pussy for pay

on my time as an escort

CW: This essay touches on topics of sex, sex work, and sexual violence.

The first time I had sex for money was in 2023. A few months prior, after I burned through my savings to move into and furnish my first one-bedroom apartment, I was laid off from my job with two weeks of severance.

I’ve had an exceedingly lucky career, especially given that I dropped out of college. I’d like to say I worked extra hard, harder than others, and sometimes I did, but I mainly consider myself a chiller who experiences bouts of ambition and knows when to take advantage of them. The most robust parts of my resume were won by cold emailing the right people. By the time I moved to LA at 23, I had a full-time job that paid a 75k salary, funded my cross-country move, and gave me health insurance. My dad installs air conditioners and my mom cut hair on the weekends before committing herself to raising my sister, who is 17 years my junior. This was more than both my parents had ever earned in a year combined.

I was content for a while, but the thrill of being able to pay your bills eventually wears off. I fell in with rich kids. I partied, then went sober, and then did every drug I could get my hands on. Everything got more expensive, too, but that was fine because I got a new job and it paid even more than the one that changed my life. More, more, more. I loved having a capital-L Lifestyle and proving I could afford it, never stopping to think about what could happen if the wheel stopped spinning. I’d spent my entire life betting against its preconditions, and I was closer than ever to the paradise on the other side. You can make up a world and live in it—put on new clothes, shake hands, play house—and that’s well and good, until the curtains close and you are left with only what you can grab in the dark, which might very well be nothing at all.

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The salon where I spent my weekends as a kid, and where I got a borderline culturally insensitive perm at age 12.

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In the aftermath of the layoff, I allotted myself what I promised would be an appropriate amount of time to cig-maxx and shake my fists at God, smoking half a pack a day and walking mindlessly for hours on end. I got a gig at LA’s most beloved and controversially priced bagel shop, which kept me afloat for those few weeks. But the buzzards had begun to circle, hovering ominously over what was once my charmed and precious life.

Panic began to settle on the eve of my one-month unemployment anniversary. Having not heard back from the dozens of jobs I’d applied for, I scoured Reddit threads about how to make your Seeking Arrangements profile most appealing to its highest-paid clientele.

I had little reservation; this was always the most obvious path, at least in the short term. Perversion was already a special interest of mine, and sex was all but a creative pursuit of that fixation. I’d spent the last year and a half directing audio porn for a tech company and was meticulous in my attention to the mechanics of pleasure—how breathy an orgasm should sound, if the moan that escapes a person’s lips is different when flogged rather than whipped, why being fingered by a werewolf is not technically bestiality. All of this, I thought, must be in service of some divine purpose.

So, I practiced my most virginal pout in the mirror and uploaded photos of myself in my hot pink Victoria’s Secret underwear, the color faded and tinged with grey from years of wash and wear. That night, I had nightmares about those photos being leaked to employers past, present, and future. I deleted them and uploaded photos in different underwear, ones I was convinced managers would find more tasteful.

Finally, I called a friend from college who’d been sugaring on and off for nearly a decade. She tells me about all the unspoken safety protocols and how the landscape has changed over the last few years. Most guys want to feel like they have a girlfriend, not like they’re hiring a hooker, she tells me. Always use a Google number. Ask for cash and make it clear you need it up front. Tell them you have a no sleepover policy. Good luck, the real money is on the coasts anyway, she said, before bookending our call with her loving words of reassurance: I think you’re made for this.

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I ritualized my routines. During the day, I worked at the bakery where I made new friends and accelerated my smoking habit tenfold. At night, or in the mornings, if I was off, I would go on dates—sometimes two or three a day. The first meeting never involved any sex and was always in public. This way, as my friend advised, I could ensure our expectations were aligned, that they were at least tolerable in person, and weed out anyone I thought couldn’t actually afford to indulge.

An escort is a vessel for whatever fantasies, no matter how domestic or crude, were rendered impossible under the constraints of everyday life. The job is to contort yourself into its shape. Usually, I went by Lucky, but if I liked them, I would say my real name was Jenny or Anna. I tried on different personalities and rehearsed their stories on my way there. My lies were more intricate at first, but I’m a terrible, terrible actor and couldn’t keep anything straight, so the details of Lucky’s life quickly became diluted versions of my own. It wouldn’t matter so much in the end; they were there to talk about themselves, and my interiority was secondary, if a factor at all. I preferred it this way, happy to enjoy a free meal while exchanging pleasantries and appealing to their imaginings of me.

