I haven't offered anyone to review my total manuscript. Thank you for your interest, but you're going to have to wait like us all. Hopefully, it'll be published before the midterms. But this is the "love letter" section that I was referring to. If you don't want to read it, then don't. But this is what hobbyists mean to me.
.26. The Men Were Not Monsters
"With few exceptions, we all sell ourselves. Unless we are self-sufficient Buddhist monks, we all cater to someone else. The employee to his employer, the entrepreneur to her customers, the artist/performer to his audience, the congregation to their pastor, the politicians to their donors, the wealthy to the politicians they bribe, MAGA loyalist to Trump, etc. As long as we voluntarily give what we have to offer and do no harm to self or others, I say "lassiez-faire".
As my visibility increased and my name began circulating more consistently, the types of men who reached out shifted. It was not immediate, and it did not happen in a single obvious turn, but over time, there was a noticeable change in tone, expectation, and the kinds of spaces I was being invited into. The inquiries became more structured. The messages were more deliberate. The men were often more careful in how they introduced themselves, more aware of discretion, more accustomed to planning, and more fluent in the language of appointments, travel, screening, timing, and expectation. These were not men who appeared disorganized, impulsive, or chaotic. Many of them were professionals, individuals who had spent years cultivating expertise, building careers, and operating within environments that required discipline, control, and sustained decision-making. They were accustomed to systems. They understood structure. They were not moving through the world randomly.
That shift mattered because it complicated the stories people often tell about sex work. Public narratives usually rely on extremes. Either the client is imagined as a violent predator, or the worker is imagined as fully empowered and in control. Either the encounter is treated as pure exploitation, or it is treated as simple commerce between consenting adults. My experience did not fit neatly into either framework. The men were not uniformly abusive. Many were polite. Many were careful. Many were lonely. Many were emotionally controlled in public and emotionally hungry in private. Some were powerful men accustomed to being obeyed. Some were tired men trying to put down power for an hour. Some were thoughtful. Some were entitled. Some were kind. Some were dangerous only in the way entitlement can become dangerous when it goes unrecognized. The point is not to sentimentalize them. The point is to tell the truth.
It is important to state clearly, and without qualification, that in my experience I was never physically harmed against my will. I did not operate under a pimp. I did not have security. I moved independently, arranged my own meetings, managed my own communication, maintained my own boundaries, and made my own decisions about who I would see and under what conditions. The interactions themselves, in the overwhelming majority of cases, remained within the parameters that had been either explicitly or implicitly established beforehand. That fact matters because it directly complicates dominant narratives about sex work, which often rely on the assumption that coercion and violence are constant and defining features of the experience. My experience did not align with that framework, and acknowledging that divergence is necessary for any honest analysis.
At the same time, the absence of overt harm does not indicate the absence of structure, nor does it eliminate the presence of power. A person can avoid physical violence and still live inside conditions that require constant vigilance. A person can consent to an interaction and still be required to manage risk at a level that most formal labor markets would recognize as unacceptable if the work were not stigmatized. A person can earn money, choose clients, travel independently, and maintain boundaries while still operating inside a system that provides no meaningful backup if those boundaries are challenged. This is one of the reasons the language around sex work so often fails. It asks whether something was forced or chosen, as if those are the only categories that matter. But much of life happens between force and freedom.
The men I encountered were often individuals who operated in positions of authority within their professional lives: lawyers, physicians, executives, government officials, entrepreneurs, military officers, financiers, professors, consultants, and men whose titles carried weight even when they did not say them out loud. They were accustomed to environments in which their decisions mattered, where people listened when they spoke, where outcomes were often shaped by their input. That orientation did not disappear when they entered the interaction. It traveled with them. It shaped how they spoke, how they made requests, how they interpreted time, how they understood access, and how they expected the emotional space around them to be organized.
Initially, I did not interpret this as power in a formal sense. I experienced it as difference. Their communication was more direct, their expectations more clearly formed, and their approach to interaction more structured. There was often less visible negotiation, not because negotiation was absent, but because it was embedded within assumption. Requests were framed in ways that suggested the outcome was already understood. Time was organized around efficiency rather than exploration. Even silence carried meaning. It signaled expectation rather than uncertainty. A pause could mean he was waiting for me to understand what he wanted without him having to say it plainly. A glance could function as instruction. A shift in tone could change the room.
