103. The Hidden Price of Sex Work
As sex work becomes increasingly normalized in our transactional world, I want to shine some light on some of the costs that these workers pay, because nothing is free.
First I’d like to say that I’ve thought a long time about how to express this without objectifying people who are already self-objectifying. So I’m going to make this as personal and and compassionate as I can.
Second, I try to learn as much about the human experience as I can. It helps me blend in, and it also allows me to be compassionate to people with very different lifestyles and moral compasses. So while I have always been straight edge (drug free), I’ve always been fascinated by drug use and have studied it extensively. And being on the asexuality spectrum, I’ve spent a lot of time studying (from a healthy distance) why people take sex so seriously.
What do people really get from these two forms of recreation (or employment) and how are they linked on a physiologic level?
When I was young, my sister (7 years older than me) went down a path where she tried pretty much every recreational drug available. In California, pretty much everything was available. I learned second hand all the downsides and felt pretty good about just learning vicariously through her without any desire to learn it first hand. My first job at age 18 (when I was still homeless) was working as a bouncer in a rowdy bar in Santa Monica called the “Oarhouse” on Main Street. If you say it fast, it’s meant to be funny. The bar isn’t there anymore. I was under age but I begged for the job and they knew I didn’t drink. So I didn’t drink in the bar, I just kicked people out of the bar. Later, when they found out I was going to nursing school, the manager said “Hey you have to work with shit and vomit as a nurse, right? Are you okay with that?” I said sure. So he said “Okay great, when we have an ‘accident’ in one of the bathrooms, that’s now your job to clean it up.”
Oh, the things I did to survive those years.
In my last year at UCLA I did neuroscience research on fetal alcohol syndrome. It could have been a very promising career but I didn’t feel comfortable killing lab animals. Then after I escaped Los Angeles after graduation I worked at Betty Ford Center for 3 years. My boss looked down on me because I wasn’t a drug addict myself, she said “You will always be a second tier employee here because you can’t understand what these people go through”. It wasn’t for lack of trying, and with my science background, I understood some things they may not have. I certainly did learn a lot there though.
So I talk a lot of about addiction in my papers because it’s been a passion of mine to learn as much as I can without personally becoming an addict. I think I was addicted to exercise for those 10 years that I trained 4 to 6 hours a day every day. And I think it is fair to say I went through a period of gaming addiction and now I have to moderate my use.
Trying to Understand Sex Work and the Sex Economy
This very close but second hand observation method worked well enough for my studying drug use, so I employed a similar method in trying to understand sex work. Both seem to be key methods of generating pleasure and reducing stress (another thing I study a lot), and all of this is important to me as I continue to design stronger and stronger “digital drugs” to meet the needs of increasingly hardened consumers. Digital drugs hold the promise of being safer, available any time, something you can keep secret, are cheaper, and are infinitely production-scalable. That’s a big part of why they can be made/delivered cheaper than other more labor-intensive forms of pleasure…
Like sex work.
In the early days of the porn industry, which started in Southern California, I ended up meeting a lot of people in that industry who would work out regularly at the various gyms I would run. Sometimes they would even try to recruit me for movies but I didn’t feel that was safe because HIV was a big problem back then, and still undetectable. I did learn a lot about the industry just from talking to them though.
It wasn’t until 2010 when I found myself single that I started trying dating apps and quickly realized I could use them to survey people about their experiences. I did this for 10 years and that’s how I managed to survey over 150,000 people. Honestly most people are pretty boring but I would occasionally run into people with very interesting stories or occupations.
These two in particular:
My Friend in Michigan
One woman I met in Michigan was terminally ill and had no kidneys. She had already lived well past her projected expiration date by the time I met her. She had a very strong will to live, perhaps because her son was not yet an adult. Not having kidneys means you can’t urinate and you have to have dialysis at least 3 times a week. You have to be VERY careful about what you eat and drink because you can’t eliminate excess water. If you consume too much moisture your blood pressure goes up and your blood vessels can explode. You also can’t eliminate urea so one has to be very careful not to consume excess protein.
My friend was very sweet and she had a lot of thoughts on the meaning of life since she had years being at the end of hers. I enjoyed her company enough that I went on “dialysis dates” with her, where I would sit with her for 2 or 3 hours while she had her dialysis. Most people can’t hold a conversation for more than 5 minutes but I was never bored talking to her.
