Some of the first advice that new sex workers typically get is to use a fake name and fake information when selling sex. We’re advised to have a separate phone for work so that clients cannot discover who we are by what our phone number is attached to, and so friends and acquaintances cannot recognize us. Keeping your face out of advertisements means you can’t be recognized, so that’s an additional measure that many escorts take. Even when you follow every single safety suggestion, the fact is, you’re never perfectly protected from being discovered.
In one brothel I worked in, a woman was discovered to be selling sex because her husband’s brother was searching for a sex worker on AdultWork and recognized her from the pictures of her body. He called her work number to confirm it was her by her voice, and that was the end of her ability to keep her work secret. She had a different nationality listed on her profile to the truth, a fake name, no images of her face, did everything ‘right’, and was still ultimately outed as a prostitute.
Being found out to sell sex is a matter of time for most people who do it long-term. Not everyone ends up having their work revealed to their family or close friends or to their landlords, but ultimately most of us have at least someone in our lives who recognizes us or finds out at some point. Thus, being discovered is a common fear, and not an irrational one.
If discovered to be a sex worker, many people risk losing the support of their families. For those whose partners do not know about their work, they risk the end of their relationships. Depending on where a person lives they may risk arrest or other legal action. Given how malicious many people can be towards those who sell sex, even a small number of people knowing a sex worker’s real identity can lead to catastrophic consequences; a vindictive person might inform someone’s landlord so they lose their home or tell their employer in a typical civilian job so they’re fired and have to rely on prostitution for the entirety of their income.
Most people have secrets, and many people have ones which could significantly damage their lives if they went public. With sex work, mitigating the risk of exposure conflicts with the need to earn money in a way that means we can’t fully protect ourselves. If you’re actively selling sex, you need to advertise to a pool of people and then make clients out of some of them. Depending on how many people you need to advertise to for finding one client, and how popular those platforms are, every day adds to the chances that someone you know will find your profile.
One thing I can think of to illustrate the mounting fear of being found out to be a sex worker is what it’s like being in a very homophobic place whilst hiding being gay. Keeping an important part of your life quiet is hard in the first place, but all people have are suspicions unless you’re actually caught engaging in gay behaviour. Assuming you can hide your feelings well. An individual gay person might have to hide a relationship, or a string of hook-ups, and most of those people are just as invested as they are in keeping the secret. The number of clients that someone selling sex as their main income will see would absolutely eclipse the average person’s number of casual partners even if they’re a slut (compliment). Clients are nowhere near as incentivized to keep their behaviour a secret as sex workers are. On top of all that, sex workers also need excuses for where our income is coming from and what we are doing at various times.
The degree of care needed to avoid being outed as a sex worker is akin to what a closeted gay person might be required to do to pass as straight… and it’ll always be less effective.
I am notoriously less careful than a lot of other sex workers I know. My face is in my ads, I sell online porn as well as escorting and the personas I use for each thing are not entirely separate, and I have identifying tattoos. Between posting nudes on reddit that have gotten fairly popular and having a profile on all of the most well-known escorting sites in my country, it’s no surprise that I’ve had multiple people I know discover my work. These days I write about it under my real name, but I still try to keep a degree of separation so that employers in other forms of work I apply for don’t discover my sex work during a background check.
One of the things that’s hard to explain about the fear of being found out is why it’s so all-encompassing and terrifying when selling sex is already so dangerous in the first place. Why are we more scared of people finding out that we sell sex than we are of doing it?
Every time I see a client, that comes with a risk of assault. Outside of a couple of instances, I haven’t feared for my life, and certainly haven’t feared being killed by a client in recent years. Most of my concerns are regarding whether clients will cross the boundaries I’ve laid out and sexually assault me, whether they’ll violently attack me, or whether they’ll rob me. All of these possibilities are bad, but none of them would be likely to ruin my entire life the way being outed as a sex worker might.
I know that I can survive being sexually and/or violently assaulted and move on from it to have a good life. Being robbed puts me in a temporarily worse financial position, but I’ve survived poverty before and can do so again. What I cannot escape is a tarnished reputation which leaves me unable to access work or resources. If I cannot get work outside of sex work, because I’m known to sell sex and can’t pass a DBS check and can’t get hired, that means any time there aren’t enough clients or I get sick there’s no way for me to pay my rent. If friends and family want nothing to do with you upon knowing what you do, how do you recover from that?
The fear lessens the more you construct your life to be able to withstand being revealed to be a sex worker more broadly. If you surround yourself with friends who take no issue with sex workers and whom you can therefore be honest with, your support network is almost guaranteed to survive if what you do for work goes public. Saving money, securing stable housing, having plans for work and multiple streams of income for if you were to lose any civilian job, these are all ways to ensure that you don’t become a victim of the stigmatization of sex work. Without a life that’s constructed this way, all it takes is one person telling your landlord you’ve sold sex from your home and telling your current employer that you sell sex for you to be homeless with nowhere to go.
