The first time I met a sex worker was at a university event during my freshman year. I wasn’t a client. I was just sharing a table with an acquaintance and the topic of sex work and student living came up. She mentioned she did cam work, and we had a lively discussion about the steps she had to take to anonymize herself. Later that year, my habit of posting nudes online for public consumption became ‘work’ when someone offered me cash for custom content. This was before OnlyFans and similar sites changed everything. Just like the woman I met at that event, I became an achingly unassuming sex worker.
We’re right here, you know.
The perception of sex work as being something that women do in fishnets under lampposts is evaporating. OnlyFans and a rising notice of relationships with financial benefits saw to that. That still doesn’t cover the breadth of sex work. It’s an incredibly diverse form of work that materializes in every imaginable way. I’ll try a few examples.
We know about contact sex workers who meet clients in person, and there are plenty of non-contact options like selling worn clothing items online or sexting for pay. But nothing is ever clear-cut. Someone works at a nude bar with a strict no-touching policy. Is that contact or non-contact? Bikini baristas use overt sex appeal to sell a product, but that product is definitively non-sexual. Is that sex work? Sometimes, the compensation for sex is a favor or a non-monetary ‘gift’.
Even as more people told me about being sex workers, it didn’t hit me until much later: If you’ve lived in a community of any kind, you’ve met a sex worker. If you’ve befriended people over the course of your life, you’ve probably befriended a sex worker. There’s no question about whether we exist. The question is whether we feel secure enough in your presence to discuss it.
Meet the team.
Like any profession, people are also forced into sex work. The highly personal and intimate nature of the work adds a ruthless layer of harm beyond being forced to work under unjust circumstances. Long before being forced into sex work, there are mountains of people who are coerced into it by circumstances and would prefer other employment. It’s not unusual to work a job you dislike in the name of survival, but the edges are always a bit sharper for sex workers. If our work isn’t outright illegal, it’s stigmatized and pushed into hiding and crass humour. Stigma is an extremely powerful tool for cutting people from support structures because it’s self-sustaining. Once it sinks in, those victimized become less inclined to speak, not more.
The story of becoming sex workers due to circumstances and managing the ensuing stigma is well-known to us. That’s what a close friend of mine did in my closing year of undergrad. She was deep in postgrad, running out of funds, and had a fairly detached view of sex. She took up contact sex work because her university income wasn’t cutting it. We had long conversations about our work in the sex industry over tea. I advised her as best I could, but being an online sex worker is very different to seeing clients directly.
Her complaints about the work always struck me as oddly ordinary and aimed more at societal problems than sex work itself. She couldn’t stand flakey or late clients because it was a colossal waste of her time. She found it absurd that the bottom of the academic career track was insufficient to support herself and a housepet. Her utility-minded side came out when she called out the stupidity of making more by ‘lying on her back’ than with all her degrees and connections put together.
Her complaints echoed mine. Especially the part where academia is way too stressful and underpaid for how important it is. I was once on track to a research/teaching career at my alma mater and I just… stopped. I put those ambitions to rest as soon as I found an exit strategy. Before those ambitions became truly foolish.
My latest sex worker friend is a lot like me but is better at this job. She’s a college-educated thirty-something who watched as Plan A through C didn’t work out. Her camera presence is ruthlessly enticing, but she’d much rather settle into the blankets with a horror movie than get wild. She recently returned to college to complete a media qualification. She hates group projects.
Lastly, there are the sex workers who don’t really identify as such. More than a few of my romantic partners have had sex for favors and gifts. That’s sex work by definition, but their dips into it weren’t a big part of their life. They don’t consider themselves sex workers any more than I consider myself a commission artist because I was once paid for painting. Sometimes, that’s what it is, a brief dip into material flattery, but a footnote in someone’s wider life.
Fellow industry professionals
Whenever I think of the sex workers I befriended, the thing that always struck me is how different we all are. There’s a wide band of age, education, and rationale between us. Most of us weren’t ‘full time’ because we tend to see it as a bridge to less stigmatized work. The complaints we share with each other are pedestrian: freeloaders, crass fools, and body aches. The complaints we level at society are much more scathing. I’ve got plenty of words for a world that wants me to cease to exist but pays to masturbate to me. I don’t regret being a sex worker with a Master’s degree, but education is more affordable where I’m from. The friends in my life who went into debt for the access to a fried job market have more to say about that injustice.
My academic friend did bridge her way from sex work to a more ‘respectable’ lecturer’s post. Her frustrations with academia are numerous and completely justified, but she’s better off as a lecturer. She always preferred books to people. The camgirl I spoke to in my freshman year volunteered at libraries and vanished herself from social media. That’s the life she wanted, but it sounds too quiet even for me. I talk to the rest when I can despite the differences in life paths and timezones. In a world that’s so thoroughly hostile to us, it pays to keep fellow industry professionals around.
Loved this article, love sex workers, solidarity forever 💖
<3!