Written by Jessie Sage
I was 36 the first time I turned on a webcam and dipped my toes in the sex industry.
A decade later, I look back and see that, in many ways, that year divided my adult life into before and after. Within a short period, I left a 19-year relationship and a PhD program with no plan for what was next. The world I’d built — the family as I had imagined it, the career I had worked toward — was over. It was time to start anew.
At the time, I had two kids and was at the beginning of what would become an expensive 2-year legal battle with my ex-husband. I was working an office job that I hated and, between rebuilding a home and lawyer bills, I was bleeding money.
At first, camming was casual. My partner and I would turn on the cam early in the morning before I went to work or on the weekends when the kids were with their dad and hoped to make a few bucks. We built a tiny following of people interested in seeing a real couple on screen; one with true affection for one another.
I was shy and afraid to work solo; I was so unaccustomed to performing in front of a camera that I would clam up whenever my partner would leave the screen to go to the bathroom. Despite my initial struggles, I would eventually gain confidence and find my niche within the industry, but several things happened that made doing so a necessity.
One of my kids started having significant mental health issues, and I spent much of my time on the phone with insurance companies and mental health professionals, trying desperately to get them the resources they needed. I often called off work to pick them up from school when they had episodes and spent countless hours in the emergency room with them when things got more severe.
My partner and I also wanted to have a baby and I had two relatively late and traumatic miscarriages before I got pregnant with our sweet child who is now 7. My partner was diagnosed with cancer twice over about 3 years. And, the child we tried so hard to have was diagnosed, at two, with autism.
Our house became a revolving door of early intervention specialists and therapists, and all the while I was shuffling both my older kid and my partner to and from the hospital in critical situations. And then, COVID hit. All three of my kids no longer had school to go to, but this was a particular problem for the little one, who was young, non-verbal, and unable to get anything out of online school.
All of this was too much for one person to take on, and at some point, I was let go from my full-time office job. This was no surprise, I was hardly employee of the year. I was stressed and distracted; living from one crisis to the next. When my boss called me in to tell me that he was going to have to let me go, I remember trying to feign an appropriate emotional response, when all I wanted to do was walk out the front door and never look back. I had too many familial responsibilities to have any feelings about that job. I decided that day that I was going to find some way to make up my salary in the sex industry, and quickly before my severance ran out.
Looking back, I don’t know how we made it through all that, or how I accomplished anything other than crying. Yet, I didn’t feel helpless because my work allowed me to continue to make money to keep my family afloat while being present to meet their many needs. In emergency department waiting rooms, I would text clients for money; while on the phone with insurance companies I would upload content to Onlyfans; and after staying home all day with the kids while they did their online school, I would do sessions after everyone else in the house was in bed.
Once I wasn’t trying to juggle a full-time job and doing sex work “on the side,” I threw myself head first into sex work out of desperation. I had to make things work, I had no other choice. I quickly made up for the salary I was no longer getting while working on my own terms. The sex industry was there for me when my life was so complex that I could no longer hold down a job in the conventional labor market.
Sex work is not a job that I recommend for everyone. I don’t typically recommend it at all! I paid for my autonomy many times over. I paid for it each time I entered a room and family members made a display of leaving in disgust. I paid for it when my mother moved out of the house she was sharing with my family and didn’t talk to me for years. I paid for it when I was outed to my partner’s family and their parents told them that we’d “lost our moral compass”. I paid for it in sleepless nights when I feared that my kids (the most important people in my life) could be taken away from me if the wrong person found out how I provide for them. I paid when I had my body and my sexuality publicly ridiculed by strangers who didn’t see me as a person. And I paid for it when civilian women expressed their belief that I’m either a threat to feminism (a gender traitor), or to their marriage (this one is laughable, I have problems of my own).
But at this point, I have already paid the price, everything that I mentioned was external to the actual work (which I like) and to my motivations for doing it. What is also true is that, through all of this, I learned to stand on my own two feet. I learned to find my voice and use it. I learned to demand compensation for my time and attention, And, I learned to trust in my ability to stay grounded in who I am and what I am doing. I have developed lovely and lasting relationships with clients who have seen me through many transitions, and I have been home for my kids when they needed me.
In reflecting on my experience as a sex-working mother, I’m drawn to Maggie Smith’s recent memoir about life after divorce, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. In it, she talks about the ways that her writing and her fame were painted as the primary cause of the breakdown of her marriage. Yet, when she was afraid she would lose her house, the success of her books allowed her to buy her husband out of it and keep her kids in the home they had always known. Near the end of the book she says, “My work was the solution, not the problem.”
I think of this often. While popular culture would make us believe that “your mother is a whore” is the worst of insults, being a whore is the very thing that allowed me to care for my family in the way they needed. I will never regret my choice to do that.
To follow and see more of Jessie Sage:
Twitter / X – @sapiotextual
Instagram – @curvaceous_sage
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