Charging for 'the care work that society expects women to provide for free'

Kim Ye, a multidisciplinary artist, explores the overlaps of sex work, motherhood, and domesticity.

Kim Ye. Photo: Louisa Fang.

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Kim Ye met her husband in a dungeon. She was working as a Domme and he was a submissive client. It was a “Kinky FemDom love story,” as she puts it. Then came marriage, a baby, and a new power dynamic: domestic inequality. Ye found herself disproportionately engaged in unpaid “care work” around the home, which stood in contrast to the paid “care work” that she performed as a sex worker.

“I felt crazy, like I had fallen for the world's longest running con, just the latest independent woman sucked into the set of a sitcom where the neurotic nagging wife faces off with the well-meaning oblivious husband week after week,” she wrote in an essay for Petite Mort.

Now, in Ye’s work as a multidisciplinary artist, she tackles this collision of paid and unpaid labor, along with other overlapping facets of sex work, domesticity, and motherhood. Currently, she’s a Mellon Arts Fellow at Stanford, where she’s working on a film that explores East Asian femininity, erotic labor, and climate catastrophe. Alongside her artistic work, she’s creating a guide for sex working parents for the Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles.

I chatted with Ye about domestic power dynamics, the many meanings of the word “motherfucker,” moving between “professional sexy superhero and undercover ‘momcore,’” and more. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

You’ve argued that one reason sex workers are stigmatized is because they “dare charge for the care work that society expects women to provide for free.” How has your experience of sex work—of daring to charge for care work—impacted the way you think about the unpaid care work you do at home as a mother and a wife?

Before I became a parent, it was relatively easy to have this parity between me and my partner, who is, you know, a cis, hetero-ish guy. He was my client in my Domme work, so we were aligned in thinking that there should be an exchange between the two partners—our relationship was based on that, we met through that exchange. That's something that was carried into our personal relationship.

With kids, it really did feel like there were these subconscious forces that created this discrepancy in our perceptions about what needed to be done. A lot of extra labor was created and somehow it ended up in my lap—until we externalized it as an actual list and then really diligently divided it between us in a business-like manner.

Just being a sex worker and being vigilant about my time, being very protective of it, has helped me to stand my ground against these subconscious forces that drag us in a certain direction.

From what you’ve written in the past, it sounds like you tried to balance the domestic scales by playing the part of the “lazy Domme” who lets things fall between the cracks, in total contrast to the “whirlwind of motion” that you are in the dungeon. How has being the lazy domestic Domme worked out for you?

It became simpler with two kids, in a way. Now one of us is with one while the other is with the other. There’s this trope of the woman in a hetero relationship becoming the keeper of all things, knows where everything is, has a map of the house in their mind. I tried different strategies of, like, playing dumb. “I don't know where the thing is,” even though I know exactly where it is.

It’s a battle because retraining takes a lot of time and I don’t know how effective it actually is. It's additional labor to not do the labor.

How do you think about the contrast between your woman-led power dynamic in the dungeon versus the inequity you discovered in the home? Was that flip surprising to you, that there wasn’t a consistency to the power dynamic?

In a way, the power dynamic is still the same, where you’re supposedly the one in charge, but then how that functions in terms of empowerment, what that does to your life, is the opposite.

Right, you’re in charge but disempowered in being in charge.

You become burdened, you become everyone’s bitch.

You write about seeing your Domme work as part of the “redistribution of resources and energy between the masculine and feminine.” Can you explain?

There’s this divide between public and private. Public accolades and the public realm of work and politics, these visible arenas of power, are largely occupied by men, or this masculine energy of competition and “winner takes all,” you know? And then you have this private unseen realm that's attributed to the feminine—how the mom is always the queen or the ruler of the house, even in many patriarchal cultures.

There's this facade of male power running everything, but even behind that public exercise of power, it’s fueled by private desires and complexes and issues and relationships within your family. Mommy issues and daddy issues. It’s what we're all responding to or reacting against. In the dungeon, I want to make overt this unacknowledged, private, and secret power.

You’ve found that, for many of your clients, their kinks connect to early childhood memories, both good and bad. You write of clients with “withholding mothers who only paid attention to them when they used the potty,” as well as a foot fetishist with early childhood memories of feeling safe playing among his mother and sisters’ barefoot feet. Sometimes, there’s a line that can be drawn between the “care work” they received early in life from their parents and then the sex work they later sought out as adults. How do you make sense of that?

