Most books about sex work seem to be trying to prove something. They want to convince you that sex work is empowering, exploitative, liberating, degrading, or some combination of the above. Money for Something largely avoids that debate. Mia Walsch tells the story of one complicated period of her life and leaves the reader to make of it what they will.
I ended up reading the entire book in two sittings. Coincidentally, both were on sweltering summer afternoons in London, sitting in the shade of a small park across the road from my flat. Once I started reading, it was difficult to stop.
The memoir follows nineteen-year-old Mia, who begins working in Sydney erotic massage parlours because severe mental illness and drug use make conventional employment almost impossible. As a sex worker she goes by Sasha. Later she begins training in a BDSM dungeon as a professional dominatrix and submissive.
The writing is frank, funny, painfully honest and often surprisingly warm.
One thing the book makes abundantly clear is that Sasha is deeply troubled long before she enters sex work. Her biggest battles are with drug addiction, mental illness, self-harm, body dysmorphia, crippling self-esteem issues and a series of unhealthy relationships.
Sex work is probably the least of her worries.
Like almost any job, the work itself has good days and bad days. Some massage parlours are run better than others. Some managers are supportive, others less so. She encounters kind clients, unpleasant clients, funny moments and uncomfortable ones. Later, she seems happiest while learning the ropes at the BDSM dungeon, where the work appears to suit both her personality and creativity.
Her mental illness clearly predates her entry into the industry. In fact, her inability to cope with a conventional job is part of what leads her into sex work in the first place. The most obvious way the work makes her existing problems worse is money. Ready access to cash makes it considerably easier to maintain a drug habit.
One of the strongest aspects of the book is its portrayal of other sex workers.
Sasha often describes them in glowing, almost reverential terms. Given her intense self-loathing, I sometimes wondered how reliable these descriptions were. She has a tendency to elevate the women around her while relentlessly criticising herself. Even allowing for that, the sheer diversity of the women she works alongside comes through strongly.
Some struggle with addiction or mental illness just as she does. Plenty of others are sane, sober and doing just fine. Throughout the book we meet women with different personalities, backgrounds, motivations and attitudes towards the work. Anyone hoping for confirmation of the stereotype that sex workers are universally damaged addicts with traumatic pasts is going to be disappointed.
The industry itself isn't romanticised either.
Some colleagues are generous and compassionate. Others are bitchy, selfish, competitive or backstabbing. They're allowed to be ordinary, complicated people.
What struck me most was how often other sex workers are the people who catch Sasha when she's falling apart. Throughout the memoir she repeatedly alienates friends through drug binges, emotional crises and self-destructive behaviour. One by one, many people drift away. Yet when she reaches rock bottom and sends desperate messages asking for help, there always seems to be at least one fellow sex worker willing to answer the phone or offer a shoulder to cry on.
By the end of the book, Sasha has enrolled at university, left massage, abandoned her dominatrix training and taken a café job. The ending is quite abrupt, although drawing a neat line under this particular period of somebody's life was probably always going to be difficult.
The final scene is also one of my favourites. Sasha catches up with an old sex worker friend whom she has always admired. During their conversation she finally begins to understand something she has struggled to believe throughout the book. Other people genuinely care about her. Some of the women she has spent years admiring also admire her and expect great things from her future.
I rarely get emotional reading books, but the final page managed to make me go slightly misty-eyed.
Reading Money for Something also made me reconsider something I've written many times myself.
When I hear sex workers complain that business is quiet, I tend to male a fairly unsympathetic observation (but usually don't say it out loud): you're competing for a finite pool of clients, and there are providers operating under exactly the same conditions as you who are busier than you are because they're putting more effort into self-promotion. Even if they have the exact same advantages and disadvantages as you, all else being equal, if they're working harder on self promotion, they're making more money.
I still think there's truth in that.
But reading Sasha's story reminded me that effort isn't quite as simple as it sounds.
Someone might know perfectly well that they should update their website, take new photos, post on social media, write some blog posts and improve their advertising. They might also be struggling to get out of bed that morning. Addiction, mental illness, abusive relationships, financial chaos and low self-esteem don't conveniently disappear during working hours.
Sasha can be incredibly frustrating. She makes terrible decisions. She behaves selfishly. She wallows in self-pity. She repeatedly creates disasters for herself and then desperately needs other people to help put her back together. Walsch doesn't seem particularly interested in making her younger self likeable.
That makes the compassion other people show her much more affecting.
Money for Something doesn't present sex workers as victims or heroes. They're colleagues, rivals, friends, occasional arseholes and, when somebody is in serious trouble, sometimes the person who answers the phone.
That's probably what I liked most about the book. It gives us a messy person living a messy life and doesn't try to turn her into an argument about sex work.
I read all of Money for Something across two hot afternoons in the park. For a book dealing with addiction, self-harm, mental illness and some very dark periods in someone's life, it is remarkably easy to tear through.