This is a piece I was asked to write for a training organisation, just prior to Covid. It never got used, but I wanted to share it anyway and thought this would be a good place to do so.

So, what do you know about sex work and sex workers?

Who are they?

What do they look like?

Why do they do what they do?

Chances are that unless you are or have been in the industry yourself, have a friend or family member who is, or work alongside sex workers in some capacity, your knowledge and understanding of sex work is likely to be based on media representations of sex workers – which almost always are incorrect.  This is a huge assumption on my part but, as a sex worker of 10 years and counting, it’s usually the case.

Chances are, you already know someone who is a sex worker – you just might not know that they are. We are everywhere. We don’t all look the same. We don’t all do the same type of work. But we all suffer the same prejudices and discrimination, on top of all the regular day to day life issues that non sex working folk have too. We also need good counsellors and therapists, just as everyone else does – however, access to such services can be very difficult for the sex worker community and even once accessed, it can be very ineffective and even damaging if the counsellor in question is uninformed and prejudiced towards sex workers.

This is a huge topic that merges with and bleeds into so many other issues – education, poverty, access to resources, ill-health physically or mentally, misogyny, capitalism, survival, racism, feminism – it would be impossible to encapsulate all the issues that sex workers are faced with in one concise piece of writing. However what I would like to try and do is to put together an ongoing body of work that addresses some (if not all!) of these issues in relation to SWs, in the hope that counsellors/therapists can understand the type of issues we face and help to support their clients effectively.

I would like to start by introducing myself a little, so that I can explain that I am more than qualified to speak on the matter. I am a sex worker myself – I have been since late 2011. I have done many different types of sex work – webcam, phone chat, porn movies, escorting, nude modelling, content creator, and Dominatrix. I began in the “vanilla” adult world before moving into Fetish/Kink/Femdom after about 2 years.

I am also someone’s daughter, auntie, sister, cousin, friend. I am a human being. I have thoughts, feelings, emotions, problems, just like the rest of you. I was not abused as a child, nor was I trafficked into sex work. I am not a drug addict. I am none of the things people automatically assume when they hear the word “sex worker”. I know what these things are because I used to think them myself. Think of representations of sex workers you’ve seen in the media – on the news, tv shows, movies and so on. They will usually be framed as someone of a low socio-economic status, with a history of trauma, abuse, addiction…very rarely are they presented in a positive or indeed factually accurate light.  Society teaches us to find women who sell sex as less than, as disgusting, as amoral. It’s totally ok for other people (mostly men, let’s face it) to profit from the sexuality and objectification of women, but it’s absolutely abhorrent for a woman to profit from it herself.  I am a 36-year-old woman with a job that is as flexible as I need it to be to take care of myself physically and emotionally, and it just so happens that this particular job is not looked upon favourably by society at large. In fact, there are those who would love to criminalise my job, cut off my means of making money and supporting myself, and see me end up in poverty or dead. Just because they don’t like what I do for a living.

It’s difficult to know where to start, because there is so much to unpack and I do not claim to speak for all SWs – although we have much in common, we also have plenty of differences and one person’s experience isn’t always necessarily the same as another’s experience. All I can do is share my experiences and those of my friends and colleagues, who have chosen to share their experiences with me.

So – what IS sex work?

Right off the bat, sex work has become increasingly difficult to define – or at least, what people do and don’t consider to be forms of sex work is often up for debate – even within the sex worker community itself.

Traditionally speaking (and sex work can be considered traditional – records dating back as far as 2400 BCE document the prevalence of prostitution), sex work is the exchange of sexual services for money or other remuneration. However, in the modern world it has come to encapsulate so much more than just two people having sexual intercourse, with one paying the other. Sex work can now include things such as: phone sex chat lines, webcam, subscription sites, content creation, (ie “selling nudes”) Fetish/BDSM activities, and more. Even broader still, are people involved with the sex industry who are not sex workers themselves – people like studio owners, website developers, camera crew, video editors, producers/directors, platform support staff, and so on.

The important thing to understand is that sex work IS work. It is a job. We just want to pay our bills like everybody else. However, it is made very difficult for us to even just exist in certain spheres because of society’s view of us as immoral, or less than, or dirty, or any other pejorative term that people conflate with sex work. As an example – a well-known sex worker recently had her bank account locked and closed (with funds in it!) because the bank discovered what she did for a living. At this point I would like to make it crystal clear that in the UK, exchanging sex for money in itself is perfectly legal – but a lot of things around it are not. This bank had decided that they didn’t want to be associated with somebody who made their money that way and simply terminated her account. Cut off. Just like that. (As a side note, this bank was the same bank I use – so I have to be incredibly careful about my monetary affairs.)  Imagine if that happened to you one day – for no reason other than someone didn’t like the way you earned your money. How would you pay your bills? Feed yourself? This sort of thing happens to sex workers all the time.