I managed to talk her into an exercise program and we also started doing walks together. After some time she got strong enough that she decided she wanted to get a job. I’m very good with cats and her cat would always try to follow me home. “My cat doesn’t like anyone!” she would say.
So what was the job she wanted? She said she wanted to work at the local strip club! That was a bit of a mind blower, but she really wanted to enjoy her remaining time and wasn’t super worried about consequences. After all, she would just be “serving drinks”. Of course, that didn’t last long before she was more involved in her job there.
She kept inviting me to visit her there, but I can’t handle noisy or crowded environments so I would always decline. I’ve had a number of friends try to tempt me into those places and I’ve always said no.
Initially her experience was very positive. She loved the excitement, the attention, and it all made her feel more alive. After a few months she admitted that she didn’t feel good mentally at the club, and it was starting to weigh on her. She ultimately quit the job. Note this was an entirely platonic friendship, and I never had any negative views on her experiment other than I urged her to stay safe.
My Friend in Austin Texas
I had a lot of friends in Austin before I left for Australia, hoping to not return. Many had revealed after I met them that they had engaged in some form of sex work, either in the past or currently. One even got paid really well to beat up a Republican senator who apparently needed professional help with atonement. With the tech boom there, a lot of money was flowing into Austin and people were willing to part with a lot of that money in order to “improve their social lives”.
Another friend also got paid to beat up guys. Apparently this was a high demand service. This other friend was top of the line though. She was a Madam, and had trained over a dozen younger ladies to work under her. Of course she didn’t reveal any of this until we had built up some mutual trust. I knew from talking to her before our first meet that she had been though a lot and her “first love”, who had a lot in common with me personality wise, had died in a high speed car accident at a young age.
Since our friendship was platonic and I was happy providing emotional support (yes I realize this is a bit ironic), I wasn’t surprised or discouraged to find out about her work. When we would go out to dinners or walks or such she never brought her work into the date and always treated me nicely. I appreciated that she could keep this boundary as when she was at work she was just beating the hell out of these guys and making them beg for mercy. Apparently she had a well stocked dungeon. I grew up on Dungeons and Dragons, so having one’s own dungeon seemed like a flex.
One day she was a bit stressed so I offered to work on her. My brand of soft tissue mobilization is very precise and can penetrate clothes and up to about 8 cm of tissue to reach deep structures that doctors can’t treat without cutting. This was handy at the track when I was coaching/training as I could assist an athlete right there on the infield rapidly and get them back on the track like at an Indi 500 race.
But this session was noteworthy. I was working on her pectoralis muscles and something I’d never experienced with thousand of other patients before happened: My hands got wet. Then my sleeves got wet. This got my attention and I opened my eyes (I have the internal body memorized and don’t use my eyes when I work) to see what was going on. I asked her if she was crying. She nodded. She cried so much that my long sleeve shirt was soaked and so was her shirt.
This wasn’t from physical pain, I was going pretty easy on her. This was just a ton of emotional pain bubbling up to the surface. Of course I felt honored that she was able to trust me enough to have that release with me there and this was kind of a personal moment. It might also totally ruin her reputation if people knew.
What I want to impress with this is that everyone has emotional needs, even the meanest people out there. Even those sociopaths that are so heavily armored and have their feelings so deeply buried. Perhaps this is why they will pay so much to have it beaten to the surface for them. I’m not putting my friend in that category. She’s a provider not a receiver normally.
The Secret Exchange
Sex work is often described/promoted as selling one’s body for cash. This is not what’s going on. Technically you might be renting it out but you generally expect to get it back in the same condition you provided it after the end of the rental period. What you don’t get back is your emotions and feelings. These clients aren’t your friends and they likely won’t ever see you again. They generally aren’t particularly worried about your feelings. They might go out of their way to demonstrate that.
To survive, the worker has to bury those feelings and to armor up as much as possible to protect their emotional state from further degradation. But the process of “armoring up” is itself a damage. I talk a bit about this in my paper on Soulmates where I describe that to have that experience one must become a “Human Gravity Well”. And to do that you need to strip as much of your armor as possible and keep it off.