Being in proximity to that kind of presence required adjustment. It required me to listen differently, to pay attention not just to what was being said, but to how it was being said and what was being assumed beneath it. This aligns with Erving Goffman's description of interactional order, where power is not only expressed through explicit authority but also through the structuring of social encounters themselves: timing, tone, gesture, deference, interruption, silence, and expectation.¹ I had to learn to read those structures in real time, without formal guidance, without institutional support, and without the luxury of misreading them repeatedly. Every interaction became a lesson in social reading.
A typical appointment with a powerful man did not begin when the door closed. It began in the messages. It began in the way he wrote. Some men wrote with precision: full sentences, clear times, careful confirmations, no unnecessary flirtation. Others wrote as if they were already in command of the appointment before it had been agreed upon. Some sent references efficiently, almost like résumés. Some apologized too much, which could signal genuine nervousness or an attempt to seem harmless. Some asked questions that sounded polite on the surface but were really tests of how much they could direct the interaction. I learned to read those differences because I had to.
There were men whose emails felt like boardroom communication. They were concise, transactional, and controlled. They wanted to know availability, location, time, expectations, and whether discretion would be maintained. They treated the appointment as something to be scheduled between meetings, flights, depositions, surgeries, campaign events, or conferences. That kind of communication could feel safer because it was organized, but it also carried its own form of pressure.
Men accustomed to efficiency could become frustrated by ambiguity. Men accustomed to being accommodated could interpret boundaries as an inconvenience. Men who were used to solving problems with money could forget that not every limit had a price. Then there were men whose messages were softer. They wanted to talk before meeting. They wanted to explain why they were reaching out. They wanted to be reassured that they were not bad people. They wanted me to understand the loneliness, the marriage, the divorce, the grief, the stress, the years without touch, the public self that could not admit need. These men were not necessarily easier. Emotional vulnerability can create its own risks because it asks the worker to carry something beyond the stated service. It can make the appointment feel more human, but also more demanding. A man who arrives lonely may not be dangerous, but loneliness can become possessive if it mistakes temporary care for permanent access.
I remember the feeling of waiting before certain appointments. The hotel room would be prepared. The light would be adjusted, not too bright, not too dim. My phone would be nearby but not visible in a way that suggested suspicion. The bathroom would smell like steam, lotion, perfume, toothpaste, and whatever cleaning product the hotel used before I arrived. My makeup would be fresh. My hair would be arranged. The room would look calm because calm had to be produced before anyone entered it. That production was part of the labor. I would check the time, check the message thread, check the name, check the room again, and then listen for the knock.
The knock itself could tell me something. Some men knocked lightly, as if already ashamed. Some knocked with confidence, as if the room belonged to them because they had paid for it. Some texted instead of knocking. Some called from the lobby. Some arrived exactly on time. Some arrived early, which I disliked because early arrival could disrupt preparation and suggested they believed their time mattered more than mine. Some arrived late with apologies. Some arrived late without apology. Every detail became information.
When the door opened, the assessment continued. Did he look like his reference or introduction suggested? Did he seem intoxicated? Was he nervous? Was he scanning the room? Did he make eye contact? Did he attempt to touch too quickly? Did he comment on my appearance in a way that felt appreciative or evaluative? Did he seem relieved? Did he seem entitled? Did he seem angry underneath politeness? These were not abstract questions. They shaped how I moved. They shaped how much warmth I offered, how much distance I maintained, how quickly I redirected, how carefully I placed my body in relation to the door, the bed, the chair, the phone, and the exit.
This is the kind of labor most people never count. They imagine the appointment as an hour of sex or companionship, but the hour was also a continuous assessment of power. I was reading what he wanted, what he believed he had paid for, what he expected me to understand without saying, what he needed emotionally, what might embarrass him, what might trigger anger, what might create trust, and what might create risk. That reading did not happen once. It happened continuously. An interaction could begin respectfully and shift. A man could be kind until he felt rejected. A man could be nervous until he became comfortable, and comfort could either soften him or make him bolder. A man could want tenderness and then become ashamed of wanting it. Shame could turn inward or outward.