Because of things like this, we often have to live life in a state of semi-secrecy and deception. This is for our own safety and protection, but personally, being deceitful does not sit right with me and causes me anxiety all the time – will I be found out by my landlord and kicked out? (Pimping laws criminalise anyone who benefits from the sexual labour of another – I know of several people who, despite never working at home, were evicted from their properties after being outed to their landlords, who did not fancy being prosecuted for pimping.) Will my car insurance company find out and cancel my policy? (This has actually happened to me before. Their argument being, someone might recognize me and chase me in their car. Really.) Will the kids’ school find out and call social services? Will my day-to-day job find out and sack me, if sex work is a part time hustle? This kind of low level, constant vigilance is both exhausting and entirely unfair. And yet we endure it every day.

I appreciate that I am coming at this from the perspective of somebody who chose to do sex work – I recognise my privilege within that, and like any job, it has good and bad aspects and we have good and bad days. I cannot speak for all sex workers, as my reasons for choosing it are not the same as everyone else’s reasons. The bottom line is sex workers are humans just trying to survive and deserve the same labour rights and protections as in any other industry.

I digress slightly – I will certainly speak more to these issues in more detail at another time, but for now I’d like to focus on how therapists can help sex workers. Some SWs may never disclose their line of work – I know of plenty of people who have not felt safe to disclose their job to their therapist – particularly those using NHS funded services, for fear that there would be a record of what was mentioned which could be used against them (again, I do know somebody this happened to – it was used against her in court regarding a care case, despite the fact that she had quit sex work long before she had her children). The judgements and prejudices that a lot of people have in regards to sex workers can lead to devastating consequences – loss of income, loss of our homes, social services taking our children away because how can a sex worker possibly be a good mother? People hear the words “sex work” and automatically think that it’s a problem, there must be something wrong with them, the person is being coerced and must be “rescued”. This is not the case for many sex workers and we need therapists and support networks that will understand this. 

For those who do disclose to their therapists, this can present just as many issues in itself. I have heard recently of a woman who was a sex worker, and her therapist was encouraging her to stay in an abusive relationship, because she should be grateful that anyone wanted to be with her “considering her occupation”. We don’t deserve nice relationships or to be treated kindly because we should be grateful that anyone will have us and our dirty jobs. Would you say that to ANY other person, in ANY other job?!

There is a bizarre notion amongst the non-sex worker community that we are either drug addled street walkers, or high class (what does THAT even mean?!) thousand-pound-a-night call girls, with nothing in between. Surely no one would do this kind of work if the money was bad, right? Many of us aren’t raking in millions, we just quietly get by on a modest income.  If we even mention having had a bad day at work, it automatically sends people into a panic that we are being abused or coerced and must leave our jobs immediately. It’s as if we must love our jobs constantly, all the time, or just not do them at all. I can’t think of any other occupation where people are expected to love their job constantly, every day, and never complain about it. I also don’t know of many other jobs where one bad day must mean that the only solution is that we should look for something else immediately. The fact is that the job itself is often not the problem, it’s the fact that we are shunned by society and sources of support, meaning abusers and those that would do us harm know they can get away with a lot more as we have fewer places to go to for help. Read that again.

The sex work itself is not always going to be the reason that someone is seeking therapy – in the same way that a trans client seeking therapy for help with bereavement, for example, is not bringing their trans status as the presenting issue – but the therapist assumes it must be and focuses on that. As I mentioned previously, we still have all the same troubles and trials as everyone else, and our jobs are not always the problem.

My own therapist, fortunately for me, was absolutely wonderful when I disclosed my profession, and has never once made me feel judged or unsafe. She has asked for clarification on things, such as words or phrases that I’ve used, for example, and has listened when I’ve explained things about my job and how it affects the rest of my life. She has never once made me suspect she has disclosed this to anyone, or outed me behind my back (again, I know people who have experienced this). Therapists must be able to extend their unconditional positive regard, confidentiality, and non-judgement to all their clients – even their sex worker clients. We are human too.