Mia Walsch was 19 when she began work in the sex industry. She'd just been fired from a job at an insurance company and saw an ad in the newspaper offering good money for erotic massage.
Over the next few years Mia worked her way through many of Sydney's parlours, while battling serious drug use and chronic mental illness.
Photo: supplied
Walsch has written a powerful memoir, Money for Something, an unvarnished account of those chaotic years, and her journey to her new life as an award-winning writer.
The book is an intense revisiting of a drug-fuelled past as she attempts to self-medicate and navigate her way through life as best she can. The endeavour of writing honestly came easily, flowing from a natural proclivity to say it how it is.
“It was a bit emotionally hectic to write it, but I’m emotionally hectic at the best of times.
“I’m a chronic over-sharer, so it was not that difficult to be so honest because that’s just the sort of person I am.”
She ran away from home to Newtown with $A50 in her pocket and got a job in an insurance company, but mental health problems made the job difficult of her. Erotic massage offered a way out.
“It felt pretty natural and normal, it was like ‘this is the next thing that I’ll do’ and it really helped me get through that period of my life, when I was quite addicted to drugs and quite mentally ill. It provided a place where I could feel accepted and found some kindred spirits.”
Working in parlours also gave her a sense of feeling attractive for the first time in her life. “I wasn’t an attractive child,” she says.
Growing up with a mentally-ill parent had left her stressed and vulnerable, while severe high school bullying had added to the trauma and subsequent a lack of emotional and mental equilibrium.
“I think some people downplay or don’t recognise how that can effect a person and I’m still living with the fall-out of the way I was treated by my school cohorts. I think that's where the real self-hatred came from,” she says.
Her intimate relationships during that time reflected her state of mind, and her boyfriend didn’t help matters. Although Walsch is mindful of avoiding taking responsibility for her own situation.
“It wasn’t a healthy relationship. He was much older, and I think I was looking for someone to take care of me. The battle with mental illness is something that never goes away. It can only be managed.
"So, in those days, I had very little self-insight. I knew I acted terribly but I felt like I had no control. As much as the first boyfriend in the book seems like a horrible person, I was an absolute nightmare to deal with as well.”
The book presents the attributes of 'a perfect sex worker' in her view – being good looking in a natural way, a workaholic, and possessing something you can draw from that you can give to clients.
“If you don’t have something to draw from the work can be very difficult,” she says.
“The main motivation boils down to money. Sex work is one of the most profitable, flexible, easiest jobs to get into with mental illness sufferers, migrant women, trans women, queer people, people with substance abuse disorders. I’m aware that it’s all about choice, but I’m also aware that the choices some people have are crappy.
“When rad feminists talk about abolishing sex work, it’s kind of like, if you want to abolish sex work then don’t look at sex workers, maybe make the value of jobs more and pay people better so that instead of choosing to do an awful job for a very little amount of money you could do a job that’s not that bad and be treated decently.”
Walsch says her clients included both men and women of varying backgrounds. “I’ve pretty much met as vast a range of people as you could see pre-corona virus walking down the street.”
One of the most odd things she observed during her time in the sex industry, she says, is that many men seemed to enjoy the thrill of coming into parlours and having beautiful women parade in front of them, only to reject them and leave. She speculates that it's about a feeling of power and control.
“That was so bizarre and fascinating to me. With BDSM, which I later merged into, that doesn’t happen as much, because the people coming in are quite focused on what they want.”
Having regular clients who have emotional needs can lead to an kind of personal closeness and honesty, even though any friendship remains transanctional in nature, she says.
“They need something from you and you need something from them – their money. But at the same time, you become almost friends. You do develop a relationship with these people. It’s not the type of relationship you would have with a partner, but it is a type of relationship.”
Defining herself as neither a 'malicious' shark taking clients from other sex workers, or a hustler out to make as much money as possible, she is happy with the 'weird misfit' label. She describes herself as an occasional sex worker nowadays, taking on clients as a dominatrix.
Her friendships with other sex workers were intense, but mostly transient. She says those women were just as varied as any you’d meet elsewhere and being among them made her feel less of a social misfit.
“I really like hanging out with sex workers, they’re some of the most fun people you’ll meet. They’re honest and I like honesty.”
She felt at home in the parlours’ staff lounges. “It was always a really happy place for me. With the exception of a few parlours, it was a place where I felt like I had friends, I had kinship and that I wasn’t the biggest weirdo in the entire world.”
She hid it from her family because of the stigma and shame, but others in her life knew her situation.
“I just didn’t care at that stage because sex work was the last of my problems, she says.
The stigma still affects her, but as she gets older the dullness of its affects it easier to cope with.
“Most sex workers I’ve met are really nice people and the hatred that you can feel from people… a few times I’ve been on live radio and the text messages would come through telling me how disgusting I am and that’s hard to hear.
“I’m such a tender person, so I don’t know why I’ve done this to be honest. I’m afraid of that stigma, but at the same time I’ve reached the age where I’m so tired of pretending to be something that I’m not. I don’t care anymore.
“I’m a nice person and I’m a really good person and I try and act ethically in every aspect of my life and if somebody wants to say horrible things about me because of what I do for work, it’s like ‘get a life’. Go and focus on something that is actually important, like the world that we’re living in today, because it’s scary and a lot of screwed up things are going on.”
She’s tried all types of drugs, but had an aversion to drugs she thought would kill her. Walsch tried Ice and was repulsed by it.
“It took me years to get off drugs and manage my mental illness… I called myself ‘practically sober' and in the book I write ‘free drugs don’t count’. I didn’t get completely sober but I did make a firm decision that I wasn’t going to do hard drugs on a daily basis and that’s when I started university.”
She studied creative writing at the University of Wollongong, and has published three science fiction novels - under the name Marlee Jane Ward - the first of which won a Victorian Premier's Literary Award.
Science fiction has become her main focus, her imagination taking her to dark places. “I write dystopian fiction and apocalyptic fiction, that’s what my focus is but I’ll write anything…There’s a quote from someone who says ‘I hate writing but I love having written' and that’s the way I feel.”
