Sex Work is a Tool
“Sex work is a tool. It’s a tool for our clients and it’s a tool for us too.” Those were the wise, encouraging words of my colleague, Steph Takaya, as I emotionally fell apart. 10 years post-divorce from a toxic marriage of 18 years, I had finally done enough trauma healing that I was starting to find out who I really was, with less trauma filtering my experience.
In May of 2014, after a few months of experimenting with a sexually open marriage, I found myself envious of the ease in which one of our sexual partners could orgasm. I often said, “I think she can orgasm with a slight breeze.” At that time in my life, orgasm was difficult but not impossible. It had to be spread out. I often said, “I came yesterday so I definitely won’t be able today so no, don’t try.” But that day in May, I read an article about Betty Dodson in The Guardian. She was the grandmother of masturbation and I resonated with her story. I went on a journey over the coming days, weeks, and months, to learn everything I could about her and about me. We had an overlap in that I didn’t love my vulva. I also never masturbated for any reason other than to rebel against my husband who wanted to own all of my sex. Basically, it should be saved for him and his needs. Masturbation was seen as stealing from him. So when I did it, it was out of spite. Fun fact, he asked for a divorce late that month. I’m so glad I found Betty when I did because I often say she walked me through my divorce, inspiring me to be a sexually liberated woman.
By November of 2014, I found myself in the Manhattan apartment of Betty Dodson, naked in a circle of a dozen women. We were talking about our stories of our bodies, orgasm, masturbation, etc. We gazed at each other’s vulvas while Betty sat next to us, looking at the same mirror, hand gloved, showing us our anatomy. “This is your clitoral shaft. Here is your urethra.” The healing power of seeing a dozen different vulvas, all beautiful and unique, was a healing salve to the stories from society, porn, partners, and self-talk. We all had one thing in common though: everyone in that cohort had a mole somewhere on our vulvas. What a weird fun fact to remember. But what I remember most is that I had done so much of ‘the work’ before the weekend, that I found myself observing from a sense of, “I want to do this work! I want to do hands-on sex ed!” Oh, and to brag a bit, I can say I laid next to Betty as we both orgasmed during erotic recess, a portion of the weekend where we learned to masturbate using her “rock and roll’ method. She came at least 3 times, this 83-year-old (at the time) badass. I was in the presence of sex ed royalty and it wasn’t wasted on me.
I returned to conservative West Michigan with a knowing that asking women to get naked and masturbate wasn’t likely to pay for the certification Betty was offering. I also knew that as a stay-at-home mom, I was on the search for who I wanted to be in this next phase of life, freshly 39 years old.
The next self-discovery phase looked like starting a sex blog (unfortunately no longer available online but will be republished as an ebook) that was a public diary of my adventures as a now single woman who was curious as fuck. A sex geek, I found the kink and BDSM community as well as the non-monogamous community in West Michigan. I started hosting Sex Geekdom meetups, a monthly sex and relationship discussion group. The summer of 2015 I attended Sex Geek Summer Camp, a camp for sex educators to learn about business, hoping to find a sex educator doing something that felt like a good fit for me to replicate. That didn’t happen. But I did meet a lot of great people connected to sex ed. In a conversation just a few months after camp, I learned about Cuddlist.com, a new company that was offering training to be a professional cuddler. While it didn’t seem like exactly what I wanted to do, it did feel like a good “stop-over” until the right opportunity came along. Cuddlist was brand new and their training was being offered for free but you had to go to either Chicago or New York City. They were stocking their site with trained professional cuddlers, both a new industry but also an industry that until then, didn’t seem to have any training. My mentor and the co-founder of Cuddlist, Madelon Guinazzo, was offering one-on-one cuddle sessions and saw a need for some guidelines to keep both the client and the practitioners physically and emotionally safe. Cuddlist.com was born. On December 2, 2014, I drove to Chicago and came home a Cuddlist Certified Professional Cuddler.