At the same time, the dynamic was not unidirectional, and this is where simplistic interpretations fail. While these men carried authority in their external environments, the interaction itself depended on my participation. They could bring expectation into the space, but the encounter required my engagement, responsiveness, and willingness to sustain it. That created a form of negotiated power, even when it did not appear as negotiation on the surface. Control was never absolute. It was relational, contingent, and constantly shifting. If he had money, I had the ability to accept, refuse, continue, redirect, soften, intensify, or end. That power was not equal to institutional power, and it was not protected by law in the way formal workplace authority might be, but it was not nothing.
This relational dimension became more apparent as I began to recognize differences in how men approached the interaction. Some maintained the same posture they carried in their professional lives. Their tone remained directive, their expectations clearly defined, their behavior aligned with the authority they were accustomed to exercising. These men often wanted the room to confirm the power they already had. They wanted admiration without contradiction. They wanted compliance without negotiation. They wanted ease without having to become vulnerable. The appointment functioned as an extension of the systems that already centered them.
Others did the opposite. They softened. They stepped away from authority, sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically. The shift was not always verbal, but it was perceptible. It appeared in the way they asked questions, the way they listened, the way they allowed space for something other than control. Some men seemed relieved not to be in charge. They wanted permission to stop managing everyone else. They wanted to be touched without performing competence. They wanted to be desired without having to lead. They wanted to speak and not be responsible for the outcome. For those men, the interaction functioned as a temporary release from power rather than an extension of it.
That contrast suggested something important. For some men, the interaction functioned as an extension of power. For others, it functioned as a temporary release from it. Understanding that distinction became central to how I navigated the work. It required me to interpret not just the surface of the interaction, but the underlying orientation of the person I was engaging with. This aligns with Elizabeth Bernstein’s concept of bounded authenticity, where emotional and relational engagement is structured within limits, negotiated moment by moment rather than fixed in advance.² The work was not about becoming someone else entirely. It was about recognizing the dynamic and deciding how I was willing to move within it.
Bounded authenticity is a useful concept because it captures the contradiction of feeling something real inside something structured. An appointment could be transactional and still contain real laughter. It could be paid and still include genuine tenderness. It could be bounded by time and still involve a moment of emotional truth. But the existence of real feeling did not erase the structure. The structure remained. The clock remained. The money remained. The risk remained. The client might remember the moment as intimacy, but I had to remember the frame in order to stay safe and emotionally intact.
Over time, that process became more intentional. I began to structure my interactions more deliberately, not only in terms of scheduling and location, but in terms of how I allocated attention and energy. The increase in money introduced a different level of expectation, but it also required a different level of internal discipline. I had to think more carefully about sustainability: what I could maintain, what I needed to limit, what kinds of clients drained me, what kinds of clients felt manageable, and how I could preserve consistency without exhausting myself. I learned that not every high-paying client was worth seeing. Some men cost more emotionally than they paid financially.
This is another part of the economics people miss. Higher compensation did not simplify the dynamic. It made it more complex. There is a persistent assumption that higher payment equals greater control for the worker, but in practice higher payment often introduces heightened scrutiny and expectation. The more I charged, the more carefully I had to consider every aspect of the interaction: where I went, who I saw, how I communicated, how I dressed, how I maintained boundaries that were not externally enforced, and how much of myself I could afford to bring into the room. Each decision carried implications beyond the immediate moment. It could influence reputation, future access, future expectations, and the way I was discussed within the network.
The men who paid more often expected more than time. They expected polish. They expected discretion. They expected emotional fluency. They expected me to understand how to move in upscale spaces, how to carry conversation, how to read class cues, how to dress for a hotel lobby without looking out of place, how to be warm but not needy, available but not uncontrolled, intelligent but not threatening, sensual but not chaotic. They expected the encounter to feel seamless. Seamlessness is labor. It requires anticipating friction before it appears. It requires eliminating awkwardness. It requires making the artificial feel natural.
