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.

Preface

Hi Sexy—

I’m so happy you’re here—come settle down next to me. Let’s hold hands while we’re at it, because this could get rough. Sex work and money—so much to say.

As sex workers, we carry our culture’s shaming and blaming contradictions on our backs: Sex workers make a ton of money. Sex workers are desperate for money. Sex workers care about nothing but money. These narratives are punishing, making it hard for us to think clearly, to think things through. Somehow, we need a framework to make sense of it all. 

Perhaps it would be helpful to take a step back and start with some stories.

I grew up in 1970s Silicon Valley, alongside the children of computer programmers born in Germany and Israel and Iran. As the Valley grew into an economic powerhouse, the property values of the surrounding bedroom communities exploded. My hometown boasted a Ferrari dealership, and the farmhouse my parents bought back in 1975 for $50,000 would sell for several million dollars today. 

I learned from an early age that money was important—I started babysitting when I was 12. My parents were the first of their families to attend college, and there was never any doubt that I would too. I earned good grades and attended a respected state university. Working a summer job as a janitor and tossing pizzas during the school year, I lived on $500/month and graduated with no student debt. 

I started stripping straight out of college, mostly because I hated office work. The idea of dancing naked seemed fun, especially since I got to choose music I liked. My first few shifts, when I learned men would wave $20 bills to get my attention, I’d giggle like I was drunk. All my life, I’d been the smart kid. I never thought of myself as pretty or sexy. It was like Monopoly money—nobody treated cash that way in real life.

            —Margot

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My family never missed a meal, but one of my more vivid kid memories is hunger. I’d sneak into the kitchen at night and eat the cat’s dry food. I can still taste the milk powder and feel the ground bone meal between my teeth. 

I grew up wearing Goodwill clothes that didn’t fit. When I hit puberty and my breasts started to swell, a neighbor lady gave me one of her daughter’s old training bras, because my parents hadn’t noticed my body was changing. More than once in high school, I menstruated through my clothes. I had to scrounge maxi pads from wherever I could find them—friends’ houses and gas station vending machines, sometimes using the same soaked pad for days on end.

Money in my family was dark and mysterious, ruled by unfathomable forces. Like love or easy good looks, it was something normal people had lots of. I was taught to always be fearful—about the future, about trusting that anyone would ever take care of me, about my own self-worth.

Sex work was a godsend. Escorting felt like stepping through a magic door—those envelopes filled with bills had power. I kept money stashed all over my apartment, even in the freezer. I had a Friday night ritual: triple-lock my front door, pull out my money from every hiding place, and count it all to remind myself what I was worth. 

That cash also made me paranoid—the thought of getting robbed or busted made my heart pound. I was sitting on more money than I’d ever had in my whole life—more than I’d ever dreamed possible. But deep down, I still felt like that weird kid. Clients would pay to have sex with me, but any minute they might discover the real me and never come back. My money never felt safe. Neither did I.

            —Lupe Ruth

+++

When I was 24, I fell in love. Pooling $13,000 I’d saved from incalls and a $4,000 inheritance, my wife and I were able to buy a house in New Mexico. Soon after that, she got it into her head that she wanted to turn our home into a lesbian bed and breakfast. This was her destiny, the only way she could be fulfilled. I thought it was my duty to make her dreams come true. We didn’t have a budget, let alone a business plan. What we had were my credit cards. 

In those years, credit card offers landed regularly in the mailboxes of college graduates, and I’d signed up for every last one of them. They made me feel rich, like I was a grown-up. Slowly but surely, I accumulated a credit line of more than $160,000, spread out over more than a dozen cards. Slowly but surely, my wife maxed them all out. We never missed a payment until the day we declared bankruptcy. I had to return to escorting to avoid losing our van to repossession and the B&B to foreclosure.

My wife had been the great love of my life, but money tore us apart. For years after our breakup, I struggled with suicidal thoughts. I believed my life was over. 

From that low point came a stroke of luck. A friend introduced me to Ralph Bruno, a true character: a mouthy letch with a fixation on the religious composition of the Supreme Court and a world-class Hello Kitty collection. He was also an accountant who specialized in tax preparation for sex workers.

Ralph surveyed the wreckage of my finances after more than a decade of mismanagement without blinking. “Miss Rachel,” he boomed in an uncut Bronx accent, “some day you will be old, but you will be rich. That day is a long way off. We have time. We will get you there.”

            —Rachel

~~~

Three different voices, three different money histories. What if I told you they were all mine? “Margot,” “Lupe Ruth,” and “Rachel” were some of my work names, these stories a few sides of myself. You deserve to know who’s advising you, Sexy Reader, and for the first half of my life, I was a genuine financial fuck-up. Don’t you worry, though—this book is not about me. It’s about getting you where you want to go. My intent is to share what I learned during the second half of my life. Along the way, you’ll hear from many successful sex workers as well as financial experts.

My story, however, does drive one important point home. During my time in the adult industry, my relationship to money underwent a profound transformation. I went from brain fog and confusion to a clear-eyed understanding of my entire financial picture. Instead of believing myself to be marginal and powerless, I grew into someone who trusts the world. I no longer leave paying bills to my partner so I can be willfully ignorant of what’s coming in and going out each month. I don’t pop a Valium when meeting with my accountant, because I understand my tax obligations. I don’t wander through life without a clue as to what my next 30 years will look like. In short, I shed the skin of a scared child, growing into an adult who can manage her affairs. 

First, however, I had to realize I couldn’t think my way out of my predicament. This was a surprisingly tough lesson to learn. After all, how hard can personal finance be? Balancing a checkbook is just arithmetic; calculus is not required.

Turns out my math skills weren’t the problem. As Karen McCall points out in Financial Recovery: Developing a Healthy Relationship with Money, we can’t scrimp, save, or number-crunch our way out of existential fear and shame. McCall writes, “Deprivation is the wound that develops when our most essential needs—physical, emotional, social, or spiritual—are not met, particularly when these needs are not met for a long time and even more so when this happens to us early in life.” What I needed to do was heal from financial trauma. This is the first step to getting right with money, whether you earn it from sex work or any other way.

My healing took several forms. I had to grieve my past mistakes and lost time. I needed my friends to listen to my worries and affirm again and again that my life wasn’t over, that good things still lay ahead for me. They kept that vision alive for me when I wasn’t able to. 

Then I needed to find experts who believed in me. They filled in the gaps in my knowledge so I no longer acted against my best interests. Over time, I developed the ability to see my entire financial picture clearly, rather than some parts in hyper-focus and the rest in a terrifying blur. Following their advice set a virtuous cycle in motion, even after years of fearing I was broken beyond repair. I racked up tangible victories—paying off six-figure debt and setting aside six-figure savings. These successes soothed my jangled nervous system, ravaged by decades of financial insecurity, confusion, poor decisions, and disasters. 

Finally, I embraced my calling as a sex professional. I made peace with following my cunt all the way down to my core, rebuilding myself anew with self-love and curiosity and compassion. Sex work, all of it—the sex, the work, the money—made this possible. 

This book is intended to guide you along the same journey. Addressing our past financial damage, we do the internal work to heal. We reach out to experts and commit to following their advice just as soon as we are able. And we step into our power to make sex work work for us, however we define it.

I wish to instill a deep acceptance in you, Sexy Reader. An understanding as instinctive as breathing that you deserve to be here, sustained for your natural life. I wasn’t born with this belief—it certainly wasn’t how I was raised. Only as an adult could I claim that legacy for myself. The good news is, I know it can be done. 

With my whole heart—

Lola D.