When seeing clients in my own home, I’ve had to weigh up the risk of letting someone in who seems visibly intoxicated once I can see them outside my window having just arrived versus leaving them outside where they might cause a fuss. Once, a regular client of mine texted that he wanted to see me and I told him I was busy… only for him to show up anyway and start pressing all the buzzers for my building and ranting that I wouldn’t open the door for him. Luckily he didn’t remember the number for my flat because I’d meet him at the main door and walk him up, and he didn’t know my real name, but the panic whilst he yelled at the front door and at my neighbours had me in a full-body panic with all the lights off acting like I wasn’t home.
Unfortunately, being outed also isn’t a one-time issue for most people. If you’re not someone famous enough for your sex work history to end up in the news, usually revelations about you selling sex will be confined to one social group. Maybe your employer finds out and fires you, though tells no-one else and you keep your home and manage to find another job… only to be outed there too much later. Or perhaps a member of your family find out and cuts you off, yet finds it so shameful that they don’t tell the rest of your family… until a few years later when it all comes out and suddenly you’ve lost contact with most of your relatives. It never ends. You can move across the country and be discovered again, or have people who swore they’d never tell start spilling all your private information the moment you have a falling out.
When a friend of mine told her mother I was selling sex, when I was still 17, she threatened to call social services and get me kicked out of the housing I was in provided by the council for making money without declaring it. Years later, a plumber came to fix my boiler and recognized me from my escorting advertisement. In between there were dozens of times I was recognized and different people from my life found out I sold sex without me wanting them to know.
It’s difficult to assess how much the panic around people knowing you sell sex might be due to personal shame about the job. It’s not an irrational fear, which makes it harder to know if you’re blowing it out of proportion.
My recommendation for those who fear telling their friends is to think about how well their friends know them in the first place without being aware they’re a sex worker. I don’t want to assume everyone’s experiences are just like mine, but my experiences selling sex have shaped so much of who I am. Even if I never saw a client again, it has impacted how I view sex and employment and how I react to any relationship that feels transactional forever. I can’t imagine having anything resembling a deep friendship with someone who didn’t know. If you’re at risk that a friend will report the activity to another workplace or a landlord or the police it’s obviously not a good idea to share the information – assuming those things don’t seem likely, I think a lot of people need to come to a decision on what type of friendship they want to have and stop deliberating.
I care what my close friends think of me, so I’ve surrounded myself with people who support me as a prostitute and don’t judge me for it. If I meet someone at work who seems like they’d be bigoted about it if I told them, I place them into a separate mental category of people I don’t tell and won’t be close with, and I don’t agonize over the idea of informing them. Maybe it seems cutthroat, but it’s one of the few options available that doesn’t leave you feeling miserable about hiding all the time.
The fear of being discovered is something I want to escape. In a situation where someone finds out, I don’t want to be making excuses, I want to be able to state clearly that it’s not something I’m ashamed of. The material damage to our lives is what keeps so many of us from being able to take that firm stance and discuss it whenever we want to. Is there a way to live that makes it relatively safe to be open, or am I deluding myself by thinking I can?
Until we end the stigma against sex work, there will always be huge risks involved in speaking about involvement in it. Any time we discuss another issue, our histories as sex workers are used to discredit us. Being recognized for other achievements or doing things that might put us in the spotlight means we risk public humiliation if our work becomes known.
I fear being attacked by large numbers of people for selling sex partially because the mockery and vitriol do get to me worst than other kind of harassment. Sex work, unlike other elements of myself, has involved a lot of trauma for me. It’s not just something I do, and sex worker isn’t just an identity I have, it’s something that it can be distressing just to discuss elements of let alone to receive death threats over. For every additional person who knows, I deal with more probing questions and having to rehash how I started over and over again. There’s only so many times you can try to correct ideas people have about prostitution before you get too exhausted to do it anymore. I suppose the reality is that when the fear goes away, I’m just tired.
Selling sex is seen as so scandalous, such juicy gossip to so many people, that it feels like there’s no way to contain the truth once it starts to spread.
Overcoming the fear associated with being outed as a prostitute sometimes seems like it’s worth the risk of the backlash, just so it’s not hanging over your head anymore. Other times it feels impossible to tell a new friend, let alone for it to be public information that anyone could find out about you. There has so be some sort of middle ground, with a close personal circle knowing and an open secret to others whilst it’s kept quiet from people involved in the larger structures controlling your housing and where you can travel ad work. Maybe there’s an amount of fear of being found out that’s safe, keeping us from being too open and losing access to basic needs without being crushing.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 