I’m an 18 year old virgin, barely making ends meet at my dishwashing job; I’m interested in making money with my body. I’ve thought about stripping but I don’t think I have the body for it and I have self harm scars on my thighs; maybe porn or escorting might be another avenue to explore. Would it be a good selling point that I’m a virgin? How would I go about advertising that?
Since stripping and porn performing are more visual than escorting, you may be right about the latter being a better path for you than the former two. I wouldn’t worry too much about the scars if I were you; I have some fairly noticeable scarring on my left arm, and I know a lady with pronounced Cesarean section scars, and both of us are quite popular escorts. There are three things in your letter, however, which do concern me and you should consider them deeply before attempting to pursue sex work.
The first is your youth: while 18 is of legal age and I’ve known some ladies (including me) who did sell sex at that age, the ongoing hysteria over “child sex trafficking” has made being so young a liability rather than an asset. Advertising sites are going to subject you to extra scrutiny, webcrawling programs run by the government and its prohibitionist cronies will flag you for increased surveillance, and your local cops and/or the FBI may even target you for “rescue” (i.e. arrest and use as a propaganda subject) in one of their pogroms if they decide you might be underage or vulnerable.
The second is your use of the phrase “make money with my body”, which to me indicates you’ve absorbed some harmful myths about sex work. What you’re doing now is making money with your body; unless commercial dishwashing is very different from the home variety, it doesn’t exactly require a lot of mental work. Escorting, on the other hand, requires considerable emotional labor; creating ads, screening clients and building a brand also require a great deal of head work. It may be that you’re up to the challenge; since I know nothing about you I can’t say. But even some very bright people don’t really like expending the kind of mental and emotional energy necessary to succeed as an escort, especially in these times of vanishing advertising sites and increased screening difficulty.
The third is your virginity. You didn’t say where you live, but your spelling and word use seem American to me. So unless you’re planning to go abroad, the only way to openly sell your virginity without bringing down hordes of authoritarians attempting to “save” you from a sensible decision (because you’re supposed to give your virginity for free to some stupid, penniless boy who may inflict an STI or worse, a pregnancy, on you) is to make a deal with a Nevada brothel to market that, and they’ll take 50%. Furthermore, none of the high-profile virginity sales of the past few years have gone well, which rather makes skeptical of the whole concept in the 21st century (though it worked well in the 19th and early 20th). Furthermore, I don’t think it’s an especially good idea for a young woman who doesn’t even know how she’s going to feel about sex with men to try to make a living at it from square one.
My advice to you is this: get a bit of sexual experience under your belt (no pun intended) before considering any kind of in-person sex work. Try doing phone sex (there are some services such as Niteflirt which are quite popular) and see if you like that, then maybe move onto camming. Do some research and talk to sex workers, and then after you’ve been doing the not-in-person stuff for a while you can try dipping into escorting if you still want to.
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