I learned how to ask questions that opened men without making them feel interrogated. I learned how to let them talk about work without turning the appointment into therapy unless that was what they needed. I learned how to listen to a man discuss a merger, a lawsuit, a deployment, a patient death, a divorce, or a political event and understand that the subject was sometimes less important than the feeling underneath it. He was not always telling me information. He was showing me the place where the public self had become heavy. My job was to decide how to respond without becoming responsible for more than I could carry.
What fascinated me was that many of these men were not monsters. They were often lonely, overworked, emotionally underdeveloped, externally successful, and internally confused. Some had been taught to achieve but not to feel. Some could command rooms full of people but could not tell their wives they were afraid. Some could perform authority all day and then sit in a hotel room wanting to be reassured that they were still desirable, still human, still capable of being seen without being evaluated. That did not make the transaction innocent. It made it complicated.
The fact that they were not monsters is precisely why the work required so much interpretation. If every client had been obviously dangerous, the work would have been simpler in one way. I could have organized myself entirely around avoidance. But most were not obviously dangerous. Most were ordinary within extraordinary conditions. They had manners. They had jobs. They had families. They had griefs. They had jokes. They had insecurities. They had charm. They also had money, access, entitlement, secrecy, and the ability to walk away from the interaction with far fewer consequences than I would face if something went wrong. Their humanity did not cancel the imbalance. It made the imbalance harder to name.
Emotional detachment began to develop, not as a rejection of connection, but as a necessary form of regulation. I could not fully invest in every interaction without compromising my ability to move through them consistently. Detachment was not coldness. It was self-preservation. It allowed me to be present without being consumed. It allowed me to listen without absorbing everything. It allowed me to create the feeling of intimacy without confusing that feeling for obligation. But detachment was never complete. There were moments, brief and unexpected, where something felt unscripted, where conversation extended beyond what was required, where connection emerged in ways that complicated the structure of the exchange.
Those moments required the most careful management because they introduced vulnerability into a system that depended on boundaries. They blurred distinctions between performance and presence, between structure and spontaneity. They made it more difficult to maintain the consistency the work required. At the same time, they reinforced that the interaction was not reducible to a single category. It was neither purely transactional nor purely relational. It existed in a space between those definitions, requiring constant recalibration.
I remember certain conversations more than I remember certain bodies. A man sitting on the edge of a hotel bed, still in his dress shirt, telling me he had not slept through the night in years. A physician who could discuss death clinically but became quiet when talking about his own father. A military officer who did not want to be touched at first because he said he needed to remember how to relax. A married man who did not speak badly of his wife but described their home as a place where no one saw him anymore. A widower who cried not because of sex, but because I asked him what she had been like before she got sick. These moments were not fantasies. They were disclosures. But disclosure is not the same as mutual relationship. I had to receive them without becoming the person responsible for repairing them.
That distinction was difficult because women are trained to repair. Women are socialized to notice emotional discomfort and respond to it. We are taught to soothe, soften, interpret, and make room. In escorting, that socialization became monetized. The work rewarded the very skills women are often expected to provide for free. But compensation did not remove the strain. If anything, payment intensified the ambiguity because it turned care into a service while still requiring the care to feel personal. The client wanted to feel that I cared, not simply that I was performing care well. That is the paradox of commercial intimacy: the labor must be convincing enough to feel real, but bounded enough to remain survivable.
This is why narratives that rely on extremes—either total harm or total agency—fail to capture the reality of the work. The men were not uniformly abusive. The interactions were not defined by overt coercion. Many of the men were disciplined, controlled, and respectful within the boundaries of the interaction. But the absence of overt harm does not eliminate structural risk. It does not remove the burden of continuous vigilance, individualized safety management, or the cumulative psychological demands of maintaining consistency across interactions. Harm does not always arrive as violence. Sometimes harm arrives as exhaustion, fragmentation, emotional flattening, and the slow normalization of being responsible for everyone else’s needs while having no system responsible for yours.
