Excerpt from Thriving in Sex Work: Sex Work and Money, a personal finance guide for sex workers, available now, wherever paperbacks and ebooks are sold.

Introduction

Sex work and money? Let’s get real—a book about the sex itself would be less messy. For many of us, money is supremely emotional, shiny and shadowy all at once—the money earned from erotic labor, doubly so. That cash might never begin to compensate for what we have to do to get it, or it might make us feel rich for the very first time. It might seem like winning the lottery, or losing at life. Getting away with murder, or selling off pieces of our soul. 

Additionally, it’s not pretty to say it, but sex work is a dream job for only a few. Work of last resort for most of us, we do it because we must. Having failed in the straight world, many of us carry financial damage. From that wounded place, stigma grinds away at us daily, telling us we’re losers, degraded and disposable. Cutthroat competition and feast-or-famine unpredictabilities keep us agitated, aggravated, off-center—the exact opposite of empowered. Often, we’re reflexively secretive about our finances, and for good reason—the world is rarely a safe place for erotic laborers. But hiding cuts us off from expert advice and traditional pathways to wealth. 

As a result, it is far too common for sex workers to have nothing to show from their time in the sex industry. I do not want this to be you, Sexy Reader. Each and every one of us, despite any mistakes we’ve made in the past, deserves to be secure. To earn what we’re worth. To have savings. To enjoy a dignified old age. 

To get there, we must get good at money.

This book is intended for all sex workers regardless of gender, job title, or earnings, and its aim is financial mastery. Fair warning: You won’t find tips on how to earn $X a year here. My purpose is to help you navigate the specific money challenges of sex work, both emotional and practical.

I wrote with one major assumption in mind: you’ve experienced some obstacle to earning the money you want.Which isn’t to say everyone working in the sex industry does so out of financial need—that’s not the case, of course. But folks hustling for the thrill or a few extra bucks aren’t this book’s target audience. This book is written for sex professionals looking to make a living. 

Overview of Thriving in Sex Work: Sex Work and Money

As a culture, we operate under two major money misconceptions. The first is that money is numbers, which means math. But math has nothing to do with squishy things like emotions and personal setbacks and stories we learned in childhood. Money most certainly does. 

The second is that money is a noun—a stack of bills, or digits sitting in our bank account. But money mastery is determined by verbs. Earning, saving, spending, tracking, investing—money is very much about what we do.

To tackle these misconceptions, this book takes a two-pronged approach. Part One unpacks our inner money life. We need to get our emotional house in order before we can face our financial responsibilities. I discuss the importance of a self-loving mental attitude, of knowing in your bones that you deserve to have what you need, and believing that there are sufficient resources to support you.

Before we go any further, though, let me say this: I don’t believe in magical thinking. We live in the real world where there are very real limits to how much any one of us might earn in the sex industry and beyond. Age, health, gender, ability, race, education, and looks can matter, as can geography and job title. I’m not saying for one second that if we just think pretty thoughts, pennies from heaven will rain down on our heads.

A core argument of this book, however, is that unconscious money beliefs are powerful and can be destructive, filling our minds with restless chatter, causing us to make bad business decisions. These beliefs might have served some purpose earlier in life, but if they’re no longer useful, it’s time to cut them loose. We’ll examine a host of money demons, and I’ll provide exercises to challenge negative scripts playing out in our heads.

Next, we’re ready for the practical side. Part Two of this book is devoted to best financial practices through the specific lens of sex work, including: 

• Having money, including keeping cash safe

• Banking

• Earning 

• Budgeting

• Tracking

• Saving

• Spending

• Investing

• Paying taxes

• Borrowing

• Giving

• Loaning

• Sharing and commingling

• Advising and consulting

• Donating

• Bequeathing

Now, I admit, that’s a pretty daunting list. You might be terrific at a few of these tasks, but hardly anyone is good at all of them. Some of us are great earners, but have no idea where the money goes. Others of us don’t earn enough to feel secure, because we’ve never sat down to figure out how much that might be. Then there are those of us who will eat ramen for weeks to stay out of debt, but won’t set aside a dime for a rainy day. Step-by-step, we’ll address each of these activities, unpacking the “doings” of money.

Along the way, I’ll share stories, provide exercises, and point you to recommended readings. I’ve recruited more than a dozen tax, legal, financial, investment, and sex work experts for their advice on advertising, reading contracts, combating online piracy, protecting online identity, creating passive income streams, and many other topics. You’ll find their wisdom in their own words throughout this book. 

Strategies for Sex Work Money: Valuing and Adulting

This book is built on two main themes: valuing and adulting.

What do I mean by valuing? The primary purpose of money is to assign relative worth to time, ideas, objects, labor, services, experiences, and even people. Money can buy us—or its lack can deprive us of—time, health, happiness, relaxation, self-esteem, sanity, and status. 

