Women in the past thought all they had to do was see if he comes home late, or smells like cigarettes. But nothing's really changed, right? People still cheat. They're going to do what they're going to do. But now that sex work is more private, there's that chance to have a double life.

Another sex worker and writer I respect put it this way: she said that as a writer, you're not about pleasing people, and as a sex worker it's all about pleasing people. It's all about creating this fantasy. I still feel like as a writer you actually do have put on a show. You can't just hand over your notes. And there is a degree to which you are appealing to the reader's vanity, whether you tell yourself you're doing that or not.

Most people aren't encouraged to think of their labor as very valuable. We usually think of it as the necessary thing we engage in in order to survive. We live in a world where our ability to survive is connected to our ability to draw a paycheck. But there are other ways of organizing labor and culture. For example, people who are pushing for fixed universal base income, or a welfare system that separates wage labor from the compensation required to survive. It was only when I thought of those alternatives that I was able to really understand what we mean when we say sex work is work.

I don't use "feelings" as a diminutive word. I'm trying to take feelings back. I think of everyone on the internet whose response to everything is: "#Feelings! This is important, this is real, this is significant!" That connects to power, too. Wanting to feel like you have power and control over your life.

We're missing a lot of the real-life stories of what people's work looks like. Those are the people that I want sitting on the zoning board meetings, on the zoning commissions. Those are the people I want participating in business improvement in their own industry. The gentrification processes that often happen in cities so often manifest in street sweeps of sex workers. How do you get sex workers on neighborhood associations, regarded as members of the neighborhood?

I think the anti-prostitution feminists need to do some consciousness-raising amongst themselves about their feelings. But that's a different political activity. Asking ourselves, how do we feel about the fact that our boyfriends, our husbands, our male partners might hire sex workers? They should have that conversation, but they shouldn't attach it to policy conversations that affect people.

I've always been a writer. I started getting paid for writing in college. Where it transitioned from commentary to journalism was in that shift - not wanting to write personal stories because people are hungry in not necessarily great ways for the sexy, sexy, sex work story. I was trying to shift the focus, and journalism was the tool I needed to write about people outside my own life and range of experience.