The Therapist and The Sex Worker
On a cool fall afternoon I sat across for a man who proceeded to tell me he was a cannnibalist. Which role do you think I was playing at that moment, therapist or sex worker? Honestly it didn’t matter, as I scanned my surroundings for exists and people who would hear me scream. I walked away unscathed that day, but the roles I play across all facets of my life often involve the same experiences…. holding compassion, care, support and sometimes eroticism without safety, support or reciprocity from the person or the system. I was trained and indoctrinated to be of service from the moment I was assigned female at birth. And with it came all of the socialized expectations that a highly neurodiverse, traumatized and isolated “girl” would learn and perfect. Fawning, masking, surviving, changing avatars and roles. One of my survival strategies actually included diversifying my labor. The same neurospice informed my abillity to see through the bs in professional spaces, allowing me to change my relationship with labor early in my life. If I am being extracted from, I at least want to control the means and method.
A highly renowned therapist supervisor once asked me how I could be a sex worker, and still practice ethical therapy. Not only was the question ignorant and whorephobic, it reinforced the attempt of the clinical field to professionalize, distance, and self define as outside of the subjugated care economy. But the patriarchal systems in which we live ensure that this differentiation is an illusion. Therapists hold the idea that their education protects them, ensures their worth in the system. But the ease with which AI therapy emerged, reflects Big Tech’s view of the work, something to be outsourced and extracted, just like sexuality. I was sexually harassed or assaulted in more human service and non-profit jobs than in sex work, and expected to smile and care anyway.
The Therapist and the Sex Worker, the Madonna and the Whore, represent two sides of the same exploitative labor spectrum. We can see in the chart below the impact of colonization, racist and gendered labor roles and systems, and the nature of this specific relationship. We’ve been isolated from community and collective, bound to idealistic romantic love/ dyadic partnering, and then left with nothing when we can’t create that, maintain that or inevitably are dissapointed by our partner’s inability to replace the village. I worked with a client with not a single other human with whom he talked to, besides me.
For many, the therapist and the sex worker represent the most accessible resources for care, emotional support, and witnessing, albeit through different mechanisms.
When we examine these structures more, we see the ways in which power and resources move, whose labor matters and with what title. Whorephobia and whorearchy (the hatred and discrimination of sex workers, and the stratification based on different types of work, specifically within sex worker communities) are tools fabricated to perpetuate the extractive labor system and further dehumanization of sex workers. Sex workers exist at every layer of the care economy, but most noteably, mainstream digital sex work access occurs within the same consumer model as therapy as a primary tool for well-being. The shame rooted in our religiously conservative culture prevents healthier models for this, which would allow collaboration and growth for clients and a challenge to labor models which exclude sex workers.
Therapists can apply for insurance, get paid leave and attend professional conferences free from harm. Sex workers face hatred and threat of violence just existing in the world, particularly those who do street based work and have more marginalized identities. Do you need an office, to be worthy of basic respect in your work? A name plaque? To be white? Able bodied?
What would it mean for our labor system, if we called out the labor dynamics and stratas? What would it look like to align interests for greater human well-being and care? The reasons someone might choose or find themselves in sex work are valid and important, and not too asimilar to therapy roles. We do know that sex work is a field with way more flexiblity for those who are parents, neurodiverse, differently abled, traumatized or mentally ill.
Until we culturally stop seeing the sex worker as the object of their hate, dehumanization, shame, fear and isolation (and therapists encourage it), we can’t shift the trajectory of human relating. If someone can dehumanize another, even in a transactional context, they will do so to others in their life, especially the women and queer folks. Sex workers don’t want to be the receptacle for the worst parts of humanity, we want to be a vital resource in the ecosystem of human care.
(One note, some therapists and sex workers are moving in the PMC and are often no aligned with liberation or justice, they are motivated by the same as others in this class structure- proximity to power gives the illusion of success and de-incentivizes changing the system).
Both therapists and sex workers have vital roles in a human centered ecosystem, but the potential symbiosis and creativity to build it happens outside of the traditional structures, in worlds we build centered on matriarchal, care based reciprocity and joy. We must tear down this entire gendered labor system to create new, together.
