People Arts & Culture Bodies
On Sex Work and Risk During a Pandemic
I couldn’t afford to live on academic wages, so I became a dominatrix. But after Covid-19, the risks became too great.
At the end of May, I got my first text from a former client: “Can I take you on a motorcycle ride?”
After two months of sheltering at home with his wife and daughters, he was desperate to take a risk. He asked if I would take one with him.
“I can’t, I haven’t gotten a manicure since February . . . ”
I typed and deleted.
“I’ve gained five pounds . . .”
I typed and deleted.
“I’ve forgotten how to walk in heels . . .”
You can’t be frank with a client, not about your body or your confidence in it. Not even in a pandemic. You can’t risk sounding like his wife.
I texted back, “I’ll take a ride with you once the city says it’s safe to eat inside a restaurant.”
I figured that was far enough off that he’d forget by the time it rolled around, or else be satisfied with eating in a restaurant. That would be risk enough.
As a part-time dominatrix, I’d grown accustomed to taking part-time risks with other women’s husbands, other girls’ fathers. Professional BDSM isn’t criminalized to the extent that other forms of sex work are, but it is risky: I spent evenings alone with strangers in a warehouse-turned-dungeon that was situated along an industrial strip in a part of LA that’s never been in a movie. The dungeon walls were sound-proofed to muffle screaming.
The truth is, I would never climb on the back of this client’s motorcycle. That’s way too dangerous. And once they made dine-in options available in LA, I didn’t take that risk either: “I’m not dying for brunch,” I said to my girlfriend, though she’d never asked to go to brunch in the first place. But we all know how important it is to maintain hope in a pandemic. This client hoped to show me the Pacific Coast Highway, unobstructed by glass and metal, so I let him hold onto that hope for as long as he could. That’s what BDSM is all about: the suspension of reality, which feels a lot like hope.
*
As a graduate student in a recession economy, in one of the most expensive cities in America, my rent was nearly 50 percent of my TA salary. My TA salary was one-third of the estimated income deemed necessary to live comfortably in Los Angeles. Every year, I signed a contract with my university, promising that I wouldn’t take additional work elsewhere. To need more showed that I lacked the dedication of a scholar. It showed I had no family wealth, no assets, no savings. Try reading Judith Butler while sipping a coffee that cost you thirty-four dollars with the overdraft fee. You have to pretend everything is fine because you are in a study group with people who seem (or also pretend) to be fine. Or else, you figure out a way to make more money.
Mistress Snow, another adjunct-cum-dominatrix, wrote for The Chronicle in 2019: “Generations of academics have sustained the professional myth of the ‘life of the mind,’ failing to account for bodily experience within their conception of academic labor.” She continues, “Thus, when a student finds that her bills outweigh her stipend and decides to bartend, or drive for Lyft, or copy-edit”—or do sex work—“it is her brain, not her already-vulnerable body, that her advisors lament.”
Some of us then validate our sex work through writing, or politics. High art, not whoring. The truth is, most people I know who do sex work do so because they need to pay their bills, not because they want to write essays about the risks they take to pay their bills, or worse, the thrill they get from taking them.
To need more showed that I lacked the dedication of a scholar. But this isn’t an essay about academic labor. It’s not even about the stigma against sex work that kept me up at night, gnawing at the manicure I maintained to appear desirable to clients. This is an essay about risk: those risks I took to engage in the fantasy of power—the fantasies of financial stability and female dominance—and where I found the limits of both.
*
There are dangers inherent to sex work like there are dangers inherent to coal mining or working in a meat processing plant, or teaching high school in a country where there are more guns than people. All laboring bodies take risks, and we deem some unfortunate, some worth it, and others not.
When a man who brags openly about sexually assaulting women with impunity won the presidency, and that man nominated another sexual abuser to the Supreme Court, I started to wonder if engaging in professional domination was worth the risk. Sure, I got to take out some of my frustration on men with enough money to afford it, but I was angrier about their money than I was happy to take it. I started referring to all of my clients as “Brett.” Driving to the dungeon, I would blast Rihanna and sing, “ Brett better have my money.”
I grew more paranoid that someone at my university would find out that the life of my body was pushing the life of my mind to the margins. Every so often, I would Google combinations of “sex work,” “teacher,” and “fired,” anxiously tossing and turning in bed until dawn. Once, I showed up on campus wearing fake eyelashes, left on after a morning session with a client. I clocked myself in the faculty bathroom mirror and walked to the student pharmacy for a bottle of make-up remover. I went back to the faculty bathroom and scrubbed off the morning before walking to class. Your students are adults with sex lives. You are an adult with a sex life. There is no overlap between the two. I repeated this to myself like a mantra.
All laboring bodies take risks, and we deem some unfortunate, some worth it, and others not. A year post-graduation, I was what struggling academics call a “freeway flier,” driving thirty miles between universities, barely scraping up enough money to pay my bills. But I had a slightly greater earning potential than I had as a student, and by that point, my bills were mostly paid. During the academic year, I had health insurance—a privilege in America—but I couldn’t build a savings, start a retirement, own property, or plan for children. I still can’t. But that wasn’t why I continued to do the work I was afraid might get me cast out of academia for good. I was unable to give up the feeling of being the kind of woman who has power, no matter how contrived.