From a public-health perspective, this distinction is critical. Harm does not emerge only from extreme events. It is also produced through sustained exposure to environments that require high levels of self-regulation without structural support.³ The work required attention, adaptability, emotional regulation, and strategic decision-making, but it provided no institutional framework to support those demands. In another profession, we might recognize this as a high-stress care environment. We might discuss supervision, staffing, safety protocols, burnout, trauma exposure, ethical boundaries, and workplace protections. But because this labor was sexualized and stigmatized, those same concerns were often recoded as personal risk, moral consequence, or private choice.
What I experienced was not constant danger in the way it is often portrayed. It was constant responsibility. Responsibility for interpretation, for boundary enforcement, for risk assessment, for emotional regulation, for maintaining consistency across interactions that varied in context and expectation. That responsibility was individualized, continuous, and unsupported by any broader system designed to absorb or mitigate it. No one else was responsible for reading the room. No one else was responsible for deciding whether a man’s silence meant comfort, shame, anger, or danger. No one else was responsible for making sure the fantasy did not become entitlement. No one else was responsible for recovering afterward and becoming ready for the next person.
That kind of responsibility accumulates in the body. It changes how a person enters rooms. It changes how she listens. It changes how she interprets pauses, glances, jokes, and requests. It creates a habit of vigilance that can begin as skill and later become exhaustion. I became good at reading men, but being good at reading people does not mean the reading costs nothing. Every interaction required attention that could not fully relax. Even when the appointment was pleasant, even when the man was kind, even when nothing went wrong, the responsibility remained mine. I carried the possibility of wrongness even through encounters that ended well.
That distinction—between harm as event and harm as condition—is what ultimately reshapes how the work must be understood. Harm as event is easier for the public to recognize. It has a scene, a perpetrator, an injury, a police report, a headline, or a story that can be repeated. Harm as condition is quieter. It lives in the ongoing expectation that a worker will manage risk alone. It lives in the need to be emotionally available and strategically guarded at the same time. It lives in the erosion that comes from turning intuition into an occupational requirement. It lives in the fact that a person can go years without being physically harmed and still be changed by the constant burden of preventing harm from happening.
That is why I resist both the rescue narrative and the empowerment narrative when either one is used alone. The rescue narrative cannot account for my agency, my skill, my choices, my income, or the fact that many interactions remained within negotiated boundaries. The empowerment narrative cannot account for the structural abandonment, the individualized risk, the emotional cost, or the absence of support. My experience existed between those poles. I was not powerless, but I was not protected. I was not constantly harmed, but I was constantly responsible. I was not simply selling access to my body, but managing a field of emotional, economic, and gendered expectations that most people never saw.
The men were not monsters. That was part of the truth. But another part of the truth is that a system does not need monsters to produce harm. A system can produce harm through ordinary men, ordinary loneliness, ordinary entitlement, ordinary secrecy, ordinary money, and ordinary indifference to the labor women perform to keep interactions from collapsing. A man did not have to be evil for the encounter to require vigilance. He only had to be accustomed to being centered. He only had to believe, even subtly, that payment entitled him to ease, access, emotional accommodation, or relief from his own discomfort. That belief was not always violent, but it was still labor-producing. It made work for me.
This is where the chapter’s larger argument returns to public health, law, and labor. If harm is understood only as assault, then policy will only respond after crisis. If harm is understood as a risk environment, then policy must ask what conditions create vulnerability before crisis occurs. It must ask what screening systems exist, what reporting systems are safe, what labor protections are possible, what health supports are accessible, and what kinds of community infrastructure reduce the burden on individual workers. It must also ask why the emotional and risk-management labor of sex workers is treated as less worthy of protection than comparable forms of labor in other industries.
The men were not monsters, but the work still required a monster-sized amount of responsibility. That is the sentence I return to when I try to explain what people misunderstand. They want danger to look like danger. They want harm to announce itself. They want the bad man to be clearly bad, the safe man to be clearly safe, the empowered woman to be entirely free, and the victimized woman to have no agency. But the reality was far more difficult. Most of the time, I was not surviving monsters. I was surviving ambiguity. I was surviving responsibility without infrastructure. I was surviving the emotional needs of men who were often decent enough to be sympathetic and powerful enough to require caution.
