Sex Work is a Tool
Content note: This post includes candid, personal reflection on sex work, sexuality, divorce, and self-discovery.
"Sex work is a tool. It's a tool for our clients, and it's a tool for us too."
Those were the words of a colleague, offered to me while I was emotionally falling apart. I was ten years out from a divorce that ended an eighteen-year marriage, and I had finally done enough of my own trauma healing to start finding out who I actually was, underneath all that filtering.
Where I Started
In May of 2014, a few months into experimenting with a sexually open marriage, I found myself envious of how easily one of our partners could orgasm. Mine had always been effortful. Spread out. Rationed. Then I came across an article about Betty Dodson, the grandmother of masturbation education, and something in her story landed. We had one thing in common right away: neither of us loved our vulva.
I'd never masturbated for myself. When I did it at all, it was an act of quiet rebellion against a marriage where my sexuality belonged to someone else. That May, my husband asked for a divorce. I've said before that Betty Dodson walked me through that divorce. She's the reason I came out the other side a sexually liberated woman instead of a diminished one.
The Weekend That Changed My Story
By November of that year, I was in Betty's Manhattan apartment, sitting naked in a circle of a dozen women. We talked about our bodies, our histories with orgasm and masturbation, the stories we'd absorbed from society, porn, partners, and our own self-talk. Betty walked us through basic vulva anatomy with a hand mirror. It was the first time I'd really looked.
What struck me most wasn't any single detail, it was the sheer variety. A dozen different vulvas, all beautiful, all completely unique, and all of them normal. I went into that weekend having already done years of my own healing work, and I came out of it with a different kind of clarity: I want to do this. I want to do hands-on work like this.
From Cuddling to Sex Work
Back home in conservative West Michigan, I knew asking women to get naked and masturbate wasn't exactly a business model. I was a stay-at-home mom, freshly 39, trying to figure out who I wanted to be next.
That search led me to start a personal sex blog, then into West Michigan's kink, BDSM, and non-monogamous communities, then to hosting a monthly Sex Geekdom discussion group. In the summer of 2015 I went to SexGeek Summer Camp looking for a business model I could replicate. I didn't find one there, but a few months later, I heard about a brand-new company called Cuddlist, offering free training to become a professional cuddler. It wasn't exactly what I wanted long-term, but it felt like the right next step.
On December 2, 2014, I drove to Chicago and came home a Cuddlist Certified Professional Cuddler. Between professional cuddling and Cuddle Party facilitation, I spent years teaching direct communication: how to identify a boundary, hold it, ask for what you want, and give or receive a real no. I was teaching what I hadn't been taught growing up, that our bodies are ours, and no one else's needs get to override that.
Sex work found its way into that work naturally. A client with years of erectile difficulty found himself able to have erections during our sessions and asked if he could try masturbation with my support. I said yes, and left that session more certain than ever that this was the direction I needed to move in.
Learning Surrogate Partner Therapy
I'd been following a sex worker and surrogate partner named Kendra Holliday, and I'd seen The Sessions, the film about surrogate partner work. When I moved to San Diego in 2018, I decided to add Surrogate Partner Therapy training to what I offered, believing Southern California would be more open to it than West Michigan had been.
Honestly, the training itself taught me less than I expected. Most of what mattered, boundaries, clear communication, self-trust, healthy relating, I'd already learned as a professional cuddler. What the training gave me was fluency in the triadic model: working alongside a client and their therapist, rather than as a solo practitioner.
From September 2016 through June 2020, I also served as Operations Manager at Cuddlist, working closely with co-founders Madelon Guinazzo and Adam Lippin. That mentorship shaped me. They modeled something I hadn't seen before, disagreement without destruction, self-care as a foundation rather than an afterthought. In a lot of ways, I was being re-parented.
In early 2020, I moved from San Diego to Baltimore, hoping to practice more Surrogate Partner Therapy in that full triadic model. My mentor Brian Gibney took me on, trusting that my boundaries would make me a strong practitioner. I didn't fully understand what he saw at the time. I do now.
What I Didn't Expect to Learn About Myself
As of 2024, I've walked roughly a dozen clients through Surrogate Partner Therapy, and many more through professional cuddling and other sex work. My role isn't to heal anyone. It's to be scaffolding, a safe enough space for someone to take risks and find out what they want and don't want. I'm a mirror, not a fixer.
Along the way, I learned as much about myself as any client learned about themselves:
I don't have to earn my place in a relationship. I used to try to be "the best partner" so no one would leave. I don't do that anymore. Someone loving me isn't contingent on my perfection, and I'll be okay even if a relationship ends.
Vulnerability and authenticity are the glue. If you know you're not being yourself, you'll never fully trust the connection.
Be kind, not nice. As Jules Taylor Shore says, "clear is kind." A genuine yes is a gift. A genuine no is, too, it frees the other person to find someone who's a real yes for them.
On a more personal note, I discovered I have aphantasia, I don't visualize mental images at all. It reframed a lot of past confusion, including why clients have looked at me like I had three heads when I suggested masturbating without fantasy. I've never fantasized. I work entirely from sensation.
The bigger discovery was realizing I'm asexual. I used to want sex partly to confirm my own desirability, to check the emotional temperature of a relationship. As I did more self-worth work, that desire quietly dropped away. I first recognized myself in responsive desire (thank you, Emily Nagoski), needing arousal before desire shows up at all. More recently, with help from asexuality educator Aubri Lancaster, I learned the more precise distinction: sexual attraction is aimed at a person, while sexual desire is something that happens in the body, on its own timeline. I don't experience the first. I sometimes experience the second.
Looking back, I think being asexual is part of what made me good at sex work. I never depended on attraction to my clients to do the work well. But it's also part of why, in 2024, I chose to pause.
Pausing Sex Work
Sex takes real effort for me. I don't think about it idly. Wanting it requires a conscious decision, the right conditions, safety, connection, permission to change my mind without being punished for it. When I have that safety, my body can come online. When I don't, nothing happens, and that's fine too.
Pausing sex work in 2024 meant sitting with real questions: Do I want to spend that particular kind of energy on clients, or protect it for my personal life? What does that mean for my income? Will clients still choose to work with me without that option on the table? It was a scary decision, and it was also the only way to actually walk my own talk, for myself, my clients, my kids, and my community.
The Tool Cuts Both Ways
Sex work has been a tool for every client I've worked with. It's also been a tool for me, a way to learn myself alongside them. I'm grateful for what I know now that I didn't know a decade ago. I'm curious what's still ahead.
I'm still holding space. I'm just no longer certain what shape that space will take, and for the first time, I'm genuinely okay not knowing yet.
If this resonates and you're curious about working together, connect with me at HumanConnectionLab.com.