Between pro cuddling and becoming a certified Cuddle Party facilitator, I was getting regular opportunities to teach my community direct communication skills; how to identify, communicate, and hold boundaries; practice asking ourselves what we want and then asking for it; and practice receiving and giving a no. But maybe most importantly, I was teaching (and learning) that our bodies are ours. We get to decide what we do with our body and what we don’t and no one else’s needs or desires get to override what we want for ourselves. Wow! That was not something I learned growing up. My mother didn’t model that in our home. In fact, I can tell stories of her avoiding sex but never a story of her setting a firm no. The running joke in our house was that she wore extra clothes to bed, didn’t shave her legs, etc, all to avoid my father wanting to touch her. NOT the message to send in a home with three daughters. It made so much sense that I caved to my husband’s pressure for sex. It wasn’t violent, how sex happened against my will. It was subtle. It was the whining. It was the bitchy attitude if I tried to be a no. It was a wearing down. His needs over mine.
I died a little more every time I did something that I didn’t want to do. I had to go a little more distant or dissociative each time. I would count the ceiling tiles or think about cleaning the kitchen or the grocery list. In fact, towards the end of our relationship, I recall thinking, “Wow, I think I was actually present during sex today.” It was that unusual that I noticed.
During my time in platonic cuddling, I dabbled in sex work. I’d get a client that learned of my sex geekery and they’d ask for support. One senior client had years of ED and found that he was having erections during our sessions. He asked if he could try masturbation. I was a yes! I left that session feeling even more excited about my work. I knew I had to move more towards sex work. There were others and most of the time the sex work left me really feeling like I was helping clients change their lives.
I was following a sex worker named Kendra Holliday who identified as a surrogate partner. I had watched The Sessions, a movie about a surrogate partner. I was somewhat familiar. I had even met a couple of surrogate partners at Sex Geek Summer Camp. When I moved to San Diego in 2018 I decided I would add Surrogate Partner Therapy training to my modalities. I felt like Southern California would be open to the work in a way that I didn’t see happening in West Michigan.
I got some training but more to be a more informed sex worker than to practice surrogate partner therapy in the way in which you work with a client and their therapist, what we call the triadic model. I wanted to know what I didn’t know and training, I thought, would fill in those gaps.
I can’t say I learned much from the training that I didn’t already know from my time as a professional cuddler. It’s the boundaries. It’s the ability to communicate clearly. It’s the wisdom of self and learning to trust my instincts. It’s having a strong self-worth. It’s the modeling of healthy relating.
During my years in Cuddlist, I acted as their Operations Manager from September 2016 through June 2020. I worked side by side with the co-founders. I got a lot of extra mentoring in that position. Cuddlist leadership walk the talk. They live in bodies that practice self-care on a much deeper level than getting a massage or taking a mental health day. They make choices in life that center themselves so that they can be more loving towards others. Madelon Guinazzo and Adam Lippin, the co-founders, served as new parents to me in the way that they modeled disagreement without destroying each other. I was being re-parented.
In early 2020 I moved from San Diego to Baltimore with the hopes of getting to practice more surrogate partner therapy, the kind where I work in that triadic model. My colleague and mentor in SPT, Brian Gibney, took me under his wing, trusting that my boundaries would make me an excellent practitioner in SPT. I didn’t quite get it at the time. I get it now.
As of 2024, I’ve taken maybe a dozen people through surrogate partner therapy. I’ve worked with even more in professional cuddling or some sort of sex work other than SPT. My work now looks like holding space for clients to learn about themselves, anywhere from platonic to erotic. I’m the scaffolding for them to heal themselves. I’m not a healer. They are their own healer. I’m there to give them a safe enough space to take risks to learn what they want and what they don’t. I’m there to cheerlead them. To be a mirror, loving them so they can learn to love themselves. They are the most important person in their lives and until they learn to practice that, they will never be able to fully show up for others the way they want.