And that is what ultimately reshaped how I understood the work. It was not only the dramatic moments that mattered. It was the accumulation of ordinary ones. The polite emails. The careful screenings. The hotel rooms. The confessions. The negotiations. The moments of tenderness that still required boundaries. The men who were respectful and still draining. The men who were lonely and still entitled. The men who made me laugh and still required me to calculate exits. The men who thanked me for listening without understanding that listening had been the labor all along.
To tell the truth about this work, I have to hold all of that together. I have to say that I was not physically harmed against my will, and I also have to say that absence of physical harm is not the same as safety. I have to say that many of the men were not monsters, and I also have to say that the system placed the burden of managing their humanity on me. I have to say that I exercised agency, and I also have to say that agency without structure can become another form of abandonment. I have to say that the work was often controlled, negotiated, and bounded, and I also have to say that the labor of keeping it bounded was constant.
That is the distinction the public rarely sees. Harm is not always an event. Sometimes harm is a condition. Sometimes the condition is the expectation that one woman will manage everything alone and then be told, because nothing visibly terrible happened, that she was safe.
Notes
¹ Erving Goffman, “The Interaction Order: American Sociological Association, 1982 Presidential Address,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (1983): 1–17.
² Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
³ Kate Shannon et al., “Global Epidemiology of HIV among Female Sex Workers: Influence of Structural Determinants,” The Lancet 385, no. 9962 (2015): 55–71.
In that world, people sometimes talked about something called the stripper index.⁵
The phrase sounds almost like a joke, and in some ways people used it that way, but underneath the humor was a sharp observation about money. Strippers, escorts, dancers, and sex workers often moved toward disposable income before other people knew how to name what was happening. If a major sporting event was coming to town, the clubs knew. If the All-Star Game was coming, the dancers knew. If a convention filled the hotels, the escorts knew. If military personnel were being moved into a region, sex workers knew. If a factory opened, if a port expanded, if an oil field boomed, if contractors arrived, if a political event flooded a city with staffers, lobbyists, police, security, consultants, and men with expense accounts, the sex economy felt it quickly.
That is why the phrase “stripper index” was never really only about strippers. It was about sex workers as economic sensors. It was about the way women working near male leisure, cash spending, travel, and fantasy often saw money moving before economists, journalists, or politicians admitted what was happening. We were not sitting in policy meetings, but we were reading the receipts of policy. We were not publishing market analysis, but we were watching who had cash, who was anxious, who was spending recklessly, who wanted to be seen, who wanted discretion, and who suddenly disappeared.
Sex workers go where the money goes because survival teaches mobility. The market may pretend to be abstract, but it has geography. Money shows up in hotel bars, airport lounges, steakhouse reservations, strip clubs, private parties, convention centers, military towns, boomtowns, and cities hosting men who are temporarily away from home. When money concentrates somewhere, desire industries usually notice. When money leaves, we notice that too.
The same was true in reverse. Sex workers were often among the first to feel economic pressure because what we provided was usually paid for with disposable income.⁶ For many men, seeing a dancer, hiring an escort, booking companionship, spending recklessly in a club, or extending a night past what was practical belonged to the category of adult indulgence. It was not rent. It was not groceries. It was not a child’s tuition. It was not the mortgage. It was the kind of spending men justified when they felt flush and reduced when they began to feel uncertain.
Before the language of downturn reached the evening news, it could show up in shorter appointments. It could show up in men asking more questions about rates. It could show up in regulars delaying meetings, apologizing, explaining that work was strange, that bonuses were smaller, that the firm was tightening, that contracts were delayed, that investors were nervous, that travel budgets were being watched. It could show up in the clubs before it showed up in public reports. Fewer bottles. Smaller tips. More men looking than spending. More men wanting the feeling of access without the cost of actual access. The mood would change before the official numbers did.
That was part of the education. Men taught escorts about economics, sometimes directly and sometimes without realizing it. They talked. They explained what was happening in their industries. They complained about interest rates, contracts, staffing, layoffs, hospital systems, litigation, campaign money, mergers, real estate, military budgets, reimbursement rates, insurance, fuel prices, and market uncertainty. They did not always think they were teaching me. Sometimes they thought they were venting. Sometimes they were trying to impress me. Sometimes they were thinking out loud because the room felt private enough for them to say what they could not say elsewhere.
