One of the most common misconceptions about sex work is that it is done by someone who is either desperate, out of other options, or both. 

 

Sex workers in film and television are women in a temporary fix who through their own hard work, grit and determination, or thanks to a rescuing angel, are able to escape their temporary plight and move beyond the horror and degradation of “selling themselves”. 

 

The underlying assumption here is that only sex workers “sell themselves.”  

 

Which is clearly rubbish. 

 

Most people in the modern world are exchanging their time for money. This is most obvious if you’re in employment where your contract states the number of hours a week that you are to work in order to receive payment. But the self-employed are also exchanging their time for money. 

 

We are all selling ourselves!  

 

Carolyn Myss  explains that one of the core human archetypes we all carry within us is “The Prostitute.” You know you are interacting with the world from this part of yourself when you are “Selling your soul for money”. 

 

Not your body. Your soul.

 

By Carolyn Myss’s definition we have all been prostitutes at one time or another in our lives, because we have all done jobs we find boring, pointless or out of alignment with our values and belief systems. We do them because we need the money. In our willingness to compromise, and even override our soul’s desires, we allow ourselves to be prostituted.

 

Ikigai (illustrated in this Venn diagram) is the Japanese alternative to prostituting your soul. 

You will notice that when you do something you love which is also something the world needs, you have MISSION.

 

When you do something the world needs which you can be paid for, you have found your VOCATION.

 

When you do something you can be paid for and are good at, you are doing your PROFESSION.

 

When you are doing the thing that you love and which you are good at, you are following your PASSION.

 

When your work is your MISSION and your VOCATION and your PROFESSION and your PASSION you have found IKIGAI.

 

In my early 20s with an Honours degree in Anthropology behind me and filled to the brim with desire to bring peace and love to the world (a true hippy two decades too late) my IKIGAI was teaching. 

 

First I had to fight my parents who didn’t consider it a proper job (ahh, if only they could see how I’ve progressed!) I was passionate and determined because I believed I would be good at it and that I’d love it. I truly believed that education was a right for everyone and that the role of the educator was to light a fire of passion or knowing or something – anything – within the beating breast of every child. 

 

Next, I had to fight the system. Despite a 2:1 from a top university, my degree was one of those “Mickey Mouse” degrees as the BT ads used to say and didn’t automatically qualify me for a place on a Primary PGCE course. I needed to justify it. 

 

So I did. I sat down and wrote a long supplementary letter to my application forms detailing how my degree could be applied to every subject in the primary curriculum. Of course it didn’t surprise me after a degree in Anthropology that a system of control (the British education system) would assert control over the types of people allowed to do the job – it’s what social structures do after all. 

 

I succeeded in talking myself onto the PGCE course and I turned out to be a bloody good primary school teacher. I worked very hard. I loved my classes passionately and would get into trouble on more than one occasion for defending their honour, but for years I didn’t understand why I was such a very good teacher.

 

Becoming a very good whore has shown me. It’s about presence, intent and energy. You can’t stand in front of a class, more concerned about data than you are about the children and be a good teacher. Just as you cannot sit in front of a cock and care more about him “finishing off and paying up” than about an expanded energetic and healing experience and be a good whore.

 

Finding IKIGAI matters. Those of us who find it once are very lucky. Those of us who find it twice – are we just greedy?! The thing is, IKIGAI isn’t a fixed state. Remove one of the 4 “ions” (passion, mission, profession, vocation) and you’ve lost IKIGAI.

 

Very quickly my vocation and profession for teaching fizzled out. I still had mission and passion but within a few years of passionate excitement that I was actually paid for something I loved doing so much, it dawned on me that I wasn’t really paid at all. I was given a bit of pin money and a pat on the head by a society that underpays all its “caring” (i.e. largely female) professions, replacing hard cash with good feels like “deep respect.” 

 

Deep respect didn’t pay my bills or buy me the clothes to work in or help me save towards an occasional holiday or theatre trip. Deep respect was increasingly irritating. And most annoying of all, maybe my parents were right?  Despite all of my training and hard work I lived on tuna pasta and an overdraft.

