I'm not sure I am up to a full AMA, honestly, and it was a very long time ago (a little over 20 years) for only several months, so there's a lot I've wilfully forgotten – and I know so many women have had it so much worse than I did.
In short, my older, abusive boyfriend coerced me into it when I was 16. Initially I was very against it, and then I think as a defence mechanism, I tried to frame it as me being grown up, progressive, and modern, in an attempted to embrace the inevitable. The fact that it was legal for over-18s made it easier for my boyfriend to make me feel prudish and invalid for feeling uncomfortable about it – after all, it was legal!
I worked at a brothel where most of the women were aged 20 – 35, and it was arranged such that the clients 'rented' the rooms from the brothel owner – probably so that we weren't legally employees, although we were treated that way, with expected working hours.
We were paid cash by the clients, who showered in the room prior to sex. There was a large emphasis on the fact that if a woman felt threatened she could call for security, but in practice you didn't want to upset a client, and would try to keep them sweet. The clients usually weren't too pushy, though, ime, but then I tended to get a cherry-picked bunch. While many women just tried to pick up clients who came in to 'browse', the owners often called regular clients and offered appointments with me (in addition, some women went on call-outs, often for clients who wanted two women, or for the rare female client).
Most clients were middle-aged men and very average – loads appeared to be married men on business trips, but there were a lot of lonely singles too. A few young, attractive men, and a few elderly men, but they were outliers.
The women who had been working there long term mostly seemed to be functional drug addicts, and they almost all appeared to have the sort of mental health issues that made holding down a regular job impossible.
I was extremely popular, especially with older men, as although I had a fake ID it was very obvious I was younger than 18, as I looked young for 16, and they loved the chance to have sex with an attractive underage girl. Many of them were weirdly chivalrous and 'kind', which was disturbing in its own way, and most of them wanted to believe that I loved it/they were pleasing me.
It took me a long time to untangle just how fucked up it was.
I know a lot of women (especially if they're still working in the industry) talk about it positively, but I think laws need to be made with the most vulnerable in mind, and normalising sex work by legalising it puts the most vulnerable at higher risk, imo.