But I was listening.
Over time, I began to understand that the learning went both ways. Men taught escorts about economics, and then escorts began predicting economics. We learned not only from what men said, but from what they did. Their spending habits became signals. Their confidence became data. Their cancellations became data. Their generosity became data. Their anxiety became data. A man could tell me everything was fine while cutting an appointment short, declining dinner, or asking whether I could “work with him” on a rate he had never questioned before. I learned to trust the pattern more than the reassurance.
That was the part no one outside the work seemed to understand. We were treated as if we existed outside serious economic life, but in reality, we were often positioned very close to it. We were near men with money when they were relaxed enough to talk. We were near men with power when they were tired enough to be honest. We were near industries before their shifts became public language. We were near the places where income turned into indulgence, where confidence became spending, and where uncertainty became restraint.
At one point, I began doing something I jokingly called Katie’s Daily Sendoff.
The name was playful, but the practice was real. I had clients who needed to watch business news in the morning, men who would normally have CNBC, Bloomberg, or another financial program playing while they got dressed, drank coffee, or drove across town. Some of them were coming to me between meetings. Some were coming before work. Some were coming from airports, hotels, conferences, or early calls. They were men whose minds were already inside the market before they ever entered the room.
So I started watching business news before they arrived.
I would wake up, get ready, turn on the financial news, and listen. I did not understand everything at first. I listened for names, numbers, moods, and repeated phrases. The Dow. The Fed. Oil. Jobs reports. Tech stocks. Housing starts. Consumer confidence. China. Defense spending. Interest rates. Inflation. Earnings. Mergers. Bank failures. Market correction. Recession fears. I learned the rhythm of that language by exposure. At first, it sounded like a foreign dialect of power. Then, slowly, I began to understand which words made men tense and which words made them expansive.
When they arrived, I would greet them warmly, kiss them, and then tell them what I had heard.
Sometimes I would say it lightly, almost teasing: “You’re in a good mood because the market opened up.”
Or: “They were talking about oil this morning. I figured you were either going to come in stressed or ready to explain something to me.”
Or: “I heard them say consumer confidence was down. Does that mean everybody is pretending not to be scared again?”
Men loved that. Not all of them, but many of them. They loved that I had paid attention to their world before they entered mine. They loved that I could meet them at the door with beauty and warmth, but also with a sentence that told them I had been listening to the same signals they listened to. It made them feel recognized. It made the appointment feel less like escape and more like translation. They did not have to leave their intellectual life outside the room. They could bring it in, and I could receive it.
For me, it became a learning process. I was not watching business news because I wanted to become a trader or because I was pretending to be someone I was not. I was watching because the men I saw were teaching me that money had moods, and those moods shaped everything around me. Their moods shaped whether they booked, how long they stayed, how much they spent, how freely they talked, how much reassurance they needed, and how much control they tried to exert. Economics was not separate from intimacy. Economics entered the room before the client did.
That realization changed how I understood the work. Sex work was not an isolated underground economy disconnected from the legitimate one. It was one of the places where the legitimate economy became visible in human behavior. When industries expanded, men spent differently. When industries contracted, men carried that stress into the room. When bonuses were good, they were generous. When markets were uncertain, they became cautious, defensive, or apologetic. When a city filled with high-income visitors, the phones PART 6 OF 6
changed. When a city emptied out, the silence changed.The stripper index was crude language for a sophisticated reality: sex workers often know where money is moving because our income depends on being close to disposable cash, male confidence, travel, secrecy, and leisure.⁷ We learn to read the economy through bodies, habits, cancellations, tips, and tone. We learn where men go when they feel powerful and where they stop going when they feel afraid.
This knowledge was not formally respected because the people who held it were not formally respected. A banker discussing consumer confidence on television was treated as an expert. A dancer noticing that men had stopped buying champagne was treated as anecdotal. A consultant explaining market contraction was treated as analysis. An escort noticing that regulars had begun shortening appointments was treated as gossip. But both were reading behavior. Both were observing demand. Both were interpreting confidence. The difference was not always the quality of the insight. Sometimes the difference was simply whose knowledge was considered legitimate.
