You'll likely be familiar with the name Wrenna Robertson from her project I'll Show You Mine. I've posted about it before (links here and here).
Recently she wrote a fantastic article about a workshop she organized exploring the experiences of sex workers, including her own. The article was published at Love, Sex, and Family:
There’s a story not often told about sex work. It’s a story that most of society would scoff at if they did hear it; write it off as pure, deluded fantasy. Many of us won’t allow it to be true. I am a sex worker, and even I immediately felt that it was too-tall-a-tale-to-tell. It’s the story of the empowered sex worker who finds healing through their work. The sex worker who has become more whole a person because of what they do. But it is a story which rings true for many of the incredible women and men I have had the pleasure of knowing, who work as strippers, escorts, tantric practitioners, porn actors and erotic masseurs.
I have been stripping for half of my life - since just days after my 18th birthday. Almost immediately I became aware of the judgment that would come my way until the present day – from friends, partners, parents, sisters and strangers. They all expressed their disappointment in me for having chosen to make money by taking my clothes off for strangers. When I explained to people that I was doing it to save money for university, they eased off a bit, conceding that it was indeed a good way to put oneself through school.
18 years later, I’m still stripping. It’s gotten harder in the past few years to explain this. For most of my years in the industry, I have been a university student. When I was younger, it was a very plausible story: the stripper working her way through college. I finished one degree, entered my mid-twenties, decided I was enjoying life too much as it was, so continued stripping, and headed back to school for another degree. I traveled lots, earned the envy of others while at the same time accumulating greater disdain. It was celebrated that I was so committed to my education, so well traveled and free-spirited, but there was a growing sense of impatience among my loved ones about when I would exit the sex industry. I internalized the knowledge that I was letting my parents down. The first in the family to get a university education (financed by my stripping career mind you), and I wasn’t even doing anything that my parents could share with their friends. They were getting bored of telling their friends that I was a student. They were getting restless, that story was getting old. Partners asked me when I planned to quit. Clients asked me when I was going to quit.
Read the rest of the article here.