Power exchange is a fantasy that a female dominant and male submissive enact together in the space of a dungeon. But in the rest of her life, the dominatrix lives with everyone else under the weight of misogyny. In a humiliation scene with a progressive client—also a teacher, high school English—he role played a pro-life activist and I an enraged feminist: a stretch for him, not for me. I “punished” him for his politics by marching him into a Planned Parenthood and demanding he make a hefty donation on the spot. Humiliation set fire to his cheeks, and that fire was something he’d been chasing since adolescence. He guessed it imprinted sometime around the moment he realized his penis was smaller than those of his friends’, which he saw in locker rooms, basement jerk off sessions, literal pissing contests, and all the other times and places that teenage boys size each other up. Many of us turn our fears into fantasies. That’s one way to live with them.
I liked learning about the contours of other people’s desires. I liked hearing about the lengths a man would go to for the very expensive feeling of having a woman slide a pair of Wolford’s stockings up over his knees, a garter holding them delicately around his thighs. “It’s worth it,” he tells me, “even if I have to refuse invites to the beach until my leg hair grows back.” I liked giving others a place to explore their secrets as much as I liked pretending to be a woman with an outsized amount of power. It felt, at times, worth the risk.
*
Many of us turn our fears into fantasies. That’s one way to live with them. To be a sex worker in America is and will always be precarious. But to be a sex worker in the midst of widespread death and illness is, for me, an almost unthinkable danger. When Congress passed the $2 trillion bailout for small businesses and the self-employed back in April, they made sure that even those working in the legal sex industries were barred from access . To be deemed an “eligible entity” for relief, one must not “present live performances of a prurient sexual nature.” I called to check in on all of my prurient friends, some of whom don’t have the privilege that I have to find working through a pandemic unfathomable.
The pandemic wasn’t the first time I faced what felt like the end of professional BDSM. In 2017, Trump signed FOSTA-SESTA into law, making sex work even riskier. My ability to safely correspond with clients who would make the difference between my adjunct wage and a living wage had all but diminished. FOSTA-SESTA made it a federal crime for websites to host content that might promote or facilitate prostitution, which its bipartisan supporters claimed would protect victims of sex trafficking. The law was a blunt force, not to mention the fact that law enforcement agencies said it wouldn’t help to stop trafficking. It took away sex workers’ abilities to organize for decriminalization, and to help each other stay safe from potentially dangerous clients. Being online at all became dangerous. To no avail, we made clever protest signs and took to the streets in footwear impractical for a protest, but suited to our cause.
When the law passed, I couldn’t transfer my advertising from Backpage to Twitter, where the possibility that I’d be discovered by a colleague was greater. At least on Backpage, if a colleague stumbled across my ad, he’d have some explaining to do about why he was there in the first place. On social media, workers were expected to put their entire lives online for public consumption by would-be clients. There was no longer any delusion you could do the work in secret.
When I stopped advertising, I almost stopped working entirely. If FOSTA-SESTA really was about driving sex workers out of business, in my case it nearly worked. My client-base dwindled. I retained a few die-hard clients who had been with me from the beginning and would stay until the end. I suddenly had to rely on that PhD I had taken so many risks to get, which had yet to get me much in the way of stable employment.
Sex work is one of the precious few ways to make fast cash in America. Sex work cash is not go for an interview, fill out employment paperwork, promise you’re not a felon, work two weeks for a paycheck that can’t cover your expenses kind of cash. It’s fast. It’s “I need emergency medical care” cash. It’s “all you need is an internet connection and a will to survive” cash.
Or it was. Now, it’s “too big a risk” cash.
When the coronavirus pandemic started to overwhelm American cities, sex workers pooled funds for distribution to the most vulnerable in our community. As Jared Trujillo wrote for The Advocate , “At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, users leveraged online platforms to raise millions of dollars in mutual aid for sex workers, and also provided harm reduction tips for workers who needed to work.” These funds protected many sex workers—including the undocumented who were excluded from receiving CARES Act relief—from exposure to the virus.
The lengths people are willing to go for survival shouldn’t be criminalized, but they are, each and every day. Those who need fast cash, those who need sex work to survive, will return to the trades after the pandemic recedes. They will incur the risk. But like the world of sex work after FOSTA-SESTA took away our internet, it will never be the same. People will keep working, but with greater uncertainty.
*
The lengths people are willing to go for survival shouldn’t be criminalized, but they are, each and every day. A client-turned-friend came to town at the end of February. Covid-19 was something I’d heard about on a news podcast, but it wasn’t news enough to make it into dinner conversation. Instead, we talked about change: her gender transition and my ever more impending retirement. I had finally gotten a more stable teaching position and with it came a greater risk of loss should I be outed as a domme. My friend was inching her way out of her closet while I was trying to shut the door on mine. A professional dominatrix weilding power over some men while cowering before others, and a transgender woman passing as a cisgender man in order to run a man’s business: both of our closets had perpetuated our conflicted fantasies of power. For both of us, hiding had so far been the easier option; though we were trying, neither of us really knew how to stop.
I still don’t. My phone still rings once in a while, and when there’s three hundred dollars for an hour of your time on the other end of the line, it’s hard not to pick up, even when the risk is greater than it once was.
I tell myself I won’t go back to professional BDSM when the pandemic recedes. I’ve gotten used to bitten fingernails, the comfort of flats, and the five pounds I gained, which would eat at the confidence I drew upon to feign supremacy over men. I need to figure out who I am now, when night descends over the city and I don’t pull on a pair of thigh high leather boots to navigate risky situations with mostly kind, sometimes awful, and once-in-a-while beloved strangers. There’s risk facing all of us now if we seek out touch from anyone, even from those to whom we are not strangers. These risks do not bestow the intoxicating, fantastical kind of power with which I’d become familiar. But we might measure their worth in the same sort of way, against a metric of hope.
