At the end of 2025, burned out from my regular news reviewing gigs and the torpor of the news in general, I took a break from journalism and became a Facebook Marketplace seller.
Encouraged by my thrifty Yorkshire mum, I sift through my daughter’s high chairs, Montessori wooden toys, and never-worn babygrows and set up a “stall”. Mum is right. Items sell within hours, desperately tired dads come to collect them, and I’ve soon got a neat stack of bank notes in my desk drawer. I’ve not had so much cash-in-hand since my stint as a professional dominatrix in my 20s. I’m reminded of the pleasure of padding down to the local Barclays branch to deposit my immoral earnings.
Soon, I run out of baby items and decide to add some of my barely worn, too-tight outfits. Immediately, the messages change. No longer are they from women looking for a nearly new bargain, but from men, of all ages, races, and locations. “All right, darling.” “DON’T get rid of this, sexy!” And “Do you have anything else to sell – like underwear?”
I sigh with world-weary irritation. “Give it a rest, lads,” I think to myself, “I’m retired!”
But soon their persistence wears me down. Before I know it, I’m entertaining the thought of selling my sexy knickers (not the La Perla ones, mind), or fulfilling their request for explicit adult images, and bantering along, despite being absolutely, resolutely done with sex work, and ruing what I wish I didn’t know about men as a result of it.
It occurs to me that this must be happening to other women. I poll my friends. Yep, at least three of them have had the same experience. One, who had set up a successful secondhand fashion “shop” on eBay, and much preferred her self-employed enterprise, said the harassment became so insufferable she’d been applying for office jobs.
Let me be clear: as someone who enjoyed a relatively cushy pro-domme “career”, and managed to get a successful book deal out of it to boot, I’m not offended by being propositioned, but I do give them short shrift. With the most irritating offenders, I delight in pricking their fantasy bubbles.
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“Listen – I’m just a broke, shabby mum with greasy roots and hip dips trying to make some extra cash to satisfy my toddler’s baby shark obsession,” then, “Facebook marketplace is for household items and clothes, it’s not for sex work.” And finally, “this is harassment”.
Upon being called out, all but one of the proponents recoil at the idea that they may be soliciting me. “Oh, God, I didn’t mean to imply THAT!”
I am bemused by their distinction, engineered to compartmentalise their shame, where if you ask an “ordinary” woman to sell you sexualised content, it clearly, in their minds, does not count as sex work. But this didn’t happen back in my domme days, before sites such as OnlyFans existed.
This marks a cultural shift. Where once men paid to watch big-studio-produced porn videos, the move to personalised sexual content from individual creators is having a knock-on effect on male sexual entitlement, and blurring the boundaries between sex workers and everybody else.
Even as a former adult operator who would do it all again to fund my break into the media, this makes me deeply uneasy. I worry about vulnerable women on the internet and that their private activities might become public knowledge. From being judged on dates – “nobody will marry you” one guy told me – to experiencing increased sexual abuse in the years since as a result of me owning my past, sex work is never the easy option.
As the English Collective of Prostitutes reminds us, of approximately 72,000-100,000 UK sex workers, an estimated 70-80% of those are mothers, many single parents. And with the promise of instant cash, how many of those who feel ambivalent or even ashamed of sex work could be persuaded?
When my daughter adds a dozen more items to her Santa letter, I crack. “Have you got any underwear to sell?” asks one particularly persistent punter. “Clean or dirty?” I shoot back. Before I know it, I’m arranging my itchiest lace knickers in a fetching heap and sending him a photograph of the gussets.
I wait for the dot dot dot to materialise into a reply. “Nah, you’re all right, thanks – I’ve had better.”
Snorting with outraged mirth, I send a voice note to my best friend. “O…M…G!” she replies, and we cackle together. Then I report him for sexual harassment. To misappropriate Dolly Parton, “this blonde domme ain’t nobody’s fool”.
Nichi Hodgson is the author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder
