Get Out, Sister!
Dear comrade in struggle,
If you are or are thinking about working as an escort, stripper, or in some other modeling or sugar dating business, it's because you want to obviously make good life decisions, the decisions that are right for you, and not necessarily what an oppressive patriarchal society deems you "should" be doing. You "should" want to be in a monogamous committed relationship with a "good" guy. You "should" want marriage and children, maybe even more than a successful career. Maybe, like me, you just want to, for a few years, anonymously date random men while you focus on self-care and on figuring out what you want to do careerwise. Still, though, you want to know what you're getting into and know what, if any, are the consequences of this kind of sexual experimentation.
A lot of the guys we've met--especially the seemingly liberal and progressive ones--act so cool, so open-minded, so seemingly sex-positive, so non-judgmental. They tell us, "This is empowering" and "I'm your friend." They invite us to visit them, sometimes in beautiful homes.
Then they nonchalantly hand us a wad of cash like that's no problem.
And somehow, we sense, something feels deeply off. Something about that creepy fake sex-positive, liberal vibe. These men have some means, enough to know we're taking some risks--the potential legal trouble, the employment gaps on our resumes, the income my mom offered to sell her home so I can claim on my tax returns, the record that can follow us, the targeting, the surveillance, the covert sabotage. They get their fantasy and go back to their homes, their 401Ks, and their jobs. We're left dissociated, paranoid, shunned professionally, not taken seriously romantically, struggling in our finances, and left watching all our hopes and aspirations quietly disappear. Doors that should've been open for us--career, relationships, family--start closing. We were meant to live real lives... but something keeps undermining it.
I graduated from college. I had real career plans. I didn't do it for long, and I kept strict boundaries with it, but even that cost me much more than whatever I got paid. You deserve to know the risks involved in what you're getting into, even Ted Bundy, who was a serial killer in the '70s, was given that much respect. These business ventures are fake sex-positive liberal packaging around the same old imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal exploitation. Maybe even, as Woodly Allen described it in Mighty Aphrodite, white slavery.
Get out, sister! While, and if, you still can.