Lana Hall at Hazlitt:
When I finally did leave the sex trade after finishing my bachelor’s degree as a mature student, I spent seven years working in “good” jobs in the corporate sector. This meant, as I understood it, that I didn’t work nights, that I was a salaried employee, and that I had dental benefits. I had a shiny access card that opened doors—to a gleaming, marble elevator bank, to planters full of plastic ferns, to blocks of cubicles illuminated by fluorescent lighting, a land of perpetual daytime.
Unlike sex work, my “good” jobs didn’t threaten to overthrow traditional power structures. Many sex workers, including myself, have long hypothesized that the reason so many people in power work to keep the commercial sex trade marginalized is because they’re threatened by it—by the idea that it’s the only field where women outearn men, that it’s an industry where women get to call the shots, and that women profit off something that men have been told they’re entitled to for free: sex and attention in equal parts. In my experience of the corporate landscape, there was none of this radical power structure, only an upholding of the traditional: men talking and women listening, men in powerful positions getting both credit and profit for the labour of women beneath them. Is this what I worked so hard for? I wondered daily.
More here.