85. Escaping Sex Trafficking in the Age of "Sex Work is Work" │ Olivia Ballard

Whose Body Is It

Growing up Latter Day Saints, Olivia was held to very strict expectations. The church and homeschooling offered glimmers of women’s spiritual power, but Olivia needed greater freedom of expression. For instance, she chafed at her family’s outpouring of grief when she revealed she was interested in dating women. She tried to be patient with them as they grieved her inevitable separation from them in the afterlife, but she felt rejected. This, along with the restrictions internalized from her childhood, drove her to confuse authentic liberation with the so-called "liberal" ideologies she encountered in adolescence.

It began with RuPaul’s Drag Race. The show seemed misogynist to Olivia, but her friends made it very clear that she’d need to adopt even the most appalling caricatures of womanhood, “trans lesbians” if she wanted to maintain access to her social circle and dating pool. She understood “you either get with this agenda or you die socially,” when she witnessed the ostracism of lesbians who resisted. The logical conclusion of this liberal feminist propaganda was her full indoctrination into another religion, with its own set of patriarchal expectations. Following in the footsteps of her liberal feminist friends, she became a “sugar baby” and started an OnlyFans. Her “manager,” aka her John, soon became her pimp, supplying her with drugs to cope with the effects of being trafficked, all the while filming her degradation for other men to consume. She believed her non-binary identity would somehow protect her from the sexual violence women experience, disassociating from her female body even as men tortured her. It was not until she realized that her choices were exposing not just her, but her girlfriend, to extreme violence, that she knew she had to exit. Olivia has since found her own source of spirituality, bodily integrity, and a reclamation of womanhood through connecting to her matrilineal line and finding the healing power of plants.

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