 

But I did still love my job. By which I mean I loved my colleagues, I loved the children I taught, I loved interactions with their parents and I did consider myself very, very lucky to do a job that brought me so much deep satisfaction. 

 

Then Michael Gove (eugenicist and Education Secretary 2010-2014) happened. What happens when you put someone who deeply believes in the genetic supremacy of the few (elite white males) in charge of education? Well it turns out that he turns that system from one in which ALL children are helped to find their level of success in the 14 years of compulsory education, to one in which most must fail so that a few can be shown to have succeeded (and thus be deemed superior). 

 

Failure became an essential part of the system that I was teaching in.

 

Teachers who had already lost both vocation and profession now lost their passion and their mission and fled in vast numbers. They have been replaced by suit wearing, brief case carrying data collection robots. My interactions with my colleagues which I had valued so much as a young teacher became soul destroying experiences as schools filled up with more and more people who cared more about data than they did about the individual needs of the children in their classes.

 

I started to hate the profession I had worked so hard to join and had loved so, so much for years. I knew that I was no longer working in alignment with my values and beliefs, but I felt trapped. I was a mum with 3 young children, not the best time to take big career risks. 

 

It was a conversation with my fridge (honestly) that helped me make my decision. 

 

I was sitting slumped in the kitchen chair at the end of another demanding day at school feeling very tired and upset after another horrible interaction with a data collection robot. The hot tea in my hands was slowly building up my strength for the evening of mothering ahead of me. The house around me was blissfully quiet, all I could hear was the hum of the fridge opposite me. 

 

My mind returned to my most pressing problem – what was I to do if I left teaching? It had long ago stopped being my IKIGAI and that day’s interaction had reminded me that it was getting close to impossible for me to stay in a system which I had come to believe was actively causing harm. What could I do instead?

 

On the fridge opposite a postcard, white with stark black words, caught my eye: 

 

“Whatever makes your soul sing – Do that”

 

I looked at it, it made sense. Of course it did, I had bought it and put it there! But it also annoyed me and I told it quite grumpily, “The only thing that makes my soul sing is sex and you can’t make money from sex.”

 

The fridge just laughed. 

 

That tall, fat, white thing in the middle of my kitchen stopped humming and laughed at me. I heard it and I paused to think about what had made it laugh, then shook my head and replied, “Oh – yes, I see what you’re saying – but women like me don’t make money from sex.”

 

What I meant of course was that selling sex was what impoverished, drug addicted, destitute, enslaved, manipulated, weak, vulnerable, fallen women have to do because they have run out of other options – think Fantine in Les Miserables – not a highly educated, “normal”, middle class English woman like me. 

 

I obviously knew that prostitution is the “oldest profession in the world” and I knew that as an industry it makes billions every year. But I was the mother of 3 children in one of the most affluent postcodes in the country. My non-working life was filled with children, dog walking, village fetes, coffee mornings and summer BBQs. None of my neighbours and friends would dream of visiting a prostitute (would they?!) – let alone be one!

 

It was impossible.

 

DAMN – there was a postcard right next to the singing soul one: 

 

“Nothing is Impossible, the word itself means I’m Possible”

 

WHAT???

 

There is no point in plastering inspiration quotes all around the house if you are going to ignore them. So I didn’t. That conversation with the fridge planted a seed. I did some research, talked with my most trusted few and one small step at a time Anabelle was created. 

 

MISSION 

 

I knew I loved sex, as I had told the fridge it truly is the thing that makes my soul sing. Like a painter needs to paint, a singer needs to sing and a dancer needs to dance – I need to give and receive sex, but to be honest, when I started, I had no idea if the world needed Anabelle. 

 

I had no idea that what I would offer would fill a societal need. I have learned over the past 10 years that the world really needs kind, loving, authentic, genuine sexual services. 

 

I have learned that sex, for many, is not the joyful experience that I have always found it to be. Sadly, for many, sex is a disconnected, monotonous, dull, harmful often toxic experience. Humans are wired for connection, nothing is ever going to stop human beings from seeking love and intimacy. Can you imagine a world without great art or great music? 