Only a small fraction of these dates would lead to intimacy or an ongoing arrangement, but, shockingly, a majority of the guys I met through Seeking were decent and kind enough for me to want to spend (paid lol) time with. Spiritually impoverished and out of touch, sure, but money will do that to you, and I was already familiar with that strain of psychosis from my years in LA. They were forward, often visibly nervous, which endeared me to them, and usually honest about the lack of connection in their lives outside this shadow self. Many granted me near complete entry to their psyche, or at least whatever little of it they themselves had access to. I, in turn, was charmed by the attention (my drug of choice) and generosity. It was a goods-for-services exchange that demanded each party act accordingly, and the mutual understanding, in theory, provided me with a barrier of protection.

My deepest, darkest secret is that I’ve always loved men—dating them, befriending them, sleeping with them, observing them in their day-to-day. I’ve made peace with this by now, but for a long time, I felt like a traitor to the cause, as though I had forsaken my queerness, self-respect, and bond to others living under the perils of gendered suffering, for nothing more than a passing glimpse inside the clubhouse. Still, I was discerning about my company. I never fantasized about men loving me, and I am as easily turned off as I am charmed. But I had always been so jealous of boy world, mesmerized by the ease with which they could access jubilance and fun. Hanging out with them provided respite from my own torturously severe nature. I related to their sadness, too. This resonance would eventually turn to pity, but I could recognize in them my own refusal to confront the persistent, unbearable loneliness making a home inside me, and I watched cautiously as that same instinct kept them from seeing life for the precious gift it really was. Yes, I became an escort for the money, but my lingering fascination with the Other Gender is what made me good at it.

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I never counted how much money I made in all, because I knew the number would paralyze me, but I could tread water for a while, and it was certainly more than what I would’ve been making on food service gigs alone. My PPM (price-per-meet) was $800 a night, which is what I made at the bakery in two weeks if I had good shifts. There was no slutty calculus involved in determining this number. The girls I consulted on Reddit said they were charging anywhere from $300 to a few thousand in LA. I didn’t possess the experience or expertise for a four-figure rate, but I didn’t want to slash that number in half. My assumption was that I’d naturally settle in a specialty market (petite Asian girl with larger-than-average boobs—fetish content made in a lab) and that those who were looking for me would pay the sticker price, and they did.

There were enthusiasts like Johnathan, a professor who invested in occasional sexual escapades. These rendezvous were, for him, not so different from saving up for a weekend in Vegas or some novelty collector’s item. He was a perfect gentleman with a no-nonsense way about him and a penchant for luxury; he opened every door without failure, always ordered the specials, and capped his alcohol intake at two drinks. Our encounters were only a few hours long, and we didn’t sleep over at the hotels because of my no-overnights policy, but that never kept him from booking the nicest ones anyway. Before parting, we would seal the night with a kiss and $800 in cash, tastefully tucked into a cream envelope.

Edward was an entertainment executive who stood out to me immediately for his timidity. I was taken by his profile because he seemed too young (mid-30s), handsome, and earnest to be soliciting sex online the way other genetically disadvantaged men were. He had a boyish smile and was posing in front of a sunset in his first photo, his face a little too close to the screen. We met at Cha Cha Lounge, a grungier bar on my side of town that revealed his edge and restrained taste despite his money and influence. He had recently reactivated his Seeking account and tends to do so in between relationships, which marked his loneliest moments. We talked about our sobriety stints and his grand visions for his life as a quiet, loving father with a loud, boisterous (ideally Asian) wife and kids. We didn’t talk much after that night, but I always appreciated our brief and gentle encounter.

For my birthday, Glen insisted on taking me out for an Omakase dinner. It cost nearly $1,000, including the wine and the bottle of whiskey in his hotel room. He was in an open marriage, or so he told me, and had a baby back home on the East Coast, but wanted to visit LA more frequently. He worked in tech and was as close to self-made as I was willing to believe. I think he took a special interest in me because we both grew up poor. He told me as much when he expressed how my excitement over simple comforts delighted him. This was not meant as a dig, but I took it as one because it revealed my position as a stranger to opulence. It was his world, not mine, and I was only there because of the grace he so lovingly bestowed upon me. He made up for this by being the only client I enjoyed having sex with.

