When I was 18 and living in Perth, I walked past a sex shop that said
‘dancers wanted’ in the window. It was a peep show. I’d been working
at McDonald’s and was on Centrelink before that, and I was like,
“This is not sustaining my life.” I’ve always seen myself as an
outsider, living on the fringe, so the sex industry wasn’t particularly
scary to me. I had a super-liberal upbringing and was fascinated
with strippers and sex workers. I remember being a little girl in
the city, always wanting to see sex workers on street corners.
I was obsessed with glamorous ladies and loved the idea of Kings
Cross in Sydney, where it was a hotbed of debauchery and sin.
No one explained the job to me at all – they kind of just throw you
into the peep show. I was doing little sexy stripteases for the guys
watching, or they could book a private dance, where you go into
a separate room and it’s more of a lap dance situation. Everything
in the sex industry you kind of figure out as you go along. There’s
no guidebook – you learn from other workers. At the end of my
first shift, I remember leaving with all this cash and being like,
“Oh my god.” I’d never had that kind of agency before.
I did peep-show work for maybe three years, then I got super-burnt
out. I went and did a TAFE diploma and worked in bookshops and did
normal world stuff until I was 27 or 28, when I met a girl who was a
dominatrix. I was like, “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. How
do you do it?” She was really generous and set me up with a dungeon
down here in Melbourne, and I did a BDSM apprenticeship.
People have this view that BDSM is a very cruisy and easy aspect of
the sex industry, like you’re just beating guys up, but it’s actually so
emotionally demanding – it’s a lot of work to try to get into someone’s
head, figuring out why they want to do certain activities. I got into
full-service sex work because it was something I know how to
do – I know how to play the part of a sexy girl more than trying to
understand someone’s head in the kink world. I did BDSM for a
year, then got into brothel work, and I’ve been doing that for about
six years now, and private escorting for about three years.I hate the word ‘empowering’. There’s this idea that for something
to be legitimate work, you need to be empowered by it, but we’ll
never ask someone working at Macca’s if they’re empowered
by their job. There’s an idea that you have to love what you do
in the sex industry, otherwise you’re being exploited, but sexual
labour is labour like any other kind. The thing I find empowering
is having the ability to run my own business and work my own
hours. It’s one of the few industries that lets a woman with little
education or financial backing become her own boss and run
her own business, and that’s empowering for me – money and
the freedom to pursue comedy and art and writing. The sex itself
is the same as being a masseuse or a therapist or working in
aged care or childcare, where you’re interacting with bodies and
people’s emotions. People are like, “It must be gross and weird
to interact with someone’s body,” but I would imagine wiping
someone’s butt is quite gross, and if you’re in aged care that’s
your job – you just put on your rubber gloves and do it every
day. That’s kind of how I feel about having sex with strangers.People imagine a sex worker as someone with a drug problem on
a street corner, or they think of a high-class escort. But there are
a million shades of grey in between: some do this because they’re
single mums, or because they’re students and need flexibility.
People are always surprised that I’m a sex worker, because I’mbella green is a sex worker,
writer and comedian.
AS TOLD TO GISELLE AU-NHIEN NGUYENeverybody
has a story
pieces of me