Cortigiana Onesta

no, not Church and State. Work and relationships.

One of the biggest misconceptions about sex work is that workers don’t or can’t have normal lives or relationships. That all we do is fuck, shop, and do drugs. That we take home hundreds of thousands a year that just gets pissed away on designer duds and designer drugs. We all have implants, model bodies, plastic surgery, perfect faces.

And of course anyone logical knows this isn’t the case.

Many of us are students who don’t want loan debt. Many of us are frugal and want a good sized nest egg.  Many of us are childfree hedonists who want to enjoy life. Many are mothers who want to spend as much time as possible at home with their children. Some are having a hard time with getting jobs with the near double digit unemployment rate in the US.

But the one thing we all have in common is that we have lives outside of work. Some of those lives involve husbands, wives, children. Some of us live alone. Some of us live with our significant others. Some of us have significant others we see off and on.

Maintaining a relationship while being a companion is not easy, but it is doable. We are still real people. We laugh, we love, we hurt, we cry. What we need is a person who understands that. And when we find that person, we fall into a niche with them. They ask how our day was, laugh at the anecdotes, sympathise with the bad days. They understand what we do for money, and they don’t mind.

How you ask?

The same way anyone with a controversial job or viewpoint does. You think doctors who perform abortions or people who picket clinics keep their significant others in the dark about what they do? Not in most cases. The significant other knows and either agrees with it, or comes to terms with it.

The same thing goes for sex work. Believe it or not, there are men and women that understand that there are those that choose to be companions willingly. They believe that we enjoy our jobs, that we are safe, that we are just normal people. They realise that despite what we do at our jobs, we can come home and be “normal”. We are no different than anyone else who works in customer service. We are no different than anyone else with a controversial job. We are people, providing a service. All we require from a significant other is that they remember that, and that they have an open mind.