I’ve been practicing showing up for myself as I show up for my clients. In that, I’ve learned so much about myself. What I know now that I didn’t know before:
I don’t have to prove my worth to be in a relationship. I used to try to be “the best partner” so they wouldn’t leave. I don’t feel the need to do that any longer. Someone loving me isn’t about me being perfect. Someone loves me, and I feel loved, when I’m imperfect. While I don’t want to lose my partner, I know I’ll be ok if I do. I love me and I have value with or without my partner(s).
Vulnerability and authenticity is the glue to connection. Be yourself. If you know you aren’t being yourself, you’ll never trust the connection you have with others.
Be kind, not nice. “Clear is Kind” as Jules Taylor Shore says. When we have clarity in our communication, we are being kind. That means that an authentic yes is delightful and a no is kind. Let that other person find someone who is an authentic yes. We can turn down an offer in a gentle way. We can gracefully receive a no. “Thank you for taking care of yourself” when hearing a no will change the world. Pass it around.
On a more personal note, I’ve learned that I don’t see pictures (it’s called Aphantasia) and wow has that left me looking back over past experiences with a fresh lens. One example, it explains why when I’ve asked clients to try not fantasizing during masturbation they’ve looked at me like I have three heads. I never fantasize! I work solely off sensation during masturbation. If I use porn, I can be in it with the performers, but without porn, I’m really running off sensation.
But then the big one hit and I found myself overwhelmed around what to do with my work. I’m asexual. I used to desire sex because it was a way to confirm my desirability, test the temperature of my relationship, etc. Once I worked on my self-worth, I noticed my desire for sex dropped. First, I identified strongly with responsive desire, meaning that I have to be aroused for sexual desire to show up. (Thank you, Emily Nagoski and her book Come As You Are.) This last year I recognized that I don’t experience sexual attraction. Now that I have more awareness and I slow down in engaging with others, I find myself asking, “What am I drawn to with this person in front of me? What is my attraction?” It’s not sex. It’s a sensual attraction. I want to be close to them. I want to cuddle with them. I want emotional intimacy. Then, in those spaces, sometimes sexual desire shows up. My colleague and asexuality educator Aubri Lancaster helped me learn the difference between sexual attraction and sexual desire. Sexual attraction is aimed at a person. Sexual desire is something that happens in my body, like my libido shows up or as she likes to say, “I get a desire for an orgasm.”
Looking back, being asexual likely helped me with my sex work. I never relied on sexual attraction with clients. But it’s also making me pause my sex work so I can get clarity as to if I’m a yes to continuing in sex work.
Sex takes a lot of work for me. I don’t sit around thinking about sex. When I want to engage in sex with my partner, or others, I have to make a conscious decision to pursue sex. I have to put myself in a space where I think desire will be fostered. I have my owners-manual figured out and I know what the recipe is to get me there. Put Michelle in body-to-body contact, add a dash of vulnerable connection, do something with my partner that makes him respond with noises of yumminess, and notice that my body starts to come online. But the biggest key is noticing if I feel safe that if I don’t get there or change my mind, my partner can gracefully pivot away from sex and not punish me for it, but rather celebrate my change of mind. (I wipe tears as I write that, because it’s the exact opposite of my old life.)
Do I want to spend these ‘sex spoons’ on clients or do I save them for my personal life? How does that affect my income? Will clients still want to work with me? I know what I offer outside of sexual contact stands on its own but will clients take a chance on me without the sex carrot? Making this decision to take a sex work cleanse in 2024 is scary! And it’s the only way I can walk the talk. I have to model this for myself, my clients, my kids, my family, my friends, my community.
Sex work is a tool. And it’s a tool for us too, the practitioner. It’s given me a space to learn about myself right along with my clients. I’m grateful to know myself as I do. I’m excited to see what else there is to learn. Check back in 2025. I know I’ll still be holding space, I just don’t know what my limits will be.