I met Alan for the first time during lunch hour at a high-end cafe. I wore a button-up and a skirt that was an inch away from being deemed too scandalous for daytime. He was well over six feet tall, and in his mid-60s, but still quite fit. I caught a glimpse of our reflection in the restaurant window and remember thinking our physiques made me look like a wartime child prostitute. Every question he asked was a challenge of my wit, taste, or patience. He complained a lot about ex-girlfriends, their money-hungry ploys, the lack of class. His favorite thing to do was dangle something shiny in front of me—international trips, music festivals, weekend getaways—to see if I would wilt on command. The signs were certainly there, but when you need $1900 to pay rent, and it’s due in a week, it is easy to ignore what you would otherwise swallow as truth.

People assume sex is the most nauseating part of the whole ordeal. You give your physical body over, keeping your doe eyes intact as you are poked and prodded. Sometimes this was the case, and if you ask anyone in the trades, they will have their share of stories, but it was rare that sex with clients felt inherently like subjugation.

I was dating a lot over the course of this period, both as Angela and as Lucky. One of my biggest fears was that this wet blanket of obligation, looming large over my encounters with men on Seeking, would dull my own sensorial appetites, forever morphing my relationship to one of life’s greatest pleasures. But my time as a working girl cast light on the revelation that there was often little distinction between the sex I had for work and the sex I had for fun. Both could be tedious, moving through grueling (mostly heterosexual) scripts, boring you to death in the process. Both could reveal a new dimension of arousal—splitting you open and thrusting you into an even greater hunger for deviance.

If we think of creativity as any process that demands imagination, curiosity, and attention, then we can begin to view the theater of sex as a canvas for truth. With practice, your own performance of the act can disclose which entanglements have transformative potential and which are better contained to that singular experience. In this strange and unexpected way, my faith in sex as a tool for excavation was reawakened. Being paid to give a show slowly cues you into when true eroticism is most potent.

Crucially, in my life as a civilian, I was also having sex with someone I liked. When you have this kind of sex—sex you like, with someone you like—you’re reminded that there is a measure of desire that never belonged to you alone, one that can only be animated by flesh. There is some intangible, forbidden force at work that demands to be witnessed and satiated. I assured myself that if I did not lose sight of this fundamental truth, nothing could be ripped away from me. To my credit, I was mostly right.

Shame is the mind-killer, able to render entire swaths of life untouchable, so I made myself impervious to its influence. I would tell anyone and everyone who would listen about how I was making it all work. Eventually, someone would always ask if I had negative sexual experiences to report. The obvious evasion of the words “assault” or “rape” makes this tricky because, despite the insistent nature of the question, no one seems to be prepared for the story when your answer is yes.

I don’t begrudge curiosity about the work—I’m often the one bringing it up!—but I’ve gleaned that what the people most fascinated by sex work actually want is reassurance that your experience is just as disturbing as it is glamorous, that it contains the darkness they’ve imagined for you, and that the riches, however big or small, are not worth envy. (People want to walk out of Anora saying, “Yes, good for her!” while resolute in their conviction that they would never, even in their darkest hour, be like Ani, not because they lack the skill, charisma, and will but because it is ultimately beneath them.)

On our first night together, Alan and I attended a concert at a venue my friends and I frequent. It isn’t the sex with older men I can’t stomach, but the outsized attention, which exposed you, like in the dreams where you show up naked to school. Alan is white and was insistent on PDA, especially when we drank, which we always did, so it was difficult to pass off our public interactions as anything other than what they were. This mystique was, in part, the fantasy many clients were paying for. Girls would come up to me to ask for a lighter or the time, lingering just a few seconds too long before turning away and whispering into their friend’s ear. When he was in the bathroom, servers would approach the table and ask me if I needed anything, looking for a sign of distress, like they were on an episode of What Would You Do?

