LOS ANGELES—The Daily Beast on Monday published a thoughtful first-person account by former Craigslist call girl Melissa Petro in its Women in the World section in which she talks about "another kind of indignity sex workers face—not on the job, but when they leave the trade."
Petro, who left sex work in 2007 to become a public school teacher in New York City, made news in 2011 when she lost the teaching gig job after blogging about her past sex work on the Huffington Post. Now she feels compelled to talk about what it's like to be a former sex worker in an unforgiving world.
"When it comes to leaving the trade, people need emotional and psychological support—not just money," she writes, and cites the opinion of Corey Shdaimah, the director of a program in Baltimore that helps people transition out of the trade, who believes former sex workers "need a nonjudgmental environment to make sense of their experiences, so that they can make choices that are right for them. They need to be treated like human beings. And yes, they need jobs."
AVN wrote about Petro last year in a piece about a fundraiser for the Speak Up! Media Training Program organized by the Red Umbrella Project. "Speak Up! is led by Audacia Ray and Eliyanna Kaiser, two former executive editors of $pread magazine who have worked with mainstream and independent media as part of the sex worker rights movement for many years," AVN reported at the time. "Speak Up! is the result of a need expressed by members of that community for more resources and training on how to strategically respond to and interact with media."
Petro mentioned the Project in her Daily Beast article, writing, "This past fall, I partnered with sex-worker advocacy group Red Umbrella Project in New York to launch the Becoming Writers Workshop, allowing sex workers to write their stories. The eight-week workshop culminated with a public performance and the publication of PROS(E), an anthology of writings by people in the trade. I’m hoping that programs like this will not only give people the skills to tell their stories, but will help society understand something about life in the sex trade—and reduce the stigma."
Still, she freely admits that life has been a challenge since she left teaching, and that the search to find work, hard enough in these difficult times, is exacerbated by her past.
"Admittedly," she concedes, "I have sometimes felt tempted to return to sex work. But I choose to not sell sex, as I’m too intimately acquainted with the pain that doing so would cause me. On this day, International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, people in the industry come together to address their special vulnerability to violence and human-rights abuses. I ask that today you also think of the people who—for whatever complicated reasons—sell sex. When you think of us, I hope you realize, we’re not that different than you."
