My first significant exposure, outside of the internet, to other people who sold sex was when I worked at a brothel at the age of 19. I was still in the process of working through a lot of the harmful ideas I’d absorbed about sex workers since I was young. While I was there, I met a number of women who were married or had boyfriends who did not know they sold sex. Or at least, most of them had partners they believed did not know. This very quickly gets complicated.
I’m going to write here about various sex workers I’ve known, anonymised, who have kept their profession secret from partners. I’ll also be talking about my own experiences, because it’s only fair that I do so if I’m going to talk about others.
One woman I was very close with when I was working in a brothel for the first time, a woman we’ll call Elena, I got very close with. She struggled with speaking English and so I’d help her with replying to clients via text. In return, she reminded me to eat when I forgot and would cook things for me or help tidy away my things. A few times, she joked about being a mother figure to me, and I found that to be oddly accurate to the way she took care of me there. It took over a month for her to admit to me that she had a husband and kids at home who didn’t know she did this for work. When she told me this, for a brief period, I found myself angry with her.
I judged Elena partially because she was so much older than me and I saw her less as a peer and more as some idealized adult who should have everything together, I think. Her own shame about it meant that she confessed it to me as if it was something terrible, and so that contributed to me seeing it as such. Elena was an amazing woman who took care of me the first time I ever worked in a brothel when I was terrified. She was also lying to her husband and selling sex behind his back. I found this hard to reconcile.
Over time she told me more about her relationship with her husband and her kids. I stayed at the brothel more and more and started to be there overnight so I’d see when she arrived around 8am. She’d arrive in an Amazon jacket that workers wear and when I asked her she told me that her husband believed she worked in an Amazon warehouse. They’d moved the to UK almost a decade ago and in that time she’d had various jobs but also did sex work in between. Elena had also done sex work back in her native country, which her husband knew about but believed was exclusively prior to her relationship with him.
Elena’s husband worked for minimum wage and couldn’t earn enough to support them alone. Due to Elena’s struggles with English and her lack of qualifications, she struggled to find traditional jobs or to keep them when she did. The more I learned, the more I understood that her lies to keep her marriage together weren’t selfishly motivated. Elena’s husband could not afford to support himself and their children alone, nor could Elena support herself and their children alone. Only together, with him working at supermarkets and her selling sex, were they making enough to hold things together.
Am I supposed to be angry at her, for finding a way to provide for her kids, but feeling the need to lie about that method because of backlash? Of course, in an ideal world, her husband should be aware of what sexual partners his wife has and be able to risk assess for himself as a result, but we don’t live in an ideal world. Her options were to lie or to potentially lose her children to the care system or be unable to afford to feed and clothe and house them safely.
One woman I knew had a boyfriend who lived in another country, who she visited roughly 6 months out of the year once all her trips were added together. During the other six months, she did brothel work to raise funds to live off of for the rest of the year. For the purposes of this, we’ll call her Liv. Her eventual plans were to move in with him, I think, and Liv was earning enough to get by in the meantime until he suggested they get married. He was controlling and clearly didn’t trust her, but wasn’t aware that she sold sex.
As Liv and I got closer, she told me more about her relationship with her boyfriend. He was very religious, believed they should be saving sex for marriage although had made exceptions to that rule that encompassed certain sex acts with her, and he really loved him. Liv also saw him as a source of stability and a path to a future where, once he finally got the promotion he was waiting for and they got married, he’d be able to provide for her and she wouldn’t need to work anymore.
She’d lied to him about the nature of her work. He believed she cleaned houses for a living, supposedly. He’d often ask for proof of where she was, and she’d facetime him from one of the bedrooms in the brothel claiming it was her own. On occasion, she’d show me in the background on their facetime call and claim I was a friend visiting her. I wasn’t out as trans get, and to him, I was presented as a non-threatening woman whose presence was evidence that she was not cheating on him.
