I’m on a train from Berlin west to Bonn, the previous German capital, where I have co-curated an exhibition on the history of sex work at the federal cultural hall. It’s probably the first exhibition on such a scale of its kind, and it’s been a long year in preparation. I also made some art for the thing—2 quilts about working under criminalization and the future utopia, respectively. I have also made my outfit and mended my corset and spent three hours packing, prepared my house, prepared my cat and partner for the separation, etc. Now, on the train, I am preparing my mind.
My pioneering escort agency is in dire straits. We ran through all our startup funds while waiting for the government to permit us to operate (the registrations took in total over 2 years and thousands of euros, during which time we were not legally allowed to earn money). After that stressful and exhausting period finally ended, we realized that the big tech platforms that every business needs to market itself (mostly Instagram and Google) actively discriminate against legal sex work businesses, meaning we have to take much more creative (and usually more expensive) advertising routes. Very few potential clients have yet heard about the collective because of this, so we are still a ways away from being self-sustaining. I worked for 4 years with no salary and then, after risking being kicked out of Germany for not adequately supporting myself and going into heavy debt and being yelled at for it by everyone who cares about me, set a boundary that I needed to be paid. I found investors to fund my salary, and all went well for almost a year. Then the money ran out and we have not been able to find more, so I lost my job and subsequently had a pretty intense health breakdown as a result of delaying feeling my fatigue of the past 5 years of constant striving to get this business—which everyone agrees is the best possible way forward for the sex industry but no one has any resources to contribute to—off the ground.
I started my sex work career—which has always been something I enjoy that suits my personality and needs better than any other job I’ve had—under full criminalization in the US in Boston, where sex workers are actively hunted by law enforcement. I moved to Germany to salvage my mental health after this took its inevitable toll. Working in Germany is incalculably better by comparison, but here we still face the problem of exploitation. Even registered sex work businesses here operate in ways that are destructive to workers. For some reason, most of them break basic aggravated pimping laws with impunity. My first agency didn’t get me enough work to sustain me, and when I complained, I was pressured to offer increasingly bizarre fetish services I was not comfortable with, like anal sex and rape play. When I objected to this and to coercion to sign a contract which increased the agency’s take from 30- 40%, I was threatened in a multitude of ways, including being reported to the foreigner’s office. Brothels were a similar scenario. I was fired from one for criticizing the brothel for not taking the rape of a colleague seriously. I started Paramour because the independent market still hasn’t fully bounced back from Covid and the Ukraine war and other economic and social factors, and I keep having wretched, traumatizing experiences at these businesses. And now the first worker-owned, all-gender escort agency is on its last legs due to structural discrimination.
This is very tiring and bad for one’s health. I had previously co-founded a sex worker’s political organization and a union section to try to address these issues from lobbying, political action, and labor-rights positions; I then thought we might get more traction founding a business, as a participant in Germany’s economy. After all this, a few months ago, I applied to be a member of the expert commission that has been empaneled to rewrite the German prostitution law, as a person with all these experiences but also a historian’s perspective of the effects of public policy on German sex workers over the past 1,000 years. I was thanked for my application, acknowledged for my expertise, and told I might be contacted to participate in a workshop. I told them it was fine not to hire me, but please, please hire at least one person with experience in the industry for the panel—policy has always been made without the participation of people with actual lived experience in this extremely nuanced and still quite mysterious lifestyle, and therefore, it has always caused harm—both intended and unintended. I got a non-answer answer, only to find out later that, in 2026, politicians are still making the same catastrophic mistakes they have been making since Roman times: No sex workers (current or previous) are on the panel. This was a blow. I don’t know how things ever change if none of us are in the room. I’m too tired to plan a demonstration to crash a meeting, although I would love to.
After this exhibition opens, I am looking forward to spending some time recovering my health. What’s next for Ernestine? I honestly don’t know…but escaping to a goat farm sounds really good.