I’m a 24-year-old gay male with few resources and no “marketable” skills. I have made a lot of bad choices and now I struggle to make ends meet in a crappy dead-end job, living paycheck to paycheck in an expensive East Coast city. Recently, someone on Grindr offered me $3,000 to have sex with him. He is homely and nearly three times my age, but he seems kind and respectful. I could really use that money. I have no moral opposition to prostitution, but the few friends I’ve spoken to were horrified. Part of me agrees and thinks this is a really bad idea and I’ll regret it. But there’s another part of me that figures, hey, it’s just sex—and I’ve done more humiliating things for a lot less money. It makes me sad to think the only way I can make money is prostituting myself, because my looks aren’t going to last forever. And let’s face it: Prostitution is an ugly and messy business, and it wouldn’t impress a potential future employer.
Stressed Over Taking Elderly Man’s Payment To Eat Dick
I shared your letter with Dr. Eric Sprankle, an assistant professor of psychology at Minnesota State University and a licensed clinical psychologist. “This young man is distressed that he may have to resort to ‘prostituting himself,’ which suggests he, like most people, views sex work as the selling of one’s body or the selling of oneself,” said Dr. Sprankle, who tweets about sexual health, the rights of sex workers, and secularism at @DrSprankle.
But you wouldn’t be selling yourself or your body, SOTEMPTED, you would be selling access to your body—temporary access—and whatever particular kind of sex you consented to have with this man in exchange for his money.
“Sex work is the sale of a service,” said Dr. Sprankle. “The service may involve specific body parts that aren’t typically involved in most industries, but it is unequivocally a service labor industry. Just as massage therapists aren’t selling their hands or themselves when working out the kinks of some wealthy older client, sex workers are merely selling physical and emotional labor.”
Massage therapists who haaaaate seeing their occupation referenced in conversations about sex work—all those hardworking, never-jerking massage therapists—might wanna check their privilege, as all the cool kids on campus are saying these days.
“Massage therapists have the privilege of not worrying about being shamed and shunned by friends,” said Dr. Sprankle, “and not worrying about being arrested for violating archaic laws.” You will have to worry about shame, stigma, and arrest if you decide to go ahead with this, SOTEMPTED.
“He will have to be selective about whom he shares his work experiences with and may have to keep it a lifelong secret from family and coworkers,” said Dr. Sprankle. “This could feel isolating and inauthentic. And while I am not aware of any empirical evidence to suggest men who enter sex work in this manner later regret their decision, this young man’s friends have already given him a glimpse of the unfortunate double standard social stigma of pursuing this work.”
Because I’m a full-service sex-advice professional, SOTEMPTED, I also shared your letter with a couple of guys who’ve actually done sex work—one a bona fide sex worker, the other a sexual adventurer.
“I was struck by the words SOTEMPTED used to describe sex work: ugly, messy, humiliating,” said Mike Crawford, a sex worker, sex-workers-rights activist, and self-identified “cashsexual” who tweets at @BringMeTheAx. “For many of us, it’s actually nothing like that. When you strip away the moralizing and misinformation, sex work is simply a job that provides a valuable service to your clients. Humiliation or mess can be involved—if that’s what gets them off—but there is absolutely nothing inherently ugly or degrading about the work itself.”