If sex work’s taught me anything, it’s to never be miserly about love. I love you costs nothing and feels like a million bucks.

The wild and crazy stripper is not sober. She’s a shot-taking, line-ripping, mentally unstable firecracker, and the best fuck of your life.

When a client is “exploited” by a sex worker, the worst that can happen is that they lose their money. When a sex worker is exploited by a client, the worst that can happen is that they lose their life.

They arrive late into the evening because that’s when they make their money, when the patron is sufficiently plastered and ripe for the exploiting. As dancers, we find our people in the locker room—the ones with similar life experiences, backgrounds, and senses of humour.

Like writing, sex work is a game of endurance. Whether in the club or on the street, scribbling in a journal or revising the last draft of a manuscript, the writer and the whore must learn to “stick it out” and be patient with the process.

clients and their assortment of quirks. We are professionally warm, tender, gentle, and affectionate, all the while maintaining rock-solid boundaries.

Storytelling—that is, telling our own stories—has the power to transform ignorance into wisdom, hatred into love. The truth changes people. That’s what I call advocacy.

Is sex work empowering or disempowering?”—is not a question we ask of workers in other industries.

I don’t blame anyone for thinking badly about whores—but I do find those unwilling to change their positions in the face of evidence suspicious. Why hold on to a harmful prejudice that only serves to dehumanize a group of already vulnerable people?