Clearly these workers are moving in the opposite direction. At some point they might be looking for a relationship or at least someone to provide some emotional support and the stigma of their work alone is a huge impediment to this. Even if they find someone open minded enough that likes them enough, that’s the easy part. The hard part is opening up and being vulnerable to another person when you’ve spent years training yourself to do the opposite.
A woman in Australia did a documentary on her “event” where she slept with 100 guys in one day. Since it’s a documentary, I found it interesting. There is a reason why sex workers from the UK (as in this instance) go to Australia to do these sorts of stunts. Another woman wanted to ride her notoriety and did the same thing with 1000 guys in one day. Even OnlyFans banned her video because these women “farm” the local schools for “participants” and there was no age verification. The woman in the documentary, Lily Phillips, admitted that she didn’t even remember most of the day. She could only recall a few out of the 100 men. Doing this with total strangers requires a LOT of armor. And it seems like it was this armor that she regretted, not the actual activity. I have to say, this is pretty good self awareness, as this is where I think the costs are often hidden from participants.
This Applies to Dopamine Addicts Also
As I’ve been writing about in several papers now, people have a bit of a choice when they use dating apps: are they there to find a relationship or are they pleasure seeking? As I’ve tried to explain in my series on Demographic Collapse, this choice is increasingly one or the other. You can’t have your cake an eat it too. Once sex has become your drug of choice, you will go through withdrawal if you stop.
Having just one partner counts as “stopping” on a physiologic level. You get the dopamine by surviving a dangerous situation. Your body adapts to anything you survive and gives you less and less dopamine each time. So while you might get a LOT of dopamine the first time you sleep with someone, you aren’t getting that after a year or so. This is going to increasingly push someone to have additional partners. In our strongly pro-monogamy culture, this is typically hidden and will lead to breakups when it is exposed. This doesn’t provide a good environment for a long term relationship and is especially bad for child rearing.
I don’t personally think monogamy is “natural” though I do understand it has a lot of economic advantages. I’ve been in a monogamous relationship for the last 5 years and I’ve done monogamy as long as 9 years so I’m not putting monogamy down. I’m just pointing out that if “stranger sex” is your drug of choice, that’s going to be tough to get if you are making a monogamy commitment to someone. And that sort of vow gets harder and harder the longer you are on the dopamine carousel. Riding the Carousel also hardens you emotionally, making a successful long term relationship doubly unlikely.
As a scientist that studies dopamine, and has that as one quiver in my robust neuroeconomic quiver that I use when making Digital Drugs, I have great respect for the chemical and its function in the body. People who abuse dopamine, like any drug, are going to experience pain and loss as I watched the people at Betty Ford Center experience for the three years I worked there.
Final Thoughts
Sex work has never been more profitable. It’s likely also never been as acceptable as it is now. People even say “sex work is work and you can’t shame workers”. That’s quite a progressive leap from when we used to stone people to death for adultery. That wasn’t that long ago, actually. In some parts of the world, that still happens.
For many, this path is the obvious best choice if they feel that they are sexy enough to make it work for their clients. A lot of content online is there to encourage this and to teach people how to be “sexy”. I’m not passing judgment on the choice. I just think that all of the focus on “the bag” is a bit deceptive when there is almost no focus on “the cost of the bag”.
Therapy can only help so much, it will never completely reverse any damage you suffer. And therapy is very expensive. I have friends that are therapists that tell me they are pushed to the breaking point daily by patients who are in increasingly poor health. I had one such friend in Austin that warned me of the stress that therapists are enduring during the pandemic, and the last time I talked to her she seemed like she had finally succumbed to the stress and was completely dysfunctional.
The entire system that is there to support people with high stress jobs is disintegrating under the load. Becoming a therapist is a very not-sexy job so the number of available workers there is going to continually decrease as the demand for it goes up. I realize the subject is taboo, but as a society I think we need to have a healthy conversation about the choices we are making and the choices we are giving our children. Sure, with AI taking all the “real” jobs, this might be what’s left for us. If that ends up being what we decide we want, then let’s at least set up the mental and physical support services infrastructure that this will require.
I dread watching us lose one or more generations to drug addiction and mental health issues just because we find our biological nature too embarrassing to confront. Oh, and also because corporations find it so profitable that they will ride this dragon as long as they are able to without regulation.