Selling bareback (unprotected) sex is something sex workers have always done, in varying amounts. There’s always controversy around it within sex worker communities and then waves of disgust from outsiders looking in. Prostitutes are seen as disease vectors by many, referred to as dirty or tainted, and the idea of us selling unprotected sex is part of what prompts this disgust reaction from people.
To make something perfectly clear: money being exchanged does not change the likelihood of STI transmission. If you have unprotected sex with someone, there is a risk of getting an STI. That risk is augmented when you cannot be reasonably sure that you know someone’s status, either during a one-night stand or with a client. The difference between selling unprotected sex vs. having unprotected sex for pleasure is that there’s a financial benefit that comes with that risk rather than the benefit of pleasure from a preferred kind of sex.
When I first started escorting in the UK outside of sugar daddy “dating”, I told myself I would be as safe as possible. The first brothel I worked in, I refused to do oral without (blowjobs without a condom) and always used protection during penetration. I quickly realized that everyone around me either did oral without by default, or charged for it as an extra fee of around £10 or £20 in most cases. I very quickly started charging for it as an extra, then abandoned charging for it completely and offered it as standard. I lasted maybe 2 weeks, not offering it. STI transmission is much lower risk via oral than via PIV sex or anal sex, though it’s still a notable risk. In the same way that people having casual sex with partners often don’t use protection for oral even if they use condoms for other activities, that’s what I did.
From within the sex worker community in the UK, the pushback against unprotected services is largely limited to bareback full-service, meaning either vaginal or anal sex. Almost all of us have given up on trying to enforce condoms for oral, and so since we’re all doing it no-one can created a whorearchy based on who does and doesn’t. Clients are so used to unprotected oral in their private sex lives, even from people they sleep with who enforce it for other kinds of penetration, that they assume it will be offered and react negatively when it isn’t. It’s safety matter.
Unfortunately, an understanding of the dynamics with clients and the reasons someone might not use protection tends not to be extended to people who sell bareback full service sex.
Sometimes people run out of condoms unexpectedly. Maybe their last condom breaks while they’re with a client and the client expects to finish the session. Perhaps a client offers twice their hourly rate for bareback and they can’t afford rent that month without accepting the offer. God forbid, maybe a regular client asks for bareback and says he’ll take his money to someone else if they don’t agree, and they can’t afford to lose that kind of income.
I’ve offered bareback services before, sometimes not even for more money. One day I was exhausted after seeing several clients in one day at my home, and the last one of the day kept going on about how it’s hard for him to keep it up in a condom (common excuse) and kept moving to rub his dick against the outside of my genitals whilst I moved away when he did and told him no. He kept trying to convince me, kept rubbing himself against me and then claiming he wasn’t going to put it in without my permission – as if my complaint wasn’t also about the rubbing as contact. Eventually, he’d done it so many times that I started to feel like he’d increased my risk of STI transmission so much already that it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. I wanted him out of there fast, didn’t feel like I had the energy to keep arguing, and so I told him he couldn’t finish inside but that he could do it bareback. He finished in about 30 seconds and came on my sheets. Was that ideal? Of course not. Am I a worse person because I agreed, now tainted and less worthy of support? Of course not.
Whilst many of us are subject to situations with various degrees of coercion causing us to forego protection, I don’t want to set a standard that bareback becomes okay only with a sufficient sob story. The fact is that bareback is riskier, yes, and so people should be well-informed about that and trusted to risk assess for their one lives. Selling sex itself is risky, so that idea that this is an intolerably risky one that must be forbidden and shunned and yet we’re expecting wider society not to moralize to all sex workers in the same way is ridiculous.
People who engage in more dangerous behaviours need more support, not less, no matter what reasons they have for doing it.
Once, I agreed for a client not to use a condom because he had a dick piercing and I found him attractive and was actually interested in having sex with him. Out of the hundreds (maybe a thousand at this point?) clients I’ve seen in my time selling sex, I’ve been actually attracted to a handful. I mention this event because even though most of my experiences selling sex have not been ones I’ve enjoyed, and even though I’ve experienced a lot of trauma from selling sex, I don’t want to separate myself out as someone who’s virtuous because of my suffering. I fucked a client, whom I found attractive, and agreed not to use protection despite knowing the risks and thinking it was a bad idea, because just like millions of people who have casual sex I was thinking with my genitals. Sue me.
