Twenty Years

Readers with long memories may recall that January second has often been a day on which big things happen in my life.  It was the day my first husband Jack left me, and it wasn’t long after this day in 1985 that I got paid for sex for the very first time.  But twenty years ago today, January 2^nd, 2000, was the date I began my full-time professional escorting career, after years of being in that neighborhood via sugaring, stripping, and what the literature calls “casual prostitution”.  And it didn’t take long before I realized that my life would never be the same again.  For the first time I could make all the money I needed and then some, with no looming debts hanging over my head, no romantic partner to accomodate, and no boss to answer to.  It’s true that I quickly discovered escort service owners can be even more awful than club owners, but it takes a lot less money and connections to start an escort service than to open a strip club, so that’s what I did.  And as the internet and the advertising options it offered grew, I was eventually able to dump that encumbrance as well.  I’ve now been monetizing my sexuality for almost 70% of my life (which is to say, basically my entire adult life), and it’s hard for me now to imagine doing things any other way; that’s especially true when I see news stories or conversations about the oppressive, exploitative conditions in most modern employment, not to mention square jobs’ lack of security and the growing tendency for employers to exert control over their employees’ private lives (firing them because of things they said on social media or because the boss got ahold of one of their nude photos, etc).  With the sole exception of librarianship (about 4.5 years), none of the square jobs I ever had lasted over 9 months; most were even shorter than that.  But once I found a profession in which I could be myself, do things my own way, control my own schedule and answer to absolutely nobody, yet be handsomely rewarded for my time and effort, there was absolutely no way I’d ever be able to see the world as an amateur ever again.  And though the past twenty years haven’t always been easy, my work was never a contributing factor to that; on the contrary, it has given me the resources and flexibility to do what I needed to manage the rest.