Really fucks you up, and fucks up your relationships with other women a lot of the time.

Like sex work has really changed a lot of my perspectives on shit because we live in a society where women are told that their primary value is their sexual desirability and nothing else they do matters if they’re not hot, and like how you know if you’re hot or not is how many men want you, and like we’re told men are these constantly horny lust machines with essentially identical parameters for what’s desirable and so anytime there’s a guy who doesn’t want you, you must be defective somehow.

And like hotness in this worldview is objective and sort of a zero-sum game and like it leads to a really shitty competitive thing between women and like IDK maybe I’m really gay or really primarily gay or something or it’s partially just being a sex worker, and really having the whole “yeah, I know I’m desirable” thing because work really covers that need for me, but like I don’t have that feeling towards other women and like I’m not saying “Oh I’m so good for not being like that, look at how good I am” or anything cause like it’s just an acculturated thing and like I don’t know how to deal with it, but like it’s come up in like my sexual relationships with other women where like they’d literally tell me that whatever about my body or appearance made them insecure somehow or like that attention I got from men made them feel hurt, and I’m also not saying “Oh, I’m secure in my position as hottest, I win” because like there are definitely like circles in which I’m not the babeliest babe or whatever because I don’t appeal to that demographic and my girlfriends would sometimes get more attention than me in those and like I didn’t care because like “the hot girl chose me, so…” so I didn’t mind them getting attention and like my girlfriends have all been really gorgeous in my opinion, and I don’t think hotness is an objective quality or a zero-sum game at all, but like it’s just really depressing that that’s a thing and that like “But I’m with you” isn’t enough to turn the culture of competition into something else.

And like I see young women jockeying for position of “resident hottie” in various spaces (usually male dominated spaces) because society has told them that’s what they have to be to be valid, and like if you want to do stuff in a male dominated space you have to be the hottest girl or there’s sort of no point and it’s just… like depressing and fucked up and like IDK when I was younger, and not doing sex work, I did often hang out in places with lots of boys because they were all like… fairly nice to me because I was decorative and like I liked some of the same stuff they liked so it felt good to be there, and like I probably would have felt pretty upset if another girl had come along and I’d sort of ended up in the cold because I wasn’t the pretty one anymore, and so like it’s a social dynamic that’s really perpetuated by men only being friendly or kind to women if they perceive them as sexually interesting and like how there’s only room for like a sort of “token girl” in a lot of heavily male interest circles, and so yeah I’m also definitely not saying that “look at these silly girls, hating other girls because they want to feel like the prettiest” because like it happens for a fucking reason, but it still sucks,