We repeat a similar sequence of events every time we see each other, right up until our last night together. Alan has never been able to get hard when we’re intimate, but likes to move through the motions anyway. Fade Into You by Mazzy Star is always—always—playing, a song I love unironically, now bastardized by the impurity of the circumstance. I take off my clothes, then his, and we rub against each other while I count to 100 in my head. I go down on him despite the fact that he is soft the entire time, and he tells me how much he loves it. Then we walk to the bedroom where he fingers me, and I pretend to come. Usually, this is where it ends, but this time, he doesn’t take his fingers out. He’s going harder and faster now. It hurts, and I ask him to slow down, to no avail. I pretend to come again in hopes that he stops. He doesn’t and twits deeper, demanding I call him Daddy, tell him how much I like it, and that I love him. I do all of these things, and when he still refuses, unsatisfied with my performance, I push him off of me and say it’s all too much. When I get back from the bathroom, where I see I’m bleeding, he’s pouting. You don’t even like me, he says. I have to comfort him because he didn’t give me my money up front, insisting he was good for it based on every other time we’d been together, and he’s yet to order my Uber to the other side of LA. Stay with me tonight. We fight over this for 20 minutes before I cave. As we lie in bed, my eyes wide open, he reaches for me again, and I jump, insisting I have to go home now. He can hear I’m on the verge of tears, and knowing he’s pushed too far, finally relents. The car arrives, but when I ask for my money, he says he spent it all on drinks for the night and will have to give it to me later.

I cry in the backseat on the way home. I don’t want clients to know my address, so I always route the Ubers to a restaurant a few blocks away. I walk through Hollywood, humiliated, and get to my house at 3 AM. In the morning, Alan texts me a photo of him golfing with friends. I remind him, with a soft and patient tone, that he never gave me the money, and he apologizes for forgetting. He says he was so drunk last night he can’t remember a thing, but of course, he knows I’ll never speak to him again, so he says he can only Venmo it to me unless I can meet with him that day. I’ve always insisted on cash because all my digital accounts are tied to my real name, and everything is too complicated to delete and set up again. It’s his final show of power, and I give it to him because it couldn’t have been all for nothing. He venmos me the $800, and I block him. For the next two weeks, it burns every time I pee or take a shower.

It’s easier calling it an assault on paper than aloud. But these were the risks, and I accepted them. Many of my friends had been through much worse, which made this transgression feel like a scratch. I’d also done more than my fair share of normal dating, which was not any less precarious. In the end, I made a little more than $3k in cash over the course of a few nights with Alan, one of which didn’t even involve sex! Just some groping in a dark concert venue. I could not say the same about Alex, a guy I met on Hinge around the same time, with whom I had a one-night stand. He spent an hour waxing on about Edward Said before I led him into my bedroom, where he slapped me so hard—without asking—that my ears were ringing in my sleep that night. A week later, he texted me, “wyd tn queen?”

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The Crazy Rich Asians slot machine at the MGM Nomad in Vegas, where I spent my 26th birthday, a trip funded by the $$$ I made from Alan. The most special trip ever.

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Do you think you would still do this if you didn’t need the money? I remember a friend asking. Maybe, I said—something I think I believed then. It was gratifying to play into whatever narratives of self-preservation I was threading at the time. The question was more fun and empowering than what I had been asking myself over and over: What are you willing to do for the life you promised yourself? What are you willing to do to survive?

It’s been a year and a half since I last logged into my account, and I only did so to recover photos. I have a full-time job in media now, one I like, that has allowed me to live comfortably, pay off my debts, and exit the sex trades. But I didn’t do so with any regret. I would do it again, knowing everything. Lucky saved my life, showing me how to live without shame about its more difficult aspects and extract the most from its savory pursuits.

Of course, nothing ever really goes away. I took a friend bar-crawling while she visited the city a few months ago. We weaved through every demonic bar in Silver Lake and ended the night outside at Prado. A man at the table next to us asked me if I had a lighter, and I traded him mine for a cigarette. He was there with two of his friends, the one furthest from me looking down at the pavement, refusing to meet my gaze. I only caught a glimpse of his face when he said his goodbyes and sprinted away a few moments later. Hey, was your friend’s name Edward? I asked. He nodded and furrowed his brow before asking how we knew each other. Don’t worry about it, I said.

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If you made it to the end, thank you for reading. And thank you x100000 to all the brilliant people in the sex trades who taught me everything I know. I owe it to you. I’m donating to Sex Workers Outreach Project - Los Angeles and this FFS fundraiser for my angel/pole teacher, Farrah, today. Consider donating an amount meaningful to you <3