My senior-year thesis writing class for undergraduate was on Vietnam Conflict Literature and Film. It was not the class I wanted to take, but it was the one that fit my schedule best as I had two part-time jobs and couldn’t afford to reduce my hours. We spent all of our time in an underground lecture theater that we affectionately referred to as the bunker, while our laidback professor gently guided our discussions of books such as The Things They Carried, Matterhorn, and Dispatches, and watched films that included The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. We were all students at a liberal arts college that considered ourselves pacifists; who had painted ourselves with rainbows in defense of gay marriage; who had never once seen violence, not even a street fight. Yet we still debated about how realistic or believable the content we were studying was, and whether or not it ‘positively contributed to the canon.’ We were idiots.
After we turned our final papers in on the final day of class, we said goodbye to our lanky and long-haired professor. We were at the age at which anyone about the age of 35 looked the same; whether or not they were 42 or 67, and we were stunned into silence when our beloved peaceful professor said that he had served two tours in ‘Nam. He told us about how much of a privilege it was to teach us, and to watch us learn and debate about something we had never experienced, with the confidence of the truly young. We thought back in shame about the assumptions we made, about the times we had argued ‘this doesn’t feel believable because this would actually be too horrible if it actually happened,’ and how wrong we all were. To this day, I think often about the patience and kindness of my professor, for listening to us and letting us postulate from our points of privilege.
This is how I feel about my transition from being a ‘civvie’ into being a sex worker. Even though I came from a mother who was a sex worker and I was familiar with so many different aspects of it, I had never been in a hotel room alone with a stranger. I had never had to take my clothes off for someone whom I had only met five minutes ago, or email a stranger back and forth as we discussed payment options and who was going to book the room.
The line itself between sex work and other forms of sexual labor is also a fuzzy one. Is it sex work when I had pegged a man on a first date because he had promised to take me to the airport the next morning and I didn’t want to pay for a cab? Was it sex work when a boyfriend made me a cake that said “I’m sorry I made your pussy bleed” on it? Is it the first time someone leaves money on the nightstand, or is it the first time someone pays for my dinner and escorts me to their car, assuming that I’m going to go home with them?
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