When I first walked Seattle’s infamous Aurora Ave as a teenage prostitute, I told myself I was doing the right thing.
My goal was to confront my relationship with sex after the trauma my then-boyfriend inflicted on me. Convinced that exposure was the way to overcome fear, I decided to face the trigger head-on and walk onto the streets -- insane, yet it seemed so rational at the time. But what began as one car date drew me into a world I barely understood: America's prostitution subculture, known by those inside it as “The Game.”
As I became increasingly immersed in its language, hierarchies, and rules, the boundary between choosing to participate and being coerced into it became blurrier -- until I found myself without much of a choice at all. My understanding of myself, other people, sex, and freedom quickly became unrecognizable from what it could have been had I never entered The Game.
Two and a half years after escaping my pimp, I'd built a new life five thousand miles away. I was an engineering student on one of the best university rowing teams in the world, seemingly far removed from the world I'd left behind. But when financial instability and my obsessive self-reliance threatened the future I had worked to build, prostitution reappeared in a form I told myself would be different. It was, at least on the surface. And it also wasn't.
Moving between the streets, the world of independent escorting, and the future I was building outside of the sex trade, I found myself facing a question more complicated than whether I could leave: what does it mean to choose something when the choice itself has been shaped by everything that came before?
My goal was to confront my relationship with sex after the trauma my then-boyfriend inflicted on me. Convinced that exposure was the way to overcome fear, I decided to face the trigger head-on and walk onto the streets -- insane, yet it seemed so rational at the time. But what began as one car date drew me into a world I barely understood: America's prostitution subculture, known by those inside it as “The Game.”
As I became increasingly immersed in its language, hierarchies, and rules, the boundary between choosing to participate and being coerced into it became blurrier -- until I found myself without much of a choice at all. My understanding of myself, other people, sex, and freedom quickly became unrecognizable from what it could have been had I never entered The Game.
Two and a half years after escaping my pimp, I'd built a new life five thousand miles away. I was an engineering student on one of the best university rowing teams in the world, seemingly far removed from the world I'd left behind. But when financial instability and my obsessive self-reliance threatened the future I had worked to build, prostitution reappeared in a form I told myself would be different. It was, at least on the surface. And it also wasn't.
Moving between the streets, the world of independent escorting, and the future I was building outside of the sex trade, I found myself facing a question more complicated than whether I could leave: what does it mean to choose something when the choice itself has been shaped by everything that came before?