Recently I went to the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of Marilyn Monroe in London, launched this year to commemorate the centenary of her birth. As a huge Monroe fan – I have seen all her films – there were very few photos that were new to me, but there were some interviews and letters that were.
A piece in Life, by Richard Meryman, first published in 1962 shortly after her death, caught my attention. Some of Marilyn’s lines stayed with me, “and I guess I’ve always had too much fantasy to be only a housewife… I was never kept, to be blunt about it. I always kept myself. I have always had a pride in the fact that I was on my own.”
I related to her sense of pride in standing on your own two feet, from the labour of your body, without relying on any one person (even though many people would consider my status as a “proud prostitute” to be an oxymoron).
I began to think about the difference between being someone who hustles (in whatever industry) and someone who is kept, and the strong link between those two in sex work specifically. My income comes from many, many clients and I am careful not to become so dependent on a single one that my finances depend on them.
I have turned down sugar daddy propositions of Aus$6,000 (£3,120) a week to belong exclusively to one client. That felt too much like being owned, even though that sort of stability is what many sex workers seek – a great “whale” that they can retire with and for whom perhaps, most aspirational of all, they can become a trophy wife.
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For marriage often is the very top of the whorearchy, the final, most socially acceptable form of exchange of sexual and emotional labour for money (an exchange that is made transparent through use of the derogatory term “gold digger”).
Margo St James, a North American sex worker in the 1970s, formed the advocacy group WHO, which stood for “Whores, Housewives and Others” (“others” meaning lesbians), which recognised the shared interests of whores and housewives.
Cardi B, the New York rapper, said in an Instagram video in 2019 that there are five levels to “tricking/hoeing”, in which the first is having your nails paid for, the second having your rent paid for, and the fifth is marriage to a rich Arab man. Wednesday Martin wrote a piece for the New York Times in 2015 titled “Poor Little Rich Women”, in which she spoke about the “wife bonuses” that extremely wealthy North American men gift their wives if they’ve behaved as they’re meant to for the year, fulfilling their social (and legal) contract both publicly and privately, a pecuniary reimbursement suitable for a living status symbol.
I’ve always been a misogamist because to me I see marriage as both patriarchal and logistical, historically about enshrining wealth and lines of inheritance rather than romance. I understand the importance it has to many queer people, but I am firmly in the camp of the writer Yasmin Nair, who has spoken about how gay marriage was a cause for and by the wealthy.
I understand the appeal of a monogamous financial arrangement to women, and especially those who are seeking financial stability, but it is not for me. Having to cater to the mood of one man, and knowing that my lifestyle was reliant on him and our relationship, would feel too precarious for me. I would prefer to continue to hustle, and control the flow of my own money.
I began to think of MMA fighter Ronda Rousey’s controversial comments a few years ago, when she said that “I have this one term for the kind of woman my mother raised me not to be, and I call it a do-nothing bitch. A DNB. The kind of chick that just tries to be pretty and taken care of by someone else.”
There was a lot of backlash due to the overt misogyny in that statement, which I thought was fair, as I am not interested in critiques of how women born without money climb the social and financial ladder. As singer Summer Walker says, “sell it online, sell it in the streets, get it how u get it, no judgement, the game is rigged regardless so y not get a head start”.
Ironically though, considering it was probably meant as a smear on sex workers just as much as on housewives, I don’t consider myself part of what she is referring to, as I’m not a “kept woman”. I am not being taken care of by anyone, whether a man or a family member.
Let’s not forget that a “kept woman” isn’t always a wife or a sex worker. In the 1985 British film My Beautiful Laundrette, one of the characters attacks the mistress of her father, saying: “I don’t like women who live off men. That’s a pretty disgusting, parasitical thing, isn’t it?”
The mistress responds: “But tell me, who do you live off? You must understand me, we’re of different generations, different classes, everything is waiting for you, the only thing that has ever waited for me is your father.” That rebuke leads the daughter to reassess her life. She runs away, and begins to support herself for the first time.
I am currently reading Henry James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove, in which the protagonist Kate Croy talks openly about becoming a kept woman – except by a wealthy aunt, not by a man. “Aunt Maude has made me a proposal. But she has also made me a condition. She wants to keep me.”
It seems that a conditional, transactional exchange does not have the same stigma when it is a blood family member that holds the reins. Monroe, a child born into poverty who ended up in foster care, never experienced being kept in that way either.
Tilly Lawless is a Sydney-based sex worker. She is the author of two novels: Nothing But My Body (2021) and Thora (2024)
