If you had asked me what I thought of the sex industry this time last year, I’d have answered with an emotionally motivated sentiment of disgust. A mixture of contemptuous anger for the buyers of sexual services and their relationship with female sexuality as a disposable commodity, laced with a righteous sense of pity and condolence for the victimised sellers of an economic manifestation of male power over women’s bodies. This is indicative of a “sex negative” stance, a contradictory feminist breed.

After meeting sex workers and hearing about the industry from their intelligent perspectives and experiences, I became aware of the extent of diversity and nuance of the black market allure of sex work, not all of which involves sexual contact (camming, phone sex, domme work), contrary to the implications of the field’s title. My particular niche is panty-selling.

I had heard that one could purchase a variety of used panties from vending machines which peppered the streets of Tokyo, and kept this nugget of absurd trivia nestled at the back of my mind until last month. After toying with the politics of such an endeavour, I decided to experiment with my own variant of marketing my laundry to an anonymous cohort of aroma-amorous men. My reasoning process went something like this:

Pros: All entrepreneurial ventures must consider the feasibility of their potential profit margins. If I buy a 5-pack of thongs from Pennys for €3 (60c each), and sell each pair for €30, essentially I will be stackin’ significant paper! My laundry load will be lighter. I get to choose my “work” hours, consisting of sending packages twice a week and posting ads on reddit’s pantyselling forum. I can spend the 20 hours a week that I would have been waiting tables on any activity that takes my fancy. There is nothing more empowering than being one’s own boss. It is more ethical selling my underwear than working in retail and contributing to a corporation which is reliant on sweatshops, outsourcing and cheap labour to produce its goods for the consumption-crazy west. My work lacks alienation; I am not renting myself out to employers and obediently selling a company’s product on their terms.

Cons: The idea of someone sniffing my dirty underwear is gross.

Regarding the cons, initially, I would have thought of my customers as perverted sexual deviants who engage in a demeaning desire that is easier to laugh about than consider seriously. On secondary examination of this bias, a quote from radical sex-positive feminist academic Gayle Rubin illuminates the hypocrisy of my previous stance: “Popular culture is permeated with the idea that erotic variety is dangerous, unhealthy, depraved and a menace to everyone from small children to national security”.

Lest we forget that the pathologizing of seemingly deviant sexualities is the same ideology that makes homosexuality illegal in 79 countries, with punishments that range from public lashes, prison time, and the death penalty. After the marriage equality referendum, a wave of liberal self-congratulatory back-patting inflated the ego of the nation, which is now seen as a country to be proud of regarding its tolerance of diverse sexualities. The fact that it is still taboo to fetishize feet, engage in certain varieties of BDSM, have group or public sex, charge money for genuinely non-coercive, consensual sexual encounters or enjoy sniffing panties highlights that rather than becoming more accepting of a rainbow array of sexualities, we have simply opened the authoritative gate to the garden of sexual purity, ushered in the gays, and slammed it shut again, leaving those who engage in anything other than monogamous, legally sanctioned and normatively accepted sexual preferences outside under an unsavoury grey cloud of imposed shame and stigma. Sexual liberation is about dismantling the gate. This idea became the main incentive for my work, so it’s not just about money anymore – I want to discursively engage people on the matter by being open about what I do.

So I decided that rather than just sending my panties to anonymous customers, I would meet with them in person to decipher if there is a panty-sniffing “type”. There certainly is not. My clients vary from bankers in suits, working class stay-at-home dads, lecturers, disabled clients, and even Trinity students. Some make special requests for period stained panties or panties I have worn to the gym. They are usually polite, nervous and embarrassed, often assuring me that they are “just a normal guy”. So far in my experience, a victim/predator relationship that is so often envisioned and represented under the guise of sex work is absent. It has given me invaluable insight insofar as having shed any sense of judgement regarding other people’s sexualities: as long as things are consensual, never yuck another person’s yum.