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I didn’t really get into sex work until the summer of 2015, though I’d done some stuff when I was 18 and 20 that was pretty much sex work. For me, it came down to needing to do something to feed my family. I started into it in Campbell River and Courtenay, and then came to Victoria in September 2016.
I’d been living on Cortes Island for a couple of years, but things went really wrong and my relationship fell apart. I’d left drinking behind me six years earlier when I had my son, but I started drinking again. I needed to get out of there, so I went to Courtenay.
I’ve had jobs in mental health and addictions work, and I’m doing some of that work now. But I don’t make enough at it to support myself and my son, so I’m doing some sex work, too. But it’s very different here in Victoria than it was in Courtenay and Campbell River. There are a lot more people offering a lot more than I do, for less money.
I also can’t afford to have my own work space in Victoria like I did in the Comox Valley. So that means doing outcalls, which makes the work feel more dangerous. When I was up-Island, I shared a two-room condo with a guy who lived there, which really helped because I always knew I could just bang on the wall if I needed him.
Up in Courtenay, it all just seemed easier. I worked in the mid-range, and I could be out there with a story saying it was unusual that I had to be doing this. Here, it’s different.
And while I find people fascinating, and do find that part of the work interesting, I have also found men to be quite awful, and just the fact that everybody is cheating does bother me. Let’s just say that this work has reaffirmed all my feminist tendencies. It amazes me how little people understand about consent – that if I agree to do a specific thing for a specific amount of money, that does not mean there’s consent when you change the conditions.
I’ve learned a lot about staying safe. In the beginning, I was a bit reckless, accepting rides in vehicles. One guy I met at a park and then we went in his car, and during the drive I started to hear the warning signs, about how he’d “normally never waste my money on this kind of thing.” We got out and walked and after not even a minute, I knew he wanted more for less. I said no, he grabbed me a couple of times, and I had to run and scream to get away. Even then, I hung around for half an hour just so I wouldn’t get caught out by him on an isolated road.
It could have gone badly so easily – if the weather was different, if there weren’t people around, if the guy hadn’t had surgery recently. Now, I’m much more careful. I do what I can so that they don’t even see my car or where I parked, plus I try to get some kind of check through Facebook or a phone or an email. And if I accept a ride, I try to have another ride back already set up.
I’ve also let people know at times that I know something about them. One client, I just addressed him by his real name rather than the fake one he’d been using.
In Courtenay, my brother and sister knew what I was doing and were also my safety people. My sister has done a lot of sex work. My brother has a law degree but has also been involved in a bunch of situations, so both of them understand this life.
But I don’t tell very many people about the work I do. The shame and stigma when you’re in sex work is terrible. Sometimes even in my communications with clients, they don’t want to think of me as an escort, they want to think of me as a struggling student.
For me, the stigma feels like a bias against women, because the man who is the customer doesn’t risk having his life destroyed because of what he’s doing. The men who do other kinds of dangerous work in our society aren’t presumed to be bad parents, which is how it is for sex workers.
I’ve had the saviours, too. That can get scary – people showing up uninvited where I’m working. The thing with this work is that you want to act sufficiently to help the client get the experience they want, but it’s a fine line if you act too much.
I first heard about Peers in 2008, when I was training as a community health worker and we were exploring the services that were out there. One of my classmates brought in a poem (from the Peers anthology “Stories from the Margin”), and I totally connected with it. So last year when I came back here, I got thinking that I wanted to reconnect with Peers. I contacted them and had a positive experience, and was able to report that bad date I’d had, which isn’t something you can do in Courtenay.
I’m home-schooling my son, and we have a lot of fun with that. It was a great school experience for him on Cortes, and I don’t want to just put him in the public school system now. He doesn’t know what I do for a living, but he and I talk about just about everything in an age-appropriate way.
I do think there’s a cost to my well-being from doing sex work. It’s not that I’m drinking every day, or depressed, but I know that for me it’s doing some damage. I really like working in mental health and addiction, so I’m going to hope that I’ll be able to do more and more of that work. But right now I need to look after my family.
