Writer Jessie Sage Credit: Photo: By Dawn Hartman

I won’t forget the first time a couple hired me to join them for their anniversary. I was honored that they wanted to share their celebration with me, but also aware (in part because I’ve had threesomes go awry in my personal life) that the three-way that is comprised of an established couple and a guest star is a fragile dynamic. Introducing someone new into a long-term relationship, even a sex worker who will happily return to her own life once the session is over, can bring up insecurities and jealousy that everyone involved must navigate carefully.

After flirting on the couch with both of them for some time, I slowly pulled my floral dress over my head to reveal that I was wearing strappy thong panties and no bra. They both looked at me, and the man turned to his wife and said emphatically, “Wow, isn’t she beautiful?”

I sensed that she needed more time to acclimate before being hit with her husband’s desire for someone other than herself (he should have known this, too!), so I casually thanked him but turned my attention to her. She was still dressed, a black maxi dress over the lingerie she would later reveal. I began to say something but she cut me off. “I’ve had a kid,” she said. “My boobs don’t look like yours anymore. And I have skin issues.”

This was an entirely unnecessary confession. I went on Accutane in my 30s because I was still dealing with late-in-life acne (I sometimes still do in my late 40s), and my breasts only look the way they do because I spent no small amount of money having them reconstructed and augmented after three children, not to mention a congenital issue that constricted my breast tissue. But even if these things about my body weren’t true, her apology wasn’t needed. Her body was not something that she needed to apologize for — none of our bodies are.

And yet, I’m not surprised she offered it. Women apologizing for their bodies — for taking up space, for not fitting an imagined ideal, for doing “embarrassing” things — is so common it almost goes unnoticed.

Before I was a sex worker, I was a birth doula, assisting couples through the process of labor and childbirth. It was as a doula that I first started to pay attention to how conditioned women are to apologize for the natural functions of their bodies. With the rhythmic beeping of hospital monitors in the background, my doula clients would apologize for their leaking amnionic fluid, for the volume and intensity of their moans in the throes of active labor, and for defecating on the delivery table while pushing — all things they had no control over.

For most of my clients, the urge to contain and control their bodies — something that had been drilled into them for their entire lives until that point — didn’t suddenly disappear when they could no longer do so. Indeed, the fear of losing control of their bodies was often what held them back from really pushing when they needed to do so, and also what compelled them to apologize when they finally surrendered to the process of childbirth — with all that it entailed.

While a doula’s job is technically to provide non-medical support, I found that I spent much of my time normalizing what was happening to my clients’ bodies and assuring them that it was OK to yell louder and make a mess. Neither require an apology.

When I moved from birth work into sex work, I found that walking clients through the process of unlearning the shame they had about their bodies (a skill I learned as a doula) was one of the most intense — and arguably most important — parts of the job.

Over the years, I have heard myself often repeat all of these refrains …
It’s OK if you leak fluid.
It’s OK if you poop on the table, everything needs to come out before that baby will.
It’s OK to make noise — don’t hold back, roar like a warrior.
It’s OK if you have stretch marks and a belly.
It’s OK if you want to be fucked in the ass.
It’s OK if you want to suck on my breasts and call me Mommy.
It’s OK to tell me exactly what you want.
It’s OK if you don’t get hard, there are a lot of ways to have sex.
It’s OK that you’re attracted to fat women.
It’s OK if you fantasize about being with men.
It’s OK if all you want is to lay here and cuddle.

While my partner teases that my California hippie heart doesn’t experience the same shame about my body or desires that those who grew up in more conservative Western Pa. do (and perhaps this relaxed acceptance of all bodies and most desires makes me good at my job), it would be a mistake to naturalize this. It isn’t that I am immune or somehow above shame and toxic messaging, it is that I have been forced to push up against them (and in public) so often that I have made peace with my body and my desires; we have become friends.

Earlier this week, in a review I published of Zoë Schneider’s local art exhibit, ‘The Whale’ — a show that pushed its audience to face the consequences of living in a fatphobic culture — I was moved to write about the way that I’ve been implicitly asked to apologize about my own body. Most notably, I wrote about a well-meaning client who told me that one of the things he has admired about me is the unapologetic way I occupy my body. As I said in the piece, it had never occurred to me to apologize to him for my body when I was there precisely because he picked me out and booked me. He was paying for access to a body that he was surprised I didn’t feel ashamed of. It would take me too long to unpack all of this. Instead, I will leave you to think about how intense this messaging of bodily shame is, especially for women.

While I am capable of seeing all of the “problem areas” of my body — cellulite, a belly, imperfect skin, back fat, signs of aging, etc. — I have lost interest in fixating on them, trying to control and contain them, and most importantly, in apologizing for them. My body takes up space, it busts out of straight sizing, and it demands to be seen. I like this about my body. I challenge all of you to like the things about your body that make it yours. And if you can’t yet do that, at least stop apologizing for it. You don’t owe that to anyone.

Jessie Sage is a Pittsburgh-based sex worker, writer, and the host of the podcast When We’re Not Hustling: Sex Workers Talking About Everything But.

Find Jessie on her website or her socials at X: @sapiotextual, Bluesky: @sapiotextual.bsky.social, and Instagram: @curvaceous_sage.