On the Separation of Personal and Professional: Sex, Work, Law, The Girlfriend Experience, and The Interpersonal Relationships of Independent Escorts

I explore the ways in which independent escorts who offer the Girlfriend Experience (GFE) create and maintain boundaries between their personal and professional lives. These boundaries are important for both escorts and their personal partners. Occasionally, some of these boundaries are crossed with certain clients. I also explore how the interpersonal relationships of sex workers affect the spaces in which they work. Most of my participants have been in relationships wherein their partner did not support their work as independent escorts. Often, these workers would transition into agency-based massage to mitigate the intimacy between themselves and their clients, which is perceived as less threatening to their partners. Due to the criminalization and stigmatization of sex work, sex workers who work in these spaces experience barriers to being intimate with clients. Furthermore, they experience adverse working conditions. It is for these reasons that the sex workers I interviewed preferred working independently.