I'd been dancing at The Crazy Russian for about six months, and all my college friends were incredibly supportive. So much so that they would regularly come in for an opportunity to get off campus and watch the lithe Russian women bend and twirl, applauding the loudest whenever I'd take the stage. I loved them for it. One night, my roommate surprised me by bringing a group of guys from school whom I'd never met before. I didn't know she was hoping to take one of them home — a tall, freckled boy with a chiseled jaw and piercing blue eyes — and before she could make her move, Sam and I locked eyes while I executed a pretty flawless inverted pole trick. He was hooked.
Despite my roommate's grumblings, the next three months of my life involved seeing a lot of Sam. I took him to his first drag show; he wined and dined me on his family's generous dime. There wasn't much chemistry, but the lack of sexual attraction wasn't what ended our relationship. It was Sam's obsession with the fact that I stripped.
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Sam had stripper fever. He'd show up at my work unannounced to cheer me on, which made my customers recoil from the stage with money still clenched in their fists. He excitedly told his parents how I earned my money before I'd ever met them, and he would blurt it out to friends and acquaintances without a second thought. Then, once in the bedroom, Sam asked me to dance for him. Lap dance. "You know," he urged, dragging a folding chair out of the corner, "like we're 'in the club.'"
There are a few rules for dating a sex worker: don't compromise their cash flow by driving away their business, never out them to other people without their consent, and don't expect them to eagerly perform activities they normally get paid to do for free. He'd broken all three, and my work and my personal life were getting a little too close for comfort. I needed to draw a boundary, so I kicked well-intentioned Sam to the curb.
But that was only the beginning. My life became an endless stream of people making assumptions about how much I made or what my childhood was like, or feeling entitled to be with me because they'd watched some of my porn scenes and therefore "knew" me. They assumed that who I was on stage and on camera was the same as who I was in the bedroom.
Ask any sex worker how they maintain their boundaries, and you're in for a long conversation. Some people develop a working identity that they keep entirely separate from their real-life persona, and others conflate the two. Many sex workers desperately want to be out but don't want to endure the invasive questions, or fear that their housing stability or the custody of their children would be compromised. Some of us just don't feel that connected to the character we've created for work, so it seems unimportant to talk about. And while some strippers love putting platforms on and grinding into their partners' crotches as foreplay, just as many would slap their boyfriend silly if he asked.
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The hardest boundary I've had to confront in my romantic relationships is the line between authentic desire in my work, and the "it's just work" defense. Sex workers in committed partnerships often spend a great deal of time reassuring their partners that what they do at work is fake. "It's not real intimacy," we insist after coming home from a porn shoot, "I'm on set. I'm cold. People are staring at me. The last thing I'm feeling is aroused." Then we highlight everything that makes our partners special to us to ease their jealousy. I'm not saying that sex workers who reassure their partners like this are being dishonest. Not exactly. But the world isn't black-and-white, and while the vast majority of us are not regularly turned on by our work, real connections can happen with scene partners and genuine fun can be had with clients. So where's the line?
Now I'm fortunate enough to have relationships where my partners are my cheerleaders. When I show up to a professional domination session with a new client who looks like Brad Pitt with an Irish accent, I don't have to worry about going home later and pretending like there wasn't genuine attraction there. It doesn't threaten my relationships in the slightest. After almost a decade of sex work under my belt, I find that the only time boundaries get blurred for me is when a partner doesn't acknowledge that the work I do is labor and deserves respect. Would you expect your wife, a chef, to come home at the end of a long day and cook an elaborate meal for you? Would you tell your accountant husband that you didn't want to hear about how mean his boss was today because his boss is a woman and it makes you jealous?
These days, when my partners want to visit me at work, they ask first. They defer to me when their parents ask me what I do for a living at the dinner table, and they ask how my day was because they're genuinely excited to hear all the juicy details. And when it comes to lap dances in the bedroom, they always let me be the instigator.
This article originally appeared on Cosmopolitan