In my opinion, he knew she was selling sex. His constant requests for facetimes and asking where she was could be written off as the kind of insecure behaviour many of us have seen men exert over the women they date, except that he always set them for a scheduled time every day. He never exhibited the accompanying requests I’ve grown to expect from abusive men, demanding to know where their partner is at random times with proof. Liv’s boyfriend checked in at 4pm GMT every day, which was the evening for him. I remember thinking at the time that he must be making sure she was safe.
Liv’s story was not well thought out. She told him she cleaned houses and that she was free for their daily check-in by 4, when he expected to see who she was with and often asked her to go into different rooms as if wanting to check for the presence of danger. Her job, which supposedly was paying for various trips abroad per year that would often last over a month, was cleaning houses between 7am and 3pm. That just doesn’t add up. The idea that her boyfriend would fall for that was nonsensical. Then there was the added factor that she was “moving house” every 3 or 4 months, when she’d rotate out brothel locations. She told me that after 2 years, she’d come back to the place we were now working from together… how had she explained that to him? I knew they’d been together for longer than that.
I’m not one to pry. In brothel environments many of us never intend to share our real names or identities, much less the details of our family or relationships. Yet, when you’re around people in a criminalized environment dealing with the same “boss” and the same fears and significant risks, you naturally start to open up and you can’t help but notice other people’s struggles. Over time, I learned enough about Liv’s relationship to be fairly confident in making the assessment: Liv’s boyfriend knew she sold sex. However, admitting that he knew would destroy their relationship. She wanted to start over with him and leave sex work when they got married, to write off this part of her life, and his religion forbid him from marrying a woman who would be considered sinful.
What do we think about her choices, here? I’m not sure she came to the same realization I did, that he must know, so she definitely felt as though she was deceiving him and expressed guilt over that. I’m not really interested in whether or not she could be considered deserving of blame, I’m more interested on the impact. Overall, would it have been better if she’d told the truth? Both of them would have been less happy. Liv’s boyfriend wasn’t harmed by her choices, even from the framework of imagining possible exposure to STDs without his knowledge… because they weren’t having sex.
She lied about her sex work because of the stigma, with the full intent of leaving it as soon as she had the means. I don’t feel like there’s any use in blaming her for that. There’s even less benefit in instructing her to confess or have done differently, especially since I think it’s likely he knew the whole time. The stigma and the position she was put into because of poverty is what drove her to lie and that’s what we should tackle.
In another brothel, I met a girl we’ll call Maria. She’d immigrated to England a few years prior, met her boyfriend almost as soon as she arrived, and had just turned 19 when I met her. I was roughly the same age. Maria had started selling sex only 6 months ago, years into her relationship with him, without him knowing. She supported both of them financially by covering their rent, originally via a business where she did people’s hair and nails at their homes, but business had gotten slow.
Maria’s boyfriend didn’t seem to know that she sold sex. Her cover story was that she was still doing hair and nails, which she’d always been paid for in cash, and she left anything remotely suspicious in the living room at the brothel where we’d all hang out. Ironically enough, her boyfriend had actually given her the idea; he’d joked about her getting a “sugar daddy” on the side when her work got slow. He was a year younger than her and was only just 18, had no job prospects yet and had been kicked out of home young, and so as their sole provider she’d actually looked into it.
If she’d told him she planned to sell sex, she said she was sure he’d have left her. Since he had nowhere else to go, he’d have been homeless if he did. Maria decided to sell sex with the intent of it happening only for a short time until he business was picking up again. As I’m sure you can guess form the fact she was at the brothel still when I met her, that didn’t happen.
Eventually, Maria got a phone call one day to her work phone which exposed everything. She picked up, said hello, and it was her boyfriend on the other end. Her escorting ad didn’t show a picture of her face but he’d recognized her from the faceless pictures that were there. Without getting into it too deeply, they argued extensively and she was devastated. I comforted her, she went home that night, then I didn’t hear from her for a couple of weeks.
