SWERFs and other abolitionists who post about their sad, icky feelings about sex work in the sex work tag should explain where they get their own money so we can analyze and criticize them the way they do about us. I bet 99% of them are either still supported by their parents or are privileged enough to have cruised through university straight into a decent paying career, and either way they’ve probably never had to support themselves on a minimum/low wage job. 

Even ignoring how horrible and dehumanizing minimum wage work can be (have you ever been forced to clean actual human shit off a men’s room wall that had been deliberately smeared there? I have, all for the amazing price of about $6/hour after taxes), abolitionists (and lots of other people, actually) seem to have NO concept of what it’s like to live off minimum wage. 

At my last job I actually made $10/hr, that’s like a whole dollar over minimum wage so I felt lucky because I’d never been paid a penny over minimum wage before. Oregon has the second highest minimum wage in the country. Federal minimum wage is still only $7.25 this year and only 29 states have a wage higher than that. I know a lot of clueless and rich people think that the only people making minimum wage are teenagers working after school jobs, but I’ve been in the workforce for 20 years and have pretty much only ever been paid minimum wage (I have worked some tipped jobs though, so I made more then), except of course when I was doing sex work. I was only scheduled for 32 hours/week when I started my last job. A lot of low wage jobs wont give anyone full time hours, so many people are forced to work at least two jobs. 32 hours was pretty good compared to most of my past jobs where they would only give me like 16-25 hours/week, but I arranged with my boss to add some extra duties to my job and got myself up to 35 hours/week. That means my income pre-taxes was $1400/month. What I actually got on my paychecks was just over $1000/month. Maybe that sounds like a lot if you’re a teenager who doesn’t have to work or pay rent, but it’s pretty much nothing. 

My rent is $900/month, which is typical for a studio apartment in Portland these days. I could maybe find a cheaper studio for around $750-800 but it would almost definitely be waaaaaaay out far from the city center, so I would probably have to get a monthly bus pass which is $100, and that would pretty much cancel out any savings. My transportation costs are zero to maybe $10/month if I take the bus a couple times, but I mostly walk or ride my bike everywhere. My phone bill is about $60/month and my internet is about $80. My electric bill is around $12-30/month. I spend about $200/month on food. So just my bare minimum costs are about $1250-1300/month, and I feel like I live a pretty cheap life. I can’t even imagine if I had student loans or a car or a kid. 

Before I started escorting, I often just didn’t eat on my days off (I worked in a kitchen and was allowed to eat whatever I wanted at work, so that was helpful). I often didn’t have $2.50 to ride the bus. I don’t mean I just didn’t have any cash on hand, I literally didn’t possess two dollars and fifty cents, nothing in the bank or anything. One time my bike got a flat tire and I didn’t have the $4 to buy a new tube and I didn’t have $2.50 to take the bus to work even just one way so I had to walk the 12 miles round trip to work and back for a couple days until I got paid. I kept thinking about moving into a house with roommates, but I was in a lease anyway so I couldn’t leave, plus moving is always expensive. Rooms in houses are renting for like $600-800/month these days, so barely even cheaper than my apartment anyway. And I did the roommate thing all through my 20s and I just don’t want to do it anymore. I feel like, a grown woman in her 30s working full time should be able to live in her own fucking studio apartment! I keep seeing that post going around Tumblr about how in no states will a full time minimum wage job pay for a two bedroom apartment, and I’m always thinking, yeah actually it doesn’t even pay for the tiniest studio in a lot of places. 

So, that’s why I finally started escorting. I didn’t want to go back to stripping for a million reasons and I couldn’t think of any other options. I don’t love escorting. If someone offered me some other job that paid…even just okay, I would probably want to take it, however with my mental health problems and chronic severe headaches I honestly don’t even know if it would be possible for me to work full time at this point. 

Basically what I’m trying to say is that there are things that are far worse than being sexually objectified; there are far more pressing concerns when you’re poor. Living without enough money to cover even your basic needs is fucking horrible. The constant stress of trying to delay shut off notices and evictions. Being in real danger of losing your home. Being hungry a lot. Deliberately overdrawing your bank account because you’re so desperate to get some food or pay off a bill, even knowing it means $30+ in overdraft charges so you’ll be even more fucked afterward. Never knowing how you’re going to save your ass this time. Feeling so desperate and hopeless all the time.