Several summers ago, I worked in an office. I worked for a publishing company, a glorified assistant in all aspects ranging from PR efforts to mailing packages. It was easy. For a so-called 9 to 5 job, the actual hours were merciful (10 to 6); the office flexible and frequently all but empty. Nevertheless, I hated it. I did not like having to be at the same place every day, having at least thirty-five hours of my week taken from me for tedious tasks I had no feeling for. Once, sitting through a staff meeting, I thought I might scream. The skin-crawling feeling was the same as in bad moments of sex work: as though if I didn’t exit the situation I might choke, or die, or bite someone. The intolerance becomes physical; I flex my calf muscles, grind my teeth. I finally excused myself from the meeting, rushed to the park outside and burst into tears, calling my boyfriend. “I can’t do this,” I said. “I can’t do this work.” This is to say: it’s work that is intolerable; the oppressive fact of wage labor that drives us to dissociate, to exit our bodies or else inhabit them in the worst of ways, like a smoke-blind person attempting to crawl their way out of a fire, desperately trying to evade the source of the damning heat.

Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)