When I began sex work, I was 20 years old. I also felt the pull to exploit the anonymity and freedom of being away from home, the quintessential American desire to re-make myself. I knew there was more in me than people at home could recognize, and I wanted to prove it. I wanted to experience every glamour and success a city could offer.
I wanted to know what it was like to be sexually powerful and I wanted to know what it was like to have men want me. Admitting as much feels shameful since it denies the primacy of external pressures that might have pushed me toward labor so in demand yet so reviled.
I had no dreams of designer handbags or weekends in the Hamptons when I started sex work. I was an awkward near-virgin who had never owned a sex toy and had experienced only a few sexual partners.
So: I was not driven into sex work. I was not destitute and desperate. But I chose webcam. I wanted to know what that work felt like, and the only way I would learn was by doing it.
So one night, a few days after I auditioned by showing my boss my boobs, I drove back to his house, went upstairs to one of two rooms with a double mattress on the floor against a pink curtain, and logged into my newly made account.