As sex workers, asserting our worth is a constant struggle. It’s so easy to relinquish our power in an effort to be liked or left alone. We undermine ourselves by not keeping track of our finances, not charging for our efforts, not budgeting within our means, allowing others to take advantage of our generosity. We’ll return to the importance of value—and valuing ourselves—again and again.

Then there’s adulting. Cliché alert: it’s hard. Behaving responsibly often means not just doing tough things, but suffering from a lack of clear choices, or weighing unquantifiable tradeoffs like today’s satisfaction against future joy.

This is just my opinion, but I’m basing this book on this belief: most money mismanagement doesn’t stem from stupidity or laziness or greed, but from confusion. Hesitation stemming from not knowing the right thing to do, or emotional overload, or because the right thing to do isn’t obvious or even feasible. Sometimes it’s all of the above. This book’s two parts, emotional exploration and practical advice, are intended to make adulting easier. 

In addition, many of us experience sex work as an extended adolescence. Even when taking significant physical, legal, health, emotional, relationship, and reputational risks, the job doesn’t always feel “real.” That mindset can work against our best interests if we convince ourselves we’re not ready to make long-term decisions: None of this actually counts. I’ll settle down and get serious on the other side of this adventure.

Here’s what I say to that: sex work is real life. It may well be some of the realest life you ever live, so treat this job with respect. Throughout this book, I’ll be reiterating some variation of this theme: if you’re old enough to masturbate on the Internet, you’re old enough to read and understand fine print.

How to Use This Book

The obvious response is however you want, Sexy Reader. You’re free to hop around, skim, and skip over entire sections if they don’t apply to you. As I mentioned in the Author’s Foreword, if you’re experiencing immediate financial hardship, start with the self-care support that begins with my discussion of the Overwhelm and then head straight over to Part Two for practical advice you can put to immediate use.

If you’re feeling financially stable, then perhaps some personal growth is in order. In that case, I advise beginning this book at the top and working your way through in order. My intent is to introduce you to best money practices that might have eluded you in the past. If you come across a section that seems easy and obvious, then by all means, move on. But pay attention to the topics that repel you, the chapters that cause you to fog up or grow restless and bored. Your financial health depends on the care and feeding of your entire financial ecosystem. Before you give into that urge to turn the page, ask yourself: Am I confident about [fill-in-the-blank]? If your honest answer is no, then this is precisely where the work needs to happen.

Limits, Biases, and Disclaimers

Let me be clear, Sexy Reader: I am not a tax, financial, investment, or legal professional. In researching this book, however, I consulted a raft of experts. At the time of this writing, to the best of my knowledge, my recommendations are legal and correct in the United States. My aim is to provide basic knowledge, not anticipate every scenario, and naturally, as time goes on, some advice will grow obsolete, so do your due diligence. 

Additionally, I’m obligated to encourage you to declare all income and pay your taxes, and I’ll make the case for why following the law works to your advantage. Please understand, however, I make zero judgments about anyone who does not. 

Readers of Thriving in Sex Work: Heartfelt Advice for Staying Sane in the Sex Industry will be familiar with my focus on savings for investment, education, home ownership, and entrepreneurship. For some, this message will be unacceptably bourgeois, and that’s valid. My rationale is we live in the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be. My aim is to help those who struggle within the system; I leave dismantlement to the revolutionaries. 

While we’re on that subject, for the purposes of this book, I presume late-stage capitalism is here for the foreseeable future, and the sex industry will continue to retain features of grey/black markets, namely stigma, heightened regulation, and policing. Any progress towards normalization or decriminalization is incremental, precarious, and hard-won. I stand with those working towards a better future, but I write for right now.

Definitions, Pronouns, and Gendered Terms

If you’ve ever done sex work or identified as a sex worker, I sincerely hope you find yourself reflected in these pages. My intent was to write with every age, gender, orientation, race, class, and ability in mind. Turns out when you address an advice book directly to the reader, you can eliminate gendered pronouns and use “you/your/you” and “we/our/us” instead. For everyone else, I use “they/their/them.”

This book is intended for sex professionals, so I expect most terms will be familiar to you. However, definitions matter. Defined terms are linked and formatted like so: sex worker. And to highlight one key phrase I’ll use a bunch, the term “sex work money” means money earned from sex work, to distinguish it from money earned other ways, and to emphasize the special emotional significance of performing this most intimate labor.

Triggers

Discussing sex work, this book carries the same disclaimers as Thriving: 

• Sex work varies wildly from person to person. There is no universal understanding of the work or the industry, and no one right way to do it or talk about it.

• I was a highly privileged sex worker. My advice will most likely be most relevant to those with similar advantages: working voluntarily, independently, and indoors, with Internet access, disposable income, professional help, and community. 

