Escort, ex stripper. Based in the UK.

There’s a couple of things here to say:

One is that like, when I was regularly doing sex work (and I have heard this from other workers too) there are clients who are women and straight couples. It’s less frequent, and like patriarchy is part of it, but I think there are other factors too. So like, the idea that women never pay for sexual services is just… untrue. I know sex workers who have bought the services of other sex workers, so like the entire argument doesn’t track for me.

And like, unless you are taking the Catherine MacKinnon route here, yr approach doesn’t at all account for gay sex work.

If we are talking about literal actual trafficking, yeah I think that is a bad person contributing to that. However, when it comes to sex work that is done freely (which constitutes the majority of sex workers) like I am ‘forced’ to have sex with men for money in the same way that I am currently ‘forced’ to scan things and sometimes see pictures of dead bodies at my current office job. And like at the end of the day, unless you are abstaining from most crops and clothes, you are directly benefitting from literal trafficking and slavery.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t murky areas; I’ve been sexually assaulted on the job and like some of the reason I didn’t get up and run away was because there was money involved. But that was not the main experience. tbh my experience of interacting sexually with men for free has a higher ratio of sexual assaults than my sex work, and I’ve written a lot about how considering all sex work 'rape’ is really harmful to sex workers more than it is to men who buy our services.

All capitalist interactions are microcoercions based in entitlement and (with service industries) misogyny. That’s how it is. Sex work might be a more emotionally high stakes version of this, and I think that a just approach to sex work would involve ways of getting women who don’t want to be in that job out of it (like…  actually, not just putting them in other shitty labor where they can still be sexually assaulted like domestic work). But like, involving police and like making it an illegal profession actually many times gets in the way of people exiting sex work. I had a 3 year work experience gap in my resume which led to it being much more difficult to get a job., which if sex work were legal and less stigmatized wouldn’t have been the case.

And like… since *I’m* the person who like probably knows more about like the relative ethics of the men who bought my sexual services than anyone else, I would basically say that the men who bought my services were basically indistinguishable from other similar men. Like, in terms of violence or misogyny or fetishization, I found it to be roughly the same as men who were trying to have sex with me for free; in a lot of cases, my tricks were much more respectful of me than most men who try to have sex with me for free. Actually, the only man who ever expressed attraction to me as a trans woman in a non-fetishizing way was a trick.

There’s lots of reasons in our world that men might pay a woman for sex that are beyond “he gets off on coercing women into sex.” For me as a trans woman hooker, it was that like… these men had no idea where to meet a trans woman, but were into the idea. Honestly, I think it’s better for a man to like pay a trans woman to figure out his weird fetish or sexuality crisis than to like subject some girl he’s dating to that. I had tricks who were men of color who were unable to have sex with a white woman unless there was money involved because of systemic racism. There are people who don’t have time because of work, etc.

If your neighbor outs you you will lose your home.

If you miss a safety call bc you are being murdered, no one will call the police bc they will be sent to jail as your traffickers

You will become vulnerable to police and sexual assault by them in a way few people can imagine. You will not be able to stop it.

If you work together with a white woman for safety and you are a woc–you’re her pimp. No appeal.

If you have kids your ex/family can take them at any time by outing you at any time. You will also now never have a future outside the industry.

If you’re a young woman of colour being assaulted for others profit, you are not innocent and trafficked, you’re a wicked little wench who will go to jail.

If you’re a high end escort whose client asks for drugs as a condition of the appt and you acquiesce and he overdoses, you’re his murderer.

You will be found guilty of assault or murder if you try to keep from getting murdered (unless the assaulted in question is very very obviously a serial killer. Then you will be outed and have no other way to make a living but hey at least you’re not in jail).

If you do get murdered, it’s your fault. You will not be remembered except maybe by us.

Hotel workers have a 40% higher injury rate than other service workers.

Women are 1.5 times more likely to be injured than men, because nearly every hotel housekeeper is a woman, and housekeepers have a 50% higher injury rate than all hotel workers.

Hispanic housekeepers are two-thirds more likely to be injured than white housekeepers.

91 percent of hotel housekeepers have suffered work-related pain.

66 percent take pain medication just to get through their daily work.

Here’s how you can make housekeepers’ jobs a little less shitty.

Reduce bending situations. For instance, hotels often tell you to toss towels on the floor that you want replaced. Try setting the towels on the closed toilet instead.

Gather all the trash cans into one.

Leave a note saying not to change the towels every day. 

Make your own beds.

Write a note with a tip thanking the housekeeper for not making the beds.

You can strip the beds by taking off all the sheets (including the ones holding the duvet, if that’s the system the hotel uses) and pillowcases, putting them in a pile, and then piling or loosely folding the blankets and duvet and putting them in a separate pile with the pillows on the stripped bed.

Tip daily. The same housekeepers aren’t always there every day.

$2-5 per person, per day is the expected gratuity if you’re a courteous guest.

Remember to mark it clearly for them so they know it’s for them to take (as opposed to leaving bills just sitting out willy-nilly).

Do Not Disturb: If you put up a Do Not Disturb sign, the housekeeper is usually just given another room to clean. In a lot of cases, that new room will be outside their normal section, one of the leftover rooms in another part of the hotel. This means they’ll have to push their heavy cart a little farther, spend time waiting for an elevator, and then have to clean a little faster to get it done. That other room might also be a normal, fine room, or it might be a disaster zone, where someone gutted a fish in the tub or spilled Pepsi on the bed. And if there isn’t an extra room to be given to a housekeeper when they have a DND, they’ll probably just be sent home early (especially if it’s a non-union hotel), so they lose some of that day’s pay.

this same species is also trained to identify tuberculosis in samples by smell, meaning they can test for TB at a rapid rate with a high accuracy :)