Khalifa shares her complicated history with Yahoo Life, explaining just how her body impacted her self-worth throughout her upbringing. It even made her feel more distant from her American classmates when she immigrated from Lebanon as a child and allowed her to seek attention by other means.
Still, she wouldn't come to understand these things until she had a life-altering encounter with a man who brought her into the realm of sex work. In her experience, she was made to feel completely out of control of not only her body but also the perception that people throughout the world had of her.
"Maneuvering my way around the contradiction of feeling like I was powerless when I was in that time of my life versus doing it now in a completely different way really comes down to my confidence," she explains. "The difference is now, it is all for me. The only thing that gets shown to the public or goes out into the public sphere is something that makes me feel empowered or sexy or confident or comfortable.