About a month later, I learned that Maria had started selling sex directly out of different hotels as her incall location, with her boyfriend controlling everything. He’d taken over her advertising and was arranging all her clients for her, reasoning that if he did it for her then no-one else would be taking a cut of the money like our “pimp” at the brothel was. I don’t know how she felt about that, whether that situation did indeed feel less exploitative to her than our manager keeping 50% of our earnings at the brothel, because I never saw her again. What I do know is that her boyfriend clearly got over his objections very fast when he realized how he stood to benefit.
She lied to him with the intent of providing for them and sparing his feelings. Again, like with Liv, the poverty drove her to make that choice and I don’t have it in me to be angry at Maria for the choices she made.
Now, I’ll talk about myself. Though I’ve thoroughly anonymized the women I mentioned here, I don’t want to talk about other sex workers and simply speculate on the ethics of their choices. At the end of the day, they make their own choices based on their situation, for better or for worse. With regards to other people’s choices, we only decide how we react to them, and I think it’s clear that with sex workers who are selling sex without the knowledge of their partners we should react with compassion and provide support.
When it comes to myself, well, I can make some judgements.
I don’t date much. When I do, it’s usually either friends I already know and who are aware of my work or it’s people I’ve met on dating apps where I tell them I do sex work within the first few messages. I wasn’t in a relationship when I started sex work and I’m lucky enough not to have to factor that into my decision-making. If I had already been in a relationship when I became homeless at 17, or when I was poor at 18, I can’t say I’d have told my partner when I started selling sex to meet my needs. Survival comes first.
I do, however, hook up with people. I frequently lie to my hook-ups about what I do for a living, or I omit.
During a hook-up a few months ago, intending just to scratch an itchy by meeting the guy on Grindr, the guy asked me how many people I’ve slept with. I panicked. My “body count” isn’t a number I know, but with some hooker math a while back, I tried to make an estimate. I estimate that the total is close to 1000 at this point – at least 800. I cannot say that number, as a 23-year-old, without it seeming insane to most people. I tell my hook-up I’ve had sex with 5 people.
We had a brief discussion about STDs in which I mentioned being on PrEP and that I’d last been tested a month prior and had only had sex a couple of times since, all protected. This was true, with Covid-19 lessening how many clients I saw at the time. He’d asked me about my total “body count” trying to make an assessment of my STD risk beyond that, I think, though it’s obviously irrelevant. Is it okay that I lied because it was a hook-up where that information isn’t relevant to his STD risk in the first place? Is it still not okay, because instead of refusing to answer I chose to lie?
I’ve frequently met people I’m immensely interested in, only to stop myself from ever expressing that interest, because I’m so sure that being a prostitute will be a deal-breaker. So much of my dating life, and the dating lives of all sex workers, involves disclosure. I’m expected to disclose that I sell sex at the very first moment or I’m seen as a liar or as wasting people’s time. I’m supposed to assume that the default is for prostitution to be a deal-breaker.
Being a sex worker is lonely. We often only have other sex workers to talk to about a huge part of our lives. Then, on top of that, the stigma makes people who know what we do react negatively to us. Dating becomes near impossible unless we date other sex workers – most of whom are in similar situations of struggle to us and are predominantly women. While ideally money and social status shouldn’t factor into who any of us dates, it is undeniable that two sex workers who are dating will find it much harder to secure housing than a sex worker and a civilian. All these barriers are put in our way and it puts so many sex workers in the position of having to grapple with being alone. Is it no wonder that sometimes people can’t tolerate that loneliness anymore and choose to lie?
It’s enticing to me, when I meet someone who I get along with and who seems to be interested in me, to imagine asking them out and getting to find out if we’d be good together without having to prepare for their reaction to me selling sex. I want the same opportunity to organically build a relationship that so many other people get.
I don’t automatically judge people who keep it a secret from their partners that they sell sex. There are circumstances where I would do the same.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 