A BLOWJOB DOESN’T NEED TO SUCK.

"I needed money and I couldn't think of much else I could do," she remembers. "Actually to be more exact, I couldn't think of anything else."

She does her job with self-assurance not least because she’s been thinking about her sexuality and her body for some time. 

Emy Fem had already spent a lot of time thinking about issues like sexuality and body awareness. She fought for a long time to be acknowledged as a woman. "I have to work as a transsexual sex-worker, because my body doesn't fit the female norm," she explains. She sees herself as "femme, more than anything," in other words as a feminine, self-determined lesbian.

Her past made it easier for her to make the step into sex-work, but she also had her own ideas and preconceptions about her new job. "The business side wasn't so clear to me before," she says today. "Sex work is a service industry where the conditions are up for negotiation - and I'm the one in charge."

"I'm the one in charge"

Emy lives in a feminist housing project, an environment where her job is accepted. When the house is cooking together, no one asks questions anymore when she suddenly gets a phone call and has to disappear into the bathroom.

Some of her flatmates occasionally take on the role of back-up - as do some friends and colleagues. "That's my insurance," explains Emy, who has since given up the nightclub job and now does home visits. During every date, once the client has paid her, she calls her back-up to confirm that everything is okay - her way of protecting herself from assault. Nothing has ever happened to her, but she knows that her job can be dangerous, which is why she never goes to a client without a back-up to call.

But sometimes finding someone to be her back-up isn't that easy. Once Emy suddenly needed someone at 5am, while she was out with a friend, and so had to confront him with what she did for a living for the first time. "He had another drink, took a breath, and then did the back-up," she says with a laugh.

Another time she returned home from a job into the middle of a party. "The client had ordered a businesswoman and so I had to explain why I was dressed up like that," Emy recalls, smiling at the memory of the nonplussed faces in her feminist commune.

Emy knows that few women in her profession are as candid and confident as she is: "Most of the other women can't be as open about it." She even knows some sex-workers who keep their work secret from their husbands. 

But games of hide-and-seek are out of the question for Emy. There are a lot of people outside her circle of friends who are aware of what she does - once, when she was a performance artist in 2012, Emy announced she was a sex-worker on stage.

She's also explained to her children what she does for a living. "They respect me and what I do," Emy says proudly, though she isn't keen on the idea that her daughter Zoé might follow in her professional footsteps. "She's still too young," Emy says. "If she started sex work later in life, I wouldn't have a problem." But she doesn't think that Zoé, at 16, has the necessary confidence with her body.

"My body is my business!"

A badge on Emy's handbag reads "My body is my business!" - a play on words in her case; she makes sure that no one else gets a say in what she does with her body, and her body really is her business.

And she thinks of her body is beautiful capital to have. "It's fun to value your own body," she says with assurance, though she admits it's not always easy for her to care for that capital. About one in four clients ask for unprotected sex, she guesses: "They don't think - they just get so horny they turn off their brains."

For her, it's a luxury to be able to turn down those requests. "I can afford to say 'no.' A lot of the others can't," - either because they're ill-informed, or they don't know how to resist the client's pressure, or just because they need the extra money they get offered for unsafe sex. “I’m privileged,” says Emy. “I speak German, I grew up in this culture. And I have a fixed address and no health insurance problems.”

But she refuses to judge other women for that: "If someone has no choice, it's not okay to judge someone's behaviour from the outside." Instead, she offers workshops where she tries to help women gain more self-confidence and awareness about their bodies.

"I want to have solidarity with those who don't have the same advantages as I do," Emy explains. "Many of us get stigmatized several times over. People of colour, trans-people, and many other sex-workers, both female and male, face discrimination on so many different levels every day."

To change that, so that her profession becomes recognized like any other, Emy wants more than anything to see prostitution become socially acceptable, "so that we get listened to more, and so what we say actually gets understood."

All Emy Fem wants is to be seen as an equal: "I'm a human being. I work. And I want to be recognized and respected as a working person."

Frauke Oppenberg