 

For far too many, their lives are lived without great sex. 

 

Yes, there is most definitely a need!

 

VOCATION

 

Could I get paid for my kindness, compassion, love, understanding and insatiable sexuality?! You may laugh when I tell you that I had doubts, because you see these qualities are just who I am, and we all find it very difficult to attach a value or a price to what we are or what we find easy (i.e. are skilled at) rather than what we have to work hard to do. 

 

If I had denied all of my qualities and trained very hard to be, say, an accountant then I would feel like I had earned the right, through sheer hard work, to charge a high hourly rate. But value something I find natural and easy? That is a much harder thing to do. According to David Graeber  this is why as a society we reward boring desk jobs so much more than the interesting creative or caring jobs – if you enjoy your work, the theory goes, you don’t deserve the same level of compensation.

 

There is a logic to this – I am miserable, but at least I am paid to be miserable!

 

But if you examine value from the receiver’s point of view then it is obvious that people who offer a service that others value deserve to be paid very well for what they do. Adele sings beautiful songs, she loves her art and is very proud of it, she doesn’t offer seats at her concerts for free. So I just had to imagine myself as Adele and charge for my beautiful songs!

 

PROFESSION

 

Once I did the inner work to have the audacity to charge for what I love the most and am uniquely gifted at, it was all quite easy. I will never forget the thrill I had driving my battered little car away from my first job with an envelope of crisp notes in my handbag. I had earned more in an hour than I did in a day as a teacher. 

 

Initially I ran the two professions alongside each other, wearing different hats for different days of the week. I loved sex and had a sense I could charge for providing it, but would I be any good at it, professionally? 

 

Thus far I had only ever had sex on my terms when I was in the mood. Could I guarantee I would be in the mood? Could I be professional enough to be sexy with everyone who walked through my door? What about days when I wasn’t quite feeling it? I am asked these questions quite frequently and I too had them in the beginning. 

 

It turned out that I was a complete natural. I am a very, very good whore. I am incredibly professional and deeply passionate about my work. I have a strongly developed “masculine” or yang energy around commitment and showing up for people. If I commit to something in my family, community or at work, I do whatever it takes to deliver on my commitment. 

 

I read voraciously and invested in incredible training to deepen my understanding and skills. I took my health more seriously because you have to be healthy when you work in this way. I worked differently, but with as much hard work and commitment, as I had in my earlier teaching days. In other words, I was very professional about being a whore and I still am. 

 

PASSION

 

Underpinning it all, all my structures, focus, professionalism, hard work, vocation and mission lies my passion. It’s still the same passion – the passion I have felt very strongly since I was very, very little – to live in a world filled with fairness, love, compassion, kindness, tolerance and respect. 

 

I find people fascinating. I love their bodies, I love their energy and I get to enjoy what very few people on this planet get to enjoy – interactions on a soul level. 

 

I have strong “feminine” or yin energy. I am highly intuitive, very sensitive and incredibly responsive. I can connect with people in an intimate setting with ease and often very, very deeply. I am good at this! And what is more, I absolutely love every minute of it.

 

My passion for sex became my purpose in life. I truly care to give people heart opening, mind expanding, life enhancing experiences. Everyone is different so has their unique needs and desires. The joy in my work is understanding those and allowing my intuition to guide me and meet them. 

 

Sometimes I will voice out loud something that bubbles up inside of me as I am working, but much of the time I quietly give or do something without saying anything and then later learn that it was THE thing they desperately wanted or needed. You can only do that when you have deep passion for what you are doing.

 

Creating Anabelle was the moment this Alice fell down the rabbit hole and went on the most remarkable adventure. 

 

I have worked with hundreds of beautiful and remarkable human beings and learned something from and/or with all of them. Some of the lessons I have learned about humanity have been saddening or shocking, but the vast amount has been nourishing and uplifting. If you could all experience humans the way I do, you would see what I mean.

 

I am still a qualified teacher, but not once has it crossed my mind to leave my life as a whore to rejoin the profession that turned me into a prostitute. 

 

I have found my IKIGAI.