What a Victorian Prostitute Taught me about Voice and power

Most people don’t know that my journey into sex work didn’t begin with desperation — or some glamorized notion of feminine self-objectification as currency, as today’s culture often suggests. My decision to become a sensual massage provider began with a poem — and also with a lifetime of trauma wounds and deep fear of economic insecurity.

As an undergraduate in English literature at a women’s college, I took a Victorian poetry class and was captivated by Augusta Webster’s A Castaway, a dramatic monologue written in the voice of a high-end prostitute named Eulalie.

Unlike the “fallen women” tropes popular at the time, the powerful, self-aware, and unapologetic Eulalie isn’t asking for forgiveness in her biting and brilliant critique of Victorian gender roles and the men comprising her elite clientele. Instead, Eulalie offers a reckoning — about class, gender, hypocrisy, and the brutal paradox of being both desired and discarded by the same society that made her.

Later, as a graduate student and single mom with two toddlers, I returned to the scene of what was, in retrospect, an awakening to what felt like an ancient calling to sex work and chose Webster’s poem as the topic of my MA thesis.
I didn’t realize it then, but I was writing about a part of myself that was yet to emerge.

More than a research project, studying A Castaway stirred something much deeper than academic curiosity — a desire to know Eulalie intimately, to speak in her voice, and to one day tell my truth as boldly as she told hers.
I remember hiking in the Oakland hills, preparing to introduce my project to classmates, and silently proclaiming that I would one day know what it would feel like to walk in Eulalie’s footsteps and see the world through her lens — to fearlessly say the ugly and the beautiful out loud, without apology.

This blog series — What a Victorian Prostitute Taught Me — is the fulfillment of that desire, and also the guiding force to my path out of sex work.

Eulalie’s Legacy

In many ways, my thesis was my first act of public rebellion against stereotypes of sex workers. I didn’t know it yet, but by choosing to write about a Victorian prostitute — not as a victim, but as an outspoken protagonist — I was beginning to untangle feelings of powerlessness that lived inside me.
At that time, I was a broke single mom and under constant legal and emotional siege after divorcing my kids' abusive father.

What I saw in the courageous and outspoken Eulalie is not just fearless defiance, but clarity, brilliance, and wisdom — the kind that can’t be learned in a classroom. She wasn’t broken — she was brilliant, refusing to shrink for the comfort of men or the moralists of her time.

In Victorian England, respectable options for women were severely limited: wives, servants, seamstresses — roles of obedience, dependence, and poverty.
Sex work, in elite circles, was paradoxically one of the few professions where a woman could engage the social and intellectual elite as a near-equal, if not as a peer.

That tension is deeply familiar.

I am the child of a college professor father and a well-educated mother, and have both a BA and MA in English Literature — yet the best job available to me after graduate school was teaching community college: grueling work, pitiful pay, and a toxic professional culture where faculty paraded moral superiority while playing out their own performance of scarcity and obedience to political and social ideology. I could barely afford a one-bedroom apartment.

Ironically, it was my teaching job — not sex work — that made me feel most like a prostitute.

In this way, Eulalie and I both lived from the margins, negotiating respectability, survival, and voice in worlds that claimed to know what was best for us — but offered little in return.

From Performer to Truth-Teller

For years, I perfected the art of performance. I was warm, wise, seductive, and safe — everything my clients wanted me to be. And I was good at it.
But somewhere along the line, I began to lose the thread of myself, my values, and more so, my voice.

It wasn’t until I shifted my business model and began helping others heal their intimacy wounds — not just soothe them — that I saw how much of myself I’d suppressed, and how many lies I’d swallowed.
Because the truth is, you can’t maintain a clear moral compass while doing sex work — no matter how therapeutic or intentional it becomes.

I was lying to everyone — and to myself.
I couldn’t date, couldn’t be honest, and felt increasingly alone, isolated, and ashamed of the impoverished life I was settling for, even though I was making a six-figure income.

My life had become a loop of making money and spending it, even when the work I offered had become a form of somatic and emotional healing.
I didn’t want to keep taking off my clothes with strangers and calling it a “career” — especially when it isn’t treated as such in the professional world.
And I deeply missed the love, intimacy, and self-respect that can come from a healthy, monogamous relationship.

This blog — and the book and nonprofit I’m building alongside it — isn’t just about sex work.
It’s about story reclamation.
It’s about being seen.
It’s about remembering the young single mom who once wrote her thesis on a Victorian prostitute and realizing:

She was never off-track.
She was just ahead of her time.