If you want to travel to the US, you have to say you haven’t sold sex in the last ten years to enter. Assuming you’re on one of their lists, known to be a sex worker, you won’t even be able to appeal for a decade.
If you want to report a sexual assault and the police know you’ve ever sold sex in your life, that fact will be used against you to try to discredit your claim.
Any time you are involved in something with a vetting process, where a job or the government does a background check on you, there is a chance of them finding out about your history of sex work, and penalising you for it.
Wider society considers sex workers to be tainted by our history in sex work for years after we last engaged in it, at best, or for the rest of our lifetimes at worst. When becoming close with people, there is always a point where we have to decide whether or not we are going to disclose our history. In this sense, while we may not always be selling sex, we’re still considered to be sex workers even if we retire – merely inactive sex workers, as though it’s a status we’ve obtained that cannot be removed. I’ve been thinking about it like a fucked up version of getting a doctorate, where you’re a doctor even if you’re not employed as one. Once you have sex with even one person for money, you’ve qualified as a sex worker and some sort of quality attaches itself to you because of that.
In a way, the idea that something about selling sex even once means you’re nebulously in this “sex worker” category does feel true to my experience. It’s as though I broke the barrier that keeps most people feeling as though selling sex is something they could never do, and now it’s incredibly easy for me. Any time I get another job, as soon as that job becomes undesirable enough, I’ll leave it to sell sex again. If I’m working at a job but can’t afford a specific sudden expense, I’ll sell sex for it. The only way I can imagine definitively retiring forever is if I had enough money that paying my expenses, even with months out of work at a time, would be no issue.
With all this in mind, that society sees us as being tainted by sex work forever and assumes our participation in other parts of the workforce is flimsy and short-term… why is it that when taking a break from selling sex, so many of us feel a disconnect from the sex work community?
As a group, people who sell sex are disadvantaged in a lot of ways and need access to resources, so most groups organized around sex work serve the purpose of distributing the things we need. When you aren’t actively selling sex, you don’t need advice on your most recent sketchy client or how to navigate your taxes or where to get condoms cheaply. Despite that, since we often cannot talk to our civvie friends or to acquaintances or colleagues about our work, that leaves us in an odd space where processing our time in sex work can become a very lonely process.
People often assume that those actively selling sex are the only ones in need of support, but in times of stress or trauma we learn to cope and push down our reactions. While obviously people in the midst of a struggle need the most help, it’s also true that once the stress or danger passes, processing things can be difficult and it’s something we need community for. The few spaces designed for people who aren’t currently selling sex but have a history of it are often for “exited prostitutes”, run by evangelical groups which want to take away rights from sex workers as a whole. They’re not a safe place to be open about our experiences, they’re predatory.
Most of the time, I only realize I’ve taken a break from sex work in hindsight. I don’t plan them, and that seems to be true of many people I know. I find a more traditional job for some stability, which I know I won’t be able to maintain long-term, and usually plan to sex work alongside it. Things get in the way, I make just enough money to get by without selling sex, and a couple of months will pass where I feel disconnected from my community… then I end up selling sex again because I leave the job or need additional money, and I feel reconnected.
I’m not sure I have solutions for how people should manage these periods, or how we can make people feel as though they can still talk about their experiences and access support even when they’re not actively doing sex work, but I know I’m going to make a conscious effort to keep talking about it now even when I take breaks.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 