My Body Is a Terrible Liar

I often wish I had the capacity to do full-service sex work. The money, the independence—it’s tempting. But the truth is, my body is a terrible liar. I can’t fake an orgasm, not even for the mortgage. Lust, I can do. Desire, I can do. I’ve had some of the hottest sex of my life with people I wasn’t in love with. But pretending? Putting on a performance I don’t feel in my bones? My body refuses.

It’s not just sex. It’s a pattern that runs through my life. The second something is expected of me, I start to revolt. There’s even a name for it—Pathological Demand Avoidance. My nervous system reads expectation as captivity. And once something feels like a demand, the joy drains out of it.

Take Harvey. He was an OnlyFans subscriber who wanted me to flash him every time he sent a tip. Fun for three days. But by the fourth, I wanted to scream: I’m not your fucking trained circus animal! The more he tipped, the more resentful I felt. Eventually, I stopped taking his money altogether, because I couldn’t stand the entitlement that came attached.

Or take my “Ask Me Anything” series on Instagram. It was such a hit, and I loved it. I got incredible feedback, and for a while it felt like pure creative joy. But then people started expecting it. “When’s the next one?” “What’s the next question?” And suddenly the thing I loved felt heavy, obligatory. I wanted to keep going, but the expectation crushed the freedom. That one hurt the most, because I really did want to sustain it.

It even shows up in little things, like “good morning” texts. People think they’re being sweet, but to me they feel like obligation dressed up as affection. There’s an unspoken script: they text, I respond, we volley small talk back and forth. But I don’t care about small talk. I care about connection. And when a text becomes a ritual I’m supposed to perform every day, I want to throw my phone in the river.

So of course it shows up in sex. If a lover I adore wants me to moan louder, I can exaggerate for their enjoyment, because the foundation is real. But with someone I’m only there with because they’re paying me, my body locks down. My nervous system demands authenticity, even when it costs me.

That doesn’t make me better or worse than the sex workers who can perform without resentment. Quite the opposite—I admire them. Their capacity is simply different from mine, not lesser. What they do is powerful, beautiful, even healing.

My body is a terrible liar. It revolts against anything that feels demanded of it. But maybe that isn’t a flaw. Maybe it’s just the way my truth insists on being lived.