It was the summer before the election. As I watched Trump speak at the Republican convention while eating pepperoni pizza on my couch, I realized that at some point over the past few months, the world had stopped making any kind of sense to me. I felt weary, confused. Paying for sex had always seemed thrilling in a sexual-bucket-list kind of way, an intriguing but purely theoretical fantasy. I had no idea how to go about finding a straight guy who sold sex I went to his site: black-and-white photos of him on a bed, body long and lean, face obscured. The obligatory underwear shot indicated he was quite well endowed.

Sex work is work, and work is hard. Sex workers are treated as a morally corrupt monolith, and if not morally corrupt, then pushed to these extreme lengths only by the worst parts of humanity — abuse, poverty, trafficking. As a result, sex workers are viewed as beings needing to be saved, rather than the workers seeking rights, productive and protective unions, and support through the workforce that they actually are.

Outside the sex sold legally in Nevada, prostitution in the United States transpires in the shadows of an underground economy. There are no accounting records to trace, no receipts to scrutinize, and no legal records to analyze. Simply, it is difficult to grasp the size of this economy.