Interview to a migrant sex worker.
February 2022. Berlin.
What is being a sex worker?
It is offering sexual services for money. Offering sex related services in a professional way.
How long have you been doing this job?
Been doing this for about two years.
Can you name three motivations that led you to choose it?
My motivations were, one: I needed money, immediately. I had to make money somehow, and my legal status didn’t allow me to have a job that paid me enough. That pushed me to take another path, and one of them was sex work, where you make money quickly, good money, depending on how you do the job.
Another motivation is that I was very curious about working with sex, to know what can be explored there. I was very curious to experience it firsthand. On the one hand, yes, I felt a bit obliged because it was what could give me money at the time, but on the other hand it was something interesting, and I said to myself: “I’m going to enjoy this profession, I’m going to take it as an adventure”.
And another important reason is the possibility to feel wanted, to feel appreciated, to feel that people love you and want you, something that I lacked a lot during the time I have been in Germany. In a way doing sex work for me was a personal challenge, about how to take things on and go forward with what you can do with yourself and your body, being in a foreign country where very few things are yours or belong to you, or you bring with you, where you don’t have a home, a family, and your friends are not around.
Are you legalized? Why?
No, I am not a registered sex worker. The work I do right now is considered illegal by German law.
The issue of legalization is complicated, because when you are not European, there are requirements that are very difficult, almost impossible to meet in order to be registered and do the work in Germany. It is a legislation that is applied from positions of nationality privilege, although it is not only so, because there are also many European people who do not have the economic solvency or access to health or medical insurance that Germany asks for. It is simply a very strong migration control mechanism.
What kind of sexual services do you offer? What are the most recurrent or requested practices?
This depends on who you are and who your clients are. My clients are usually cis men. What I offer as a services depends a lot on what the clients want. I offer services that are not necessarily mixed with my intimate life, so I can think about them better and from a distance, and plan them. I don’t know if I can say that they are services that I can do more mechanically, but I can do them efficiently, without exposing myself or becoming so vulnerable.
They have to do with sexual practices that are a bit more extreme than the ones that are normally known, or are more recurrent, and I would rather not go into details about them.
But I do want to add that they have a very wide range: they go from these kinds of extreme experiences to others that are offering boyfriend experience, or just being there for someone who is lonely. At the end of the day, many of the clients who reach out to me just want a good companion, or they want something very specific and particular.
Within the layers or ranges of practices, I have offered several. Sometimes related to online work and sometimes not. For example, clients who want to have a party or an event, and for some reason want to have you there. And yes, I guess in sex work everyone explores a little bit of everything, because it depends on what comes to you, what people ask you for.
Have you ever done street work?
No, I haven’t. I’ve had clients with whom I’ve arranged to meet on the street and do things there, but looking for clients on the street, finding them, negotiating a price and offering the service there is something I’ve never done.
Do you think it is possible to do this work and at the same time protect your privacy?
Yes, it is. And I’m very interested in that. I do the work under a pseudonym, and I create stories. That’s also part of the enjoyment of what I do: inventing those identities or personalities. I’m interested in protecting my privacy because I don’t know how a lot of people around me would react if they knew this about me. It’s not what I’m most concerned about in life either, but if I can save myself the trouble, so much the better.
On the other hand, if I wanted to get more involved with activism in this sector of work, obviously my identity would have to be public, and for that I need another kind of legal protection which I don’t have on my side at all.
To what extent does the job offer you physical, emotional and social security?
The issue of physical security is complex. Whenever you meet a client there is always a margin of risk, of unexpected things happening. Although the same thing happens when you go on a blind sexdate.
But in general my experience with clients has been good. Things that we have planned almost always happen. It is also true that there are services or experiences that I have limited myself from offering, because I don’t have a safe space to perform them.
For example, as an unregistered sex worker, I cannot go to studios or specific places dedicated to offering sex work. But if I were entitled to them, I would have support from colleagues who would be working there, it would be a safer place, like brothels are, where you live and work, and there are people who know about you, who know you.
I think a lot about physical safety is being put at stake, and for the worse, due to this kind of registration laws, which do not think first of all about people, about helping them or making their lives better, on the contrary, they cause a lot of problems, and I count myself in that group. This is a job where having a legal status can provide you with physical security, work space, and also a whole infrastructure of support.
They have to do with sexual practices that are a bit more extreme than the ones that are normally known, or are more recurrent, and I would rather not go into details about them.
But I do want to add that they have a very wide range: they go from these kinds of extreme experiences to others that are offering boyfriend experience, or just being there for someone who is lonely. At the end of the day, many of the clients who reach out to me just want a good companion, or they want something very specific and particular.
Within the layers or ranges of practices, I have offered several. Sometimes related to online work and sometimes not. For example, clients who want to have a party or an event, and for some reason want to have you there. And yes, I guess in sex work everyone explores a little bit of everything, because it depends on what comes to you, what people ask you for.
Have you ever done street work?
No, I haven’t. I’ve had clients with whom I’ve arranged to meet on the street and do things there, but looking for clients on the street, finding them, negotiating a price and offering the service there is something I’ve never done.
Do you think it is possible to do this work and at the same time protect your privacy?
Yes, it is. And I’m very interested in that. I do the work under a pseudonym, and I create stories. That’s also part of the enjoyment of what I do: inventing those identities or personalities. I’m interested in protecting my privacy because I don’t know how a lot of people around me would react if they knew this about me. It’s not what I’m most concerned about in life either, but if I can save myself the trouble, so much the better.