• I won’t have all the answers, and what worked for me may not work for you. I’ve tried to make my observations as broad as possible, but there may be times when my analyses, opinions, and suggestions won’t reflect your situation. 

• Everything offered here is in the spirit of starting a conversation as a peer, not dictating as an expert. Take what’s useful, and by all means, leave the rest.

Because we’re talking money, though, the whole freakin’ book might as well wear a trigger warning. When it comes to finances, there is no universal shared experience. I once read an article written by a guy who paid off $85,000 in student loans in two years. Turns out he rented out the condo he’d inherited from his mom and moved in with his girlfriend’s parents. Nice for him, but not exactly a lifehack everyone can relate to. Even the best financial advice is just noise if we’re in no position to follow it.

So, fair warning: my guidance may seem insultingly remedial at times, and at others, hopelessly out of reach. I am keenly aware some sex workers will be left behind in these discussions. I decided to plow ahead anyway. 

Here’s why: during my teen years, my parents were too bombed out to teach me to drive, let alone to help me buy a car. Driver’s education, however, was required at my high school. As a sophomore, I took a few trial spins in the parking lot and prepped for the written test. Years later when I was out on my own, I was able to borrow a friend’s car, pass the driving test, and get my license. I’m glad I was taught right the first time, even though I wasn’t able to put that knowledge to immediate use. 

I want you to have access to the best financial advice now and throughout your life, Sexy Reader, rather than learning backwards from expensive mistakes. Maybe not everything in this book will apply to you today, but someday it very well might. Besides, not having a whole lot of money makes it all the more important to manage it wisely. 

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Sex Work, Patriarchy, and Capitalism: The Belly of the Beast

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. 

—Audre Lorde, from The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House

Sex work stands at the crossroads of capitalism and patriarchy. The ugly truth is that many sex workers are capitalism’s refugees, selling sexuality to eat. At the same time, none of us can escape the industry’s destructive imperatives—its hegemonic enforcement of what our magnificently tender bodies, genders, and sexualities are deemed to be “worth.” 

Sex work forces us to ask some tough questions: How can we agree to be a part of system so clearly fucked up on its face? How can we navigate the industry’s corrosive dynamics and still be conscious sexual beings? How can we profit from racist, misogynist, transphobic, fatphobic, ablest, ageist, lookist standards of beauty, and call that life-affirming labor? How can we, who are often driven into this work from financial need, step into a mindset of abundance? How do we justify accumulating wealth when so many others suffer from not having enough? How can we hold ourselves accountable to our communities while engaging in labor not everyone approves of? Can it ever be possible to dismantle the master’s house while using the master’s tools? 

I’ll attempt to address these concerns throughout this book, but starting from first principles, we need to acknowledge that, indeed, things are not okay. We live in a society that deems huge swaths of humanity to be disposable. This is by design. Capitalism is structured to keep a subset of the labor force under-resourced: poverty is the point. Struggling to survive makes it difficult for members of the underclasses to protest, agitate, organize, or disrupt for change. 

Furthermore, Haves and Have-Nots are not random. Racism and patriarchy define which bodies enjoy full citizenship and which are conditional, under threat from cradle to grave. Nowhere are these discrepancies more blatant than in the sex industry where the color of our skin, the size and shape of our body parts, dictate our marketability. These relentless prerogatives determine who “gets to” and who “has to.” Who gets to work indoors, and who has to work outside. Who gets to charge thousands, and who has to take what they can get. Who can set limits, and who has to do as they’re told.

I make no apologies for the sex industry’s inequities, but commercial exploitation tells only half the story. The other half—the sex—is where I stake my claim. The Biz may well have been built for the master’s pleasure, yet he is but a paying guest. We are the ones who live here.

The most gorgeous, raw, authentic, emergent sexualities aren’t to be found in Hollywood or on Madison Avenue or the runways of Paris—sex workers are the embodied erotic, choosing both truth and dare. Our culture’s sexual imagination is no longer dictated from the top down by white, heterosexual, cisgender male tastemakers. Hugh Hefner died an irrelevant relic, Playboy’s supremacy a distant memory. The adult industry has become ferociously do-it-yourself, an explosion of creativity from the ground up. Workers display their bodies and fantasies to the world: This is who I am. Come play.

Not only that, but earnings from sex work are a redistribution of resources to women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, the disabled, and big beautiful folks for precisely what disenfranchises us—unruly bodies, genders, and identities that cannot be conquered or contained. This is never to deny the systemic injustices we face. But by living our truths, by claiming what’s ours, sex workers rebuild the world anew. Surely we can build a better one.

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Sex and money are messy. Somehow, as sex professionals, we must harness them both. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but with knowledge and self-compassion, I believe each of us can change our lives for the better. 

Come sit by me, come take my hand. Let us find our way there together.