If you have the idea of the "independent entrepreneur", that adult woman who is proud to use sex as a creative expression, it's true that she's making her life better. If it's a scared 15-year-old whose mom kicked her out because boyfriend was starting to make comments about her ass, and she has no idea where to go or what to do but a guy say she can have a place to sleep if she has sex with him (and then he starts pimping her out to his friends), that's a very different situation. Or if you're an LGBT teen and you're kicked out by your parents for being gay and fall into a similar situation.

The article is pretty nuanced.

"So I pretended. I pretended all of it was a kind of adventure. That what I gained from it was more than rent. I dismissed how much that rent meant to me. I pretended that I was not so poor, that I had not grown up poor. That I had not cried out of fear of not knowing where the money would come from next. That I did not steal food from every restaurant I ever worked in. That I never ate the food people left on their plates."

The whole economic system we're in is coercive to many.