That connects to the larger argument of this chapter. The men were part of my education, but the work itself was also an education. It taught me to listen across class lines, professional languages, and emotional registers. It taught me that power speaks differently when it thinks no one important is recording it. It taught me that markets are not only graphs and numbers; they are men deciding whether they feel secure enough to spend. They are men trying to convert stress into pleasure. They are men using money to buy relief from the very systems that gave them money in the first place.
There was a strange intimacy in that. A man could teach me about municipal bonds while taking off his cufflinks. Another could explain a hospital merger while sitting on the edge of a hotel bed. Another could talk about defense contracts, then become quiet when I asked whether he ever got tired of thinking about war. Another could explain interest rates with the patience of a professor and then admit that he did not understand why his marriage felt like a house where all the lights were on but no one was home.
Those conversations stayed with me because they showed me that expertise and loneliness often occupied the same body. The same man who could explain global markets might not be able to explain his own sadness. The same man who understood leverage financially might not recognize it emotionally. The same man who could forecast industry movement might not understand the power he carried into a private room with a woman whose safety depended on reading him accurately.
That was the contradiction I kept returning to. These men could teach me, and they could also require managing. They could be generous with knowledge and still benefit from a structure that left me unsupported. They could be kind, intellectually engaged, and respectful, while still participating in a system where my labor remained invisible. I could learn from them without pretending the exchange was equal. I could respect them without ignoring the imbalance. I could understand their humanity without making myself responsible for all of it.
Katie’s Daily Sendoff became one small example of that complexity. On the surface, it was charming. A pretty woman greeting a man with a kiss and a market summary. But underneath, it revealed the deeper skill of the work. I was studying his world so I could create a better encounter. I was using information to build ease. I was making him feel known before he had to explain himself. I was converting financial news into emotional hospitality.
That is labor.
It is intellectual labor, emotional labor, class labor, and gendered labor. It is the labor of knowing what kind of man wants to be challenged and what kind wants to be admired. It is the labor of knowing when to ask a question and when to let him teach. It is the labor of making a man feel brilliant without making yourself small. It is the labor of allowing him to speak as an expert while quietly becoming one yourself.
By then, I was beginning to understand that sex work had given me a different kind of curriculum. Brown had given me theory. Medicine had given me proximity to bodies and systems of care. The military had given me hierarchy. Magic City had given me performance, hustle, and crowd intelligence. Escorting gave me access to the private speech of men with power. It gave me an informal education in economics, law, medicine, politics, war, marriage, loneliness, and class. It taught me that knowledge does not always arrive cleanly. Sometimes it arrives in a hotel room, after a knock, from a man who thinks he is only talking because he has paid for privacy.
But that education came at a cost. I learned because I had to listen. I listened because listening was part of the service. I became economically literate not only because I was curious, but because curiosity made me better at surviving the market I was inside. The more I understood about money, the better I could understand my own work: why certain weeks were busy, why certain clients disappeared, why certain cities changed, why some men spent freely and others began negotiating, why desire expanded in times of confidence and contracted in times of fear.
That is why I do not dismiss the stripper index. It may sound informal, but informal knowledge is not useless knowledge. For sex workers, it was a way of naming what we already knew: the body often feels the economy before the report confirms it. The club feels it. The hotel feels it. The phone feels it. The appointment book feels it. The woman waiting to see whether the regular still comes this month feels it.
And once I understood that, I never looked at economics the same way again.
Footnotes for Chapter 27 1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1970).
2. Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
3. Viviana A. Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
4. Tim Rhodes, “The ‘Risk Environment’: A Framework for Understanding and Reducing Drug-Related Harm,” International Journal of Drug Policy 13, no. 2 (2002): 85–94.
5. The term “stripper index” is an informal economic concept used in popular and industry discourse to describe the idea that sex-industry workers may detect shifts in disposable income before those shifts become visible in formal economic reporting.
6. Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours, 101–132.
7. Viviana A. Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy, 20–45.
and am reading it at my own pace.