As with people in any profession, the experiences of sex workers vary. There is nothing wrong with writing a character who is abused within sex work or one who enjoys the job, and in this guide I will not moralize about whether a singular depiction might glamorize or demonize sex workers as a whole. If you’d like to read about how sex workers are often depicted in fiction, including the common tropes and the harm they do, you can do so here.
Let’s go through how to write about sex workers by asking some questions about the potential story and characters.
How are sex workers treated in your setting?
If you’re looking to write a sex worker in a way that feels accurate and grounded in reality, whether that’s within the context of a fantasy setting or a real world one, the first step is to consider what laws and stigma will impact sex workers within your environment. This is going to shape how your sex worker character behaves and how other characters react to them.
In a setting where it is illegal to buy or sell sex, like in most of the USA in the current day, your character will have to take some level of precautions if they sell sex and you do not want being arrested to be a part of their narrative. Conversely, if you want your character to frequently be in situations with high risk and fear of legal repercussions, you need to think carefully about which laws they’re breaking and how those laws are enforced. Police may engage in sting operations, raid your characters’ workplaces, or fine them for solicitation.
For sex worker characters who strip, they will still be impacted by the law. The strip club they work in may have strict licensing requirements which disallow the service of alcohol or which require it is a certain distance from residential areas or schools. Although this might not feel like something that will necessarily come up in your narrative, it will impact parts of the story like how far your character has to travel to get to work.
Online sex worker characters will have to contend with restrictions on pornographic content, like laws which forbid certain sex acts being portrayed on screen or age verification bills which will make their content harder to access. Simple moments in the story like having another character stumble across their content online, or having your character look at other sex workers’ porn, will need to take this into account.
Multiple legal models exist and each will significantly change the landscape that your character works in. Even if it is legal to buy and sell sex, you should determine whether brothels are permitted in your setting and whether those brothels must be licensed. Two sex workers selling sex from the same house meets the definition of a brothel in many countries, so if brothels are illegal or require a license then this set-up would be a crime for your characters!
On top of how your character may be treated by law enforcement or how licensing might impact them, you will need to consider what the society they live in thinks of sex work. Stigma can be pervasive, so it will make a big difference to how they’re treated by people who know about their work and how likely they are to tell people about it.
Some examples of areas of your character’s life that stigma will impact:
- Getting other jobs – Doing sex work full time will create gaps in your character’s employment history which they will need to explain, and stigma around sex work will mean they cannot tell the truth. If the fact they have done/do sex work becomes public knowledge, many jobs may reject them on that basis.
- Traveling – Various countries do not permit sex workers to enter, so your character may have trouble crossing borders or be nervous about their status as a sex worker being discovered whilst they do so.
- Banking – Banks often close the accounts of customers they discover are sex workers. To lower the risk this will happen, your character may avoid paying large sums into the ban to escape suspicion or might use secondary accounts to move money around.
- Housing – Landlords often deny sex workers housing if they are aware of their profession, so your character will need a way to get around this either by lying about their job or by forging work contracts and bank statements or finding a shady landlord who doesn’t ask questions.
- Family relationships – Family members may reject your character if they have strong negative opinions on sex work, leaving them estranged.
- Dating – Lots of people are unwilling to date a sex worker or would view seeing clients as a form of cheating, significantly decreasing your character’s dating pool.
- Raising children – People commonly believe that sex workers should not be allowed to be around children, they may be banned from adopting, and their children may even be bullied by those who know about the person’s profession. Social services might be called on your character if they are a parent, if others know they engage in sex work.
What laws are in place and how much stigma exists around sex work does not tell you precisely how your character will feel about the work, because sex workers are not a monolith. Our experiences vary, including how much we are mistreated or how severe the legal consequences are, and this can shape our views. Sex worker activists tend to agree on positions like strongly favouring the full decriminalization of sex work and treating it like other jobs, but not all sex workers are activists.
What is your character’s opinion on sex work?
This isn’t a trick question. There are plenty of sex workers who deal with internalized whorephobia, causing them to be in denial that they are engaging in sex work or to believe that it’s acceptable only because they make enough money or their circumstances are desperate enough. Others may view sex work as empowering, failing to consider the experiences of people who are not as fortunate as they are.
Your character’s opinion will be influenced by the circumstances they started sex work in and the culture they grew up in. They will not necessarily conform to the position on sex work that they were raised around, because being subject to purity culture and whorephobia can cause someone to radically oppose that bigotry rather than following it, but it will have some sort of effect. Depending on how long they’ve been involved in sex work, this effect will be more or less pronounced. As your character sells sex or strips or does porn for longer, it is likely they will lose their preconceived notions about sex work as their own experiences diverge from the stereotypes.
In addition to your character’s opinion on sex work as a concept, they will also have personal preferences related to the work. Think about why your character does sex work, to help think of these preferences. A disabled character might prefer the flexible hours that come with being an independent sex worker, for example.
Once you know how your character feels about sex work, you can use this to determine what their plans are with regards to the industry and how they might act while working. A porn actor who hates doing online sex work is more likely to hide their face and be cautious about where they advertise. A full service sex worker who sees sex work as a fun side gig which is empowering will be more likely to be open with their friends about their job. With this in mind, you should be able to work out if your character wants to stop doing sex work or sees it as a long-term career.
Why does your character do sex work?
Make a decision about your character’s reasons for doing sex work and be consistent. Your character could be doing it for the money, the flexible working hours, a desire to profit from the sexualization they are already subjected to without being paid, or because their personal situation makes finding other forms of work very difficult or impossible.
The reasons that your character chooses to do sex work should be consistent with their backstory and circumstances, but you should not feel limited to telling the most common story in your narrative. An illegal immigrant who cannot legally work in the country they are living in is likely to engage in sex work due to a lack of other options, but that does not make it impossible that they might also genuinely love sex and find the idea of doing sex work exciting. Alternatively, your character might have a larger number of options and be financially stable but keep doing sex work because they are terrified that they will lose all of the wealth they have earned if they stop.
Your character may also start for one reason and then ultimately continue to do it for a totally different reason after they start!
Does your character know other sex workers?
Most of the time, a character who is a sex worker will know at least some other sex workers to some extent. These could be people who work in the same brothel as your character, strippers at the same club, sex workers who are soliciting on the same street known for prostitution, or online-only sex workers who interact with other porn actors online to gain traction on social media.
These other sex workers will not all be carbon copies of your character. Clashes will happen