To someone unfamiliar with sex work, and the constant existential threats sex workers face, being a sex worker might seem like being part of an aspirational cool-girls' club. "Everything cool gets co-opted, and whores have always been the coolest people in the room," said Jacq the Stripper. Strippers working the pole or posing with stacks of cash on Instagram look cool, because strippers are cool, but co-opting sex work as a personal brand without actually being one isn't. "If you take our rhetoric, our style, and our organizing strategies without showing us actual support—and, yes, I mean money—you are part of the problem."
Bradley was one of her friends. He belonged to a group of boys who I only ever saw together. One of them had a credit card. At some point after we met, they used it to pay to see me naked on the internet. On that day or soon after, Bradley told his friends that he was going to have sex with me. “He wants to fuck you,” one of them said. This was the way things were. If a boy said he wanted to fuck you, you were supposed to feel flattered.