ProMomme is the Publication Painting an Honest Picture of Parenthood in the Sex Work Industry

Words: Maxine Holloway

ProMomme: A Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting, offers a fresh new perspective on the intersection between motherhood and sex work. It’s a publication that prides itself on a nuanced look at how parents in the adult industry navigates their roles as caregivers and providers. Marginalised from mainstream conversations, these stories are vital to exploring lesser heard voices. For Polyester, Maxine Holloway provides an extract from her piece for the guide.

What does it mean to be a modern day MILF? Interspersed with pop culture sound bytes (think Cardi B and Fergie’s MILF), Holloway reimagines her pregnancy through sharp prose. Whether she’s eating her placenta to regulate her hormones, or fulfilling the taboo desires of her clients, she’s commodifying the MILF experience one breast pump at a time.

Collage: Piggy Lu

Collage: Frenchie Stoner

I first began searching for “Hot Mom” inspiration in popular culture during my first pregnancy. I found that the modern mother is being rewritten in some pretty bold strokes. Grammy Award-winning rapper, Cardi B, blurs the lines between motherhood and sexuality, breastfeeding in music videos while adorned head-to-toe in couture. Admirers celebrate their favorite celebrities as iconic, hot, and talented, affectionately calling them "MOTHER" and "Mommy!" while high-waisted Mom jeans are back in vogue. The term MILF has evolved from a crude mom joke in a raunchy pie-fucking teen comedy to a badge of honor for attractive, experienced, and confident women. Everywhere I look, I see motherhood repackaged as strong and alluring.

As a sex worker, I was concerned about how starting a family would impact my job. Even though motherhood is sometimes presented as sexy, I wondered how I would continue to fit into the larger cultural understanding of commodified desirability. Like many working moms, becoming a mother profoundly affected my career. For me, it opened up new niches in pregnancy, MILF, and lactation fetish markets.

During my pregnancy, I saved for my maternity leave by teasing cocks with my browning nipples and rubbing my full, round belly on them. "Mommy's gotch you," I purr as I take control of the encounter, soothing anxieties over their taboo desires. I worked hard to keep my back strong and my hips flexible so I could maintain a variety of sex positions at nine months pregnant. Postpartum, I support my family by feeding grown men sweet, creamy milk directly from my perfectly engorged breasts. While I ride them, they clutch my soft curves and call out, "Mommy, please," as my maternal reassurance brings them to climax. 

“With my camera, I refuse to reduce them to mothers or whores, but to hold space for their growing creativity that fuels both their careers and parenting.” 

Collage: Frenchie Stoner

Simultaneously, I've been immersed in a different kind of bodywork. Post-birth, I've eaten my placenta to help balance my pregnancy hormones, split my nipples open learning to breastfeed, and spent countless hours connected to a breast pump to produce enough milk for both my child and my clients. My left arm has become disproportionately strong from holding my babies while using my dominant hand to open the door, prepare a meal, or send emails on my phone. "Mama gotch you," I coo as I take my overtired crying toddler into my arms, soothing their anxieties with the same tender assurance. Lately, dressing my changing body has felt overwhelming, so I've worn the same maxi dress all summer. 

I post work photos online, channeling my best Fergie in her “M.I.L.F. $” video, trying to capture that, "I heard you in the mood for a little MILF shake" energy… and sometimes I do feel it, but it's also a performance—Mommy Drag if you will. A fellow sex worker and DILF friend of mine and I joke about starting a parenting podcast called "How having kids ruined my porn career!" We laugh and laugh… until we cry because we are constantly grieving the people we were as we evolve into the parents we are now.

I've often turned to my camera to help make sense of the contradictions and overlaps of MILFhood and actual parenthood. I've been taking self-portraits on my phone of the intimate places where my motherhood and livelihood quietly bump into each other. These self-portraits reveal my daily labors' congruence, showing how I touch, secrete, care, perform, soothe, entice, play, and provide. Outside of the camera's frame, I'm roughly navigating the apocalyptic nature of parenthood while repackaging my own career with a MILF label. But in the frame, I am in the process of feeling how the eroticization of motherhood interacts with my own identity and desirability, fueling and pulling at my relationship with myself.

I'm not alone on this journey. I'm part of a cohort of sex-working parents who are celebrating and commodifying MILF within a larger cultural context. Despite the broader acclaim for powerful, sexy moms, sex worker parents still walk a tightrope of societal judgment and even fear. So, seeing my pregnant peers professionally debut their "hot mom-bods" fills me with wild appreciation and inspiration, again compelling me to pick up my camera. I aim to capture the often-overlooked elements of sex and desire within pregnancy and parenthood. With my camera, I refuse to reduce them to mothers or whores, but to hold space for their growing creativity that fuels both their careers and parenting. 

I do not seek to offer a neat conclusion or resolution as I share these images. To fight the stigma we experience and internalize, I crave space for recognition, understanding, and nuance for all mothers and sex workers. Ultimately, we're not just navigating a cultural zeitgeist but actively shaping it—one photograph, one family, one Mommy fetish session, one bill paid, one MILFy music video, one story at a time.

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ProMomme: A Sex Worker’s Guide to Parenting is a project by SWOPLA (Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles). Print and digital versions of the full publication can be found through Cash Machine or Sming Sming Books.

SWOPLA is a peer support organization, run by sex workers and for sex workers with a mission to pursue human rights to bodily autonomy, racial and social justice, and mutual liberation through outreach, education, mutual aid, and political advocacy. SWOPLA's vision is to usher in the reality where all sex workers are valued and respected. Get involved at @swopla.

Maxine Holloway is a sex worker, advocate, artist, and mama of two. She navigates themes of desire, labor, MILF culture, and commodification in her work. Her pornography performances and art films have earned AVN nominations, an XBIZ and Feminist Porn Award, and have been showcased in film festivals globally. Maxine was awarded a SOMArts curatorial residency, during which she developed the multidisciplinary exhibition, We're still working: The Art of Sex Work. Currently, she is the co-director of Bay Area Workers Support (BAWS), providing resources and events to local sex workers. 

Piggy Lu (he/they) is a trans-masculine artist, advocate, resource sharer, and bondage educator in Los Angeles. Piggy started his rope journey back in 2017 as a sex worker and eager bondage enthusiast. Since entering the LA scene, they have been able to attend and graduate from the Devil Mask Society’s 9th Cell Program, as well as connect with some pretty rad folks, providing a vast amount of services to the SW and LGBTQIA+ communities. Through bondage and the queer community, Piggy has been able to become the human he is today. Newly retired from sex work, they are on a mission to provide resources and low-cost bondage education to the QTBIPOC community as well as to marginalized allied white partners. Find out more: Instagram @NomadicPiggg / @PiggyxLu.

Frenchie Stoner (they/she) is a Busty Ebony Stoner, poet, and college student in disability studies living in a hood in the heart of Sacramento. They are a bisexual, enby. Their main whorientation is online sex work, but they have work in FSSW as well as in several other parts of the industry. She specializes in Fetish-Feet, Timelapse, and is stepping into the world of GTS (Giantess) content. Her favorite time passes are reading physical books, thrift shopping, writing poetry, and hyperfocusing on conspiracy theories and leaving the U.S.