When I’m actively seeing clients, I get STI tested every 6 weeks or so. Thus far I’ve been fortunate and haven’t contracted anything to my knowledge.
On the few occasions I’ve had unprotected sex with clients, I’ve felt guilty and increased the number of STI checks I get to the point of being ridiculous. Once, after a client who told me he didn’t want penetration and just wanted to grind slipped himself inside me for a couple of thrusts and acted like it was an accident, I scalded myself with hot water in the shower afterwards in a panic. Getting an STI is a lot of sex worker’s worst nightmare, not least because it impacts our ability to work and therefore to earn money, but also because of the horrific stigma and blame. Anyone who gets and STI is treated as dirty (hence the word “clean” being used to mean uninfected), but that’s even more extreme for those of us who sell sex or who are gay, for home STIs are seen as a punishment for our sinful behaviour.
The way to reduce the amount that sex workers offer bareback sex, is to provide the support they need to be able to refuse those offers. That means making condoms extremely accessible, so that the likelihood of running out of them is as close to zero as it can be. Supporting sex workers with meeting their basic needs, like having enough food and making sure they can afford rent, means we’re not going to have to take offers to fuck without a condom to be able to pay for those things. No matter how much you moralize and go on about the risks, if you force someone to choose between starving for a week or having unprotected sex once and rolling the dice on their sexual health they’re going to roll the dice.
Among those performing in porn, sex without condoms is pretty much standard practice. Professional porn shoots often include a lot of STI checks and signing forms, but this still isn’t perfectly safe. A person can have sex after their most recent check and not declare it, or test negative on the day of their sexual health screening and then have seroconversion and be contagious and detectable within a matter of days. That’s the reality. Even when you do everything “right”, there’s still a risk.
All of this being said, do I want people to be offering bareback? No. The more of us that offer it, especially publicly advertising it, the more likely clients are to expect it and push for it and the less bargaining power we have. At a certain point, if clients expect a certain sex act and other sex workers are offering it and you aren’t, you’ll lose out on clients. As it is, even among clients who want bareback they seem to have a desire to target sex workers who don’t offer it and to pressure them into it, because they see that as safer (since the sex worker is less likely to have slept with someone else unprotected recently). The first thing we need to recognize as sex workers is that the clients are creating these issues, not other prostitutes, and that boundaries we set are acts of solidarity with the rest of our community and not something everyone else is entitled to.
Refusing to do bareback as an effort to protect not just ourselves but also our fellow sex workers, by not allowing it to become standard practice, is a positive thing. A sex worker doing it anyway because they need to pay rent or eat isn’t something I will shame them for, and I won’t be convinced to.
If someone wants to know whether I condone or support bareback sex being sold, I’ll tell them that’s the wrong framing. I support all sex workers, not just including but especially those engaging in riskier services. What I do want is to minimize the amount of bareback that’s happening with clients because that keeps everyone healthier, and so I want to tackle the causes and educate people. Most of us are well aware that STIs are a significant risk, so simply telling people not to do it isn’t going to make a difference. Let’s look at why people do it despite that risk.
I don’t have all the answers. Should escorting sites disallow “bareback” or “unprotected” to be advertised on profiles? Maybe. It wouldn’t stop workers who are desperate from offering it on an individual basis or accepting when clients ask for it, but it would stop clients being able to filter for it and stop it being treated as standard. New clients who come in would be less likely to assume they can ask for it at all. On the other hand, do I really want the platforms we use to limit what we can say more? Not offering it as a pre-made tag seems like a good idea to me, but I wouldn’t want everyone who manually writes it in their profile to be banned – that would mean some of the people who are the most desperate losing access to their only income.
I’ve heard so many tales about people offering bareback consistently and taking lots of antibiotics and getting constantly tested, desperately trying to earn enough money to send money to family abroad or to pay off debt. I cannot and will not condemn people in these situations, or suggest they owe me their support in refusing bareback to lower the chances that a client asks me for it. I’m the one in a position to refuse it, at the moment, and so I’m the one who should be doing so in the hopes of lessening how much they have to.
For those continuing to sell bareback services, they need access to things like PrEP (HIV prevention drug) and free easy-access testing, as well as support if they do contract an STI.
Those of us who can afford to refuse bareback should do so to the best of our ability (and not give in like I did once, treating it like a casual sexual encounter), because that protects those who are more vulnerable. In cases where we risk-assess and find ourselves desperate enough that bareback is our best option, we shouldn’t hate ourselves for making that choice.
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