Robin Hood Hooking

Clients tend to be wealthier than the sex workers they see, with noteworthy exceptions, because of both the stigmatized and luxury nature of sexual services. People can only afford to pay for sex when they have enough disposable income to be spending some on non-essential services for their own pleasure, but more often than not the people selling it are struggling to make ends meet. As poor sex workers, we find ourselves in close proximity to the rich in a way that other poor people tend not to. Sometimes we can gain leverage over them to benefit our whole community.

Fucking our class enemies doesn’t mean we can’t still oppose them; it can be a tactic in our opposition. Clients with more money than sense are prime candidates to serve as a means of redistributing money or resources, whether that’s by using their empty apartment as a pop-up brothel or taking friends on a shopping spree with their credit card. I refer to the practice as Robin Hood hooking.

As with the Robin Hood of myth and legend, the goal of these sex workers is to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. The recipients of this money are often other sex workers, but don’t necessarily have to be, and this sharing of clients’ funds is treated as part of a lifestyle that comes with selling sexual labour from a position of precarity. Mythological criminals like Robin Hood and his band of merry men can’t hope to hold onto their stolen money for long or to explain its presence, so selfish choices were naturally discouraged. For poor sex workers, community serves as our incentive to share because it provides long-term security without checks and surveillance from the state, taking the place of independent wealth.

As poor sex workers, we find ourselves in close proximity to the rich in a way that other poor people tend not to.

With little hope of amassing wealth even if we were to save as much as possible, because of the frequency of emergencies or situations where we have to pay many months of rent up-front because we can’t reference, we rely on others who have money on hand to pool their incomes. They provide that support with the understanding they’ll be supported in return, knowing that clawing our way out of these situations alone would cost us each a lot more than it does as a constant collective effort. Couple this with having barriers to banking or safe storage of money and you have a booming cash-based mutual aid system in any group of struggling sex workers.

Unfortunately, Robin Hood hooking is a practice almost exclusive to those without access to large amounts of money on a regular basis. Though many of us fantasize about finding our white whale client who takes a liking to us and showers us with money, the reality is that sex workers who hit it big rarely give back to the community they came from. Instead of sharing the wealth, they hoard it and begin to obtain their personal security from the number in their bank account instead of their peers. On an individual level, that safety net is more constant and reliable. It just supports only one person instead of a dozen or a hundred. With this motivation, they put themselves on the wrong side of the class divide.

The problem with a practice of wealth redistribution that’s used only by those with limited access to funds is that the impact is always restricted in line with that access. Wherever we see the cut-off point at which sex workers no longer have need of a community to support them in times of struggle, that’s our ceiling for how much money can come into the community through one individual. If we imagine a world where sex workers keep redistributing wealth no matter how much our income might increase, it would be a very different world.

If we imagine a world where sex workers keep redistributing wealth no matter how much our income might increase, it would be a very different world.

The story doesn’t have to end at strippers intentionally sharing big spenders and full-service sex workers passing around the same cash every time a new person gets sick. What if the next sex worker who hits the jackpot when their elderly sugar daddy dies doesn’t buy a wildly expensive house and live off the wealth, but instead recognizes the windfall as a product of all the support they’ve gotten from other sex workers before them and pays it forward?

Our sick pay could be funded by mutual aid. A stripper who is injured after a fall on stage could have their expenses and medical bills covered. The cost of a taxi or bus ride to get to a client wouldn’t be the difference between a sex worker paying rent or feeding their child. These sums of money are trivial to the most high-end of in-person and online sex workers alike, yet the burden seems to fall on those with the least to give.

Robin Hood’s schemes can’t make up for the injustices imposed by the King. Our desperate attempts to help each other while we’re drowning in expenses ourselves won’t change sex workers’ position in our larger systems either. We need to survive long enough and be spared the overwhelm that comes with poverty, so we have the time and energy to plan. We should be beyond comparison to tales involving Kings and nobles and impoverished redistributors of wealth.

I don’t think I’ll get through to those who are already wealthy and detached, but if you’re thinking about these issues as a sex worker on the verge of a lucky break, it’s worth trying to hold tight to your values and remember your community so you don’t end up there. We can’t rely on anyone else to make things better if we won’t even be there for each other when we get a taste of privilege.

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