Our minds are amazing. If you think about a kid’s life for the first ten years, you don’t have much agency. If you're experiencing something that's disconcerting or uncomfortable and you don't have the actual power to change what's going on—or your family dynamic—your mind makes these stories or narratives, you reinterpret it as stimulating instead of scary, so the ego feels in control.¹

There’s a moment in your Petite Mort essay where, looking at your son, you ask yourself how you would feel if he “grew up to seek pain, humiliation, degradation.” How would you feel—and does that impact your approach to mothering? Does it impact your approach to sex work?

If I didn't have my experience in sex work and seeing the clients that I've seen, I think it would be disturbing that someone so quote-unquote innocent would one day seek out these intense or disconcerting or ego-obliterating experiences. But then, having had these relationships with my clients and my own experiences in my own sex life, I understand that those experiences are actually courted by people who are very strong and very self-possessed, you know?

It allows me to just hold lightly what he may become. I always feel like these kids are not really my kids, they're of the world. That allows me to lessen my control or desire to micromanage every interaction and dynamic that they have with the world. Just a silly example: whenever he goes to his grandma's house, he gets unfettered iPad access and that makes me sad. But, also, she gets to define that relationship. They get to co-make it together. I don't need to be the overseer of that.

So you're currently working on this experimental film called Motherfucker. As it relates to this project, what is a “motherfucker”? What are the meanings of that term for you?

Urban Dictionary says you can use it to mean anything. It can be a bad-ass or an asshole. It encompasses everything, it’s very democratic, but it’s also specific. Mother. Fucker. It’s a mother who fucks or has sex, which is every mom. Or someone who fucks a mother.

Thinking on a more planetary level, it’s us. Our Mother Earth, we’re fucking her—fucking her over. I'm just thinking about the relationship of the family unit and the mom’s role as the deployer of the household’s funds, as enacting this broader mother fucking of the earth that leads us careening toward destruction as we’re also trying to support life by raising our own children.

This project also ties in East Asian femininity. Can you talk a bit about that?

Most of my projects are based on my identity, so being a Chinese American, I think about how Chinese women were first seen as this threat to families in the Gold Rush era when Chinese immigrants first started coming to the U.S. en masse. It resulted in the barring of East Asian women from entering the United States because they were seen as either a threat, because of their association with sex work, or as a victim, because of their association with sex work.

So, it’s this oscillation between criminality and “helpless object” or “trafficked victim,” right? I think about how that identity has changed and is informed over time—it went from that to wartime brides and the continued association with Asian women and sex work. Which, you know, I am a Chinese American woman who is a sex worker, but also I’m a wife and a mom and all these other roles, too.

Your work has touched on the wife-whore dichotomy and how women are divided into categories of “good” and “bad,” how motherhood is split off from sexuality. Have you been able to fully incorporate all these various parts of yourself that are not supposed to coexist—mother, sex worker, artist, sexual being, wife, and so on? Or have you had to maintain some sense of fracture?

When I first started doing the Domme work there was a very strict divide. This is my Domme performer and this is my Kim “art persona.” Over the last 13 years that I’ve been doing that work, they have gotten closer and closer together. I feel more integrated than when I started the work. Becoming a parent only three years ago, that’s a new area to incorporate, but it feels easier.

Tell me about the sex worker guide to parenting that you’ve been working on. What’s going into the guide, what did folks want from it, and what have you learned so far from working on it?

This project came out of a focus group that SWOPLA did during covid. We interviewed groups of parents who did erotic labor while raising their kid. We asked them to envision a parenting magazine geared toward their community and people couldn’t even imagine it. From that conversation there became a desire for something like that to really exist. We got funding to produce a publication made from content written by sex workers who are also parents—on the value of sex work for parenting, the challenging they face, a typical “day in the life of.” There’s also images of pregnancy and pregnant people from a sex worker point of view, a “whore’s gaze.”

Through talking to these folks, it's a lot of people who are single parents. A lot of people came to sex work and it allowed them to escape shitty or abusive domestic situations. Some people came to sex work as a last resort, but then found that it was less exploitative than their school district job. It's really important to give texture to what sex work allows for in terms of parenting—not just materially and how it gives people flexibility to be involved in their kids' lives, but also the tools that sex workers have to talk to their kids about puberty, consent, sexuality—all those things that are portrayed as really mortifying in our culture.

We are also doing a documentary on the same subject that incorporates some of the same contributors filming in their space, showing how they do their work, how they move between professional sexy superhero and undercover “momcore.”

1. In Petite Mort, Ye writes, “One popular theory is that sexualization is a defense mechanism by which the situation that originally brought distress becomes eroticized as the ego's way to retain control. Stress and stimulation run similar circuits in our brains.”