How do I tell my parents I get naked for strangers

[Gomorrah]

So my father has recently been hounding me and my sister on finding work. This is understandable; I'm 20 and my sister is 18 and we can't expect our parents to take care of us for the rest of our lives. Finding work is a good start to becoming responsible, independent adults, and while I think my dad can be a bit hard on us, I know he means well. Now I don't have a lot of work experience but I had held one job washing dishes at a local restaurant chain. The pay wasn't terrible but it was fast paced employment that involved a lot of dirty work with me coming home in the early hours of the morning soaking wet on most nights. And I know, when you start out you have to do a lot of stuff you don't want to do before you're able to get to a position in life you're comfortable at, but I ultimately quit that job because it was wearing on me to a point where it started to affect me negatively.

Basically I didn't want to have to go through that again, having my work bring me to a point where I'm not sleeping or eating right and constantly dreading my next shift. So I eliminated food service from my search completely and chose to stick with retail. Needless to say the job hunt didn't go well for me or my sister and this whole thing escalated to the point where my dad threatened to flip the switches to our room's power to simulate a "you don't have the money to pay the electricity bill" situation. That was when I decided enough was enough and I'd attempt camming.

Camming, for those of you who don't know, is sex work over the internet. I do things and people pay me, it's that simple. When I started I didn't expect much, in fact I didn't think I'd get anywhere from it. After all, who would want to watch this awkward skinny trans-girl fumble around on camera when there were practically modelesque individuals streaming at the same hours? But I actually found that people seemed to enjoy me, and they were paying me for it. And that's when things changed, because I didn't hate what I was doing. Camming has boosted my confidence tenfold; I don't think I've ever felt more confident than when I am on camera honestly. It lets me see my body for how amazing and feminine it really is and I finally learned to appreciate myself. I now know that I absolutely adore preforming for people; this is work that I'm actually happy doing.

But that doesn't matter, because my father doesn't know about this and as long as it stays that way I'm unemployed as far as he's concerned. I'm just afraid of what will happen if I tell him and my mother. I mean, how would you react if your kid told you that they do sex work? I can't imagine this going well at all, and that's why I'm asking for advice here.

 

[Kagayours]

:/ Hmm... Well, do you know how your parents feel about sex workers in general? Obviously this situation is very different depending on whether your parents are of the "prostitutes are the scum of the earth" opinion vs a "I think prostitution should be legal so that it can be regulated and therefore made safer for everyone involved" opinion. I know that camming isn't exactly the same as prostitution, but, it's along the same vein, so hearing your parents' opinions on one thing could give you a decent idea of how they'd react to the other. Obviously how they feel about sex work in general isn't quite the same as how they'd feel about you doing it, but, if they have positive reactions to the former, then there's a better chance that they won't react as negatively to the latter. Maybe you could try to start a conversation about it somehow, and make the message clear that you feel positively about sex workers. And if your parents act as if all sex workers only do what they do because they're desperate and it's their only option, then maybe you can plant the idea in their head that it's not, like, "Well maybe some strippers enjoy making money that way" -- perhaps even including the reasons why you enjoy camming, just without making it about you. I feel like, if you're only talking hypothetically, then you might be more likely to change their minds about it, especially if they didn't have super-strong feelings about sex workers to begin with.

In general, I think it might be a good idea to sort of test the waters and see if you can get a vague indication of how they might react -- or sort of warm them up to the topic ahead of time, rather than diving right in with it. Like, maybe you could have a conversation with them about how much they care what your job is, and perhaps list examples of potential jobs that wouldn't be seen as being quite as "desperate" as being a sex worker, but are still pretty low on the job desirability spectrum (in the eyes of the average person, anyway). If their answer is along the lines of "I don't care what your job is so long as you can pay the bills", then that's a much better sign than them emphasizing that they want you to do something "respectable".

Or maybe you could tell them that you have the money to pay the "electricity bill", so to speak, and then, when they inevitably ask where you got the money from, you could tell them that you have a job but you don't want to say what it is because you're worried about what they'll think about it. Maybe this could get them to really listen and be a little bit more open to what you have to say, as opposed to you coming straight out with it. And, showing that you do have the money shows that this is a way for you to get some income out of this, rather than just saying "yo I wanna be an internet stripper and who knows whether or not that'll work out for me". They might be more inclined to go along with it if they see that you are making money like they wanted. Plus, who knows -- maybe setting it up as "I'm afraid to tell you where I got this money from" will make them jump to the worst possible conclusions and they'll think that you earned that money Walter White style -- at which point, they might actually be relieved to know that all you're doing is getting naked in front of a camera. :P

I dunno. It's definitely a tricky situation, but there are probably easier ways to go about it than just coming straight out with it without really knowing how they'll react (or without priming them to think positively of it). Hopefully one of these strategies helps you out -- but, you know your parents better than I do, so I trust that you'd know which of these strategies sounds like a good idea (if any).