In a new book, a former Romanian sex worker reveals an insider’s account of navigating life in Germany’s sex industry. But for the author, who uses the pseudonym J.K. Normal, her path began not in Germany itself, but about 1,200 miles to the southeast—in Bucharest, Romania.
Describing herself as “a poor girl from the poor part of Bucharest,” Juliani—as she refers to herself in the memoir—writes of how as a young woman she saw people in her own neighborhood driving BMW automobiles and even Porsches, sporting designer outfits and generally flaunting wealth that seemed unattainable in her hardscrabble neighborhood in the Romanian capital city.
"Eventually, a friend of mine who had just come back from Germany with a new Gucci bag told me, and suddenly everything clicked into place,” she says. The friend told her that she had been earning the equivalent of more than $1,100 per day working in a German sex club.
Juliani needed very little other convincing. She soon found herself boarding a flight to Dusseldorf, Germany—where she found that she could make good money, as her friend had advertised. But it was not easy money, which her friend had not revealed to her.
"To make a thousand euros, you would have to have sex with at least five, and sometimes as many as ten men a day," the sex worker-turned-author says. "There is a reason you can make a lot of money at it. Both physically and mentally, it is incredibly demanding work, and it can be damaging to some people."
She also says that while she does not intend for her book to be seen as an exposé of a supposedly “evil” sex industry, she does not attempt to “glamorize” her work either.
“It’s something in the middle," she said in an interview for the site IssueWire. "It's a reflection of society, a distillation of it, and both the virtues and the evils within it are manifestations of society's virtues and evils.”
After leaving the industry, she went on to attain an English studies degree from the University of Cologne in Germany.
"It's such an interesting world," she now says of the German sex industry. "I'm happy I'm no longer in it, but I am grateful for the insights it gave me about the world we live in."
Her self-published book, titled Sold: My Life in a German Brothel, is available as a Kindle download from Amazon.com.
Photo by Normle Publishing
