “yourself” actually means. I’d have to say that it’s mostly taught me that there's no wrong or right answer.
"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 am a New York City-based dominatrix and cultural activist. I started doing BDSM professionally in 2016 after finding a dungeon on craigslist (those were the days) and then mostly did online work for a year or two while I finished college before transitioning to full-time in-person BDSM.
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.
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.