On the other hand, if I wanted to get more involved with activism in this sector of work, obviously my identity would have to be public, and for that I need another kind of legal protection which I don’t have on my side at all.
To what extent does the job offer you physical, emotional and social security?
The issue of physical security is complex. Whenever you meet a client there is always a margin of risk, of unexpected things happening. Although the same thing happens when you go on a blind sexdate.
But in general my experience with clients has been good. Things that we have planned almost always happen. It is also true that there are services or experiences that I have limited myself from offering, because I don’t have a safe space to perform them.
Where is the stimulating/attractive part of the work you do, and where is the difficult part or the area of vulnerability?
The most attractive thing is, on the one hand, that it fascinates me to see that I can give so much pleasure to people. That people can pay for it, and pay well. I like that very much, I enjoy it. Preparing how I’m going to do things with people.
The hard part is not having a strong support network. That is important. Friends, partners, collaborators, colleagues. Because it can be an emotionally and physically exhausting job, which can compromise your health at different levels, and I am referring to sexually transmitted infections but also to extreme sexual practices. There are situations that also generate stress, others that affect self-esteem, and I believe that the greatest area of vulnerability is not having a safe space at an affective level where this work is received: from the partner, to friends, colleagues. In other words, people who understand what you do, and with whom you can talk openly about it, because it is obviously a question of keeping your mental health in good shape.
Can you relate any memorable experience with a client that this work has given you?
There is a common element with all clients: you have to be aware that you have to put aside all the interferences you have in your head, the stress, and arrive with the mental attitude that you are the light, the star, the joy, that is, the best in that person’s life at that moment. For example, to get there I have a playlist I listen to when I go to work, specially this one Bunny is a Rider by Caroline Polachek. When you set your mind to that, you give that to the client and they feel super good, grateful. When you know you made someone’s day, it’s a super comforting feeling, and it’s something that’s really been repeated in almost all of my experiences as a sex worker, regardless of what practice I do. That motivates me even more to do this work. I don’t know, it’s a very strong feeling of well-being when you see that you’ve been able to give something good, pleasure, something positive to people. You make them smile, feel fulfilled, by having a different chemical-hormonal connection with their body, feeling accepted for who they are, how they are and what they want.
It’s something that I like very much and that I gather from the experiences I’ve had, which have been very different from each other. It gives me a lot of satisfaction when clients come back, because it creates an intimate relationship that is at the same time half anonymous, because they don’t fully know who you are, what you do. But that doesn’t really matter. Because at that point in the experience the people involved expect from each other exactly what they are going to get.
I like that in general: that the clients stay super happy. And of course, it’s very important and satisfying to get paid, and to get paid well. When I get that money and I can pay my rent, pay for my food, send money to my family, pay for drinks for my friends, or buy a birthday present for someone I love very much, it feels very very good.
What is the link between this work and violence and fragility? Do these two terms relate more to the client or to the system?
When I think of fragility I don’t think directly of sex workers, who are not fragile people. They are usually super strong, able to bounce back, to rebuild, to get back on their feet, and in fact, they came to sex work because they have had to reinvent a number of elements in their life. I don’t see sex workers as weak people. We do have a lot of tact, and that is where we are linked to fragility, because that is what we work with, with situations where there is and reveals a lot of sensitivity, sometimes delicate, complex, very intimate situations.
Regarding violence, I think there is a mythification of this term when it is thought that it comes directly from the client. I am not saying at all that it does not exist, that there are no situations between client and sex worker that can be violent and not consensual. But if I speak from my concrete experience, and also that of many colleagues I know, I would say that the strong violence comes from the system, from society itself. It is a violence related to the stigma that still exists about the sex worker. That is more violent than any of the practices that any client has ever asked me for. Maybe I’ve been lucky. I can’t rule that out.
Also, the constant victimization that comes from the media and governments about those who do sex work is very violent, because there is a fixed image that those of us who do sex work are always forced or are always victims of human trafficking. And of course, there are many testimonies and stories that come from these fucked up realities, but there are also many other people here in Berlin, who do not do it for those reasons, but from a total awareness and autonomy of why and for what we do it.
That’s why it’s important and I’m very interested to talk openly about it. Because yes, we do receive a lot of systemic and social violence: from partners, acquaintances, institutions, professional circles, etc. There are many people who have done sex work for many years, and for fear, they would never dare to declare it openly if they want to get something: a new job, to say something… So yes, I find that shame is very violent, and it breaks you.
However, it’s also great to know that there are many people, activists and organizations in Berlin today talking about these issues, debating, and I believe with all my strength that the social and labor outlook can be better because of this.
Do you think there would have been a specific circumstance in which you would not have chosen to be a sex worker?
Yes. If I had had a different legal status, and had been able to work in something else that paid just as well, maybe I wouldn’t have gone straight to sex work. And if I hadn’t emigrated, I think I might not have done it either. But at the same time, knowing the work today as I do, it’s something I know I’m not going to stop doing. I do it because I want to. So, even if ideal situations come along, that bring me enough money to live on, and take up my time, I wouldn’t stop doing it because sex work provides me with something important for my life as well. I enjoy it, and I want to keep it.
Bunny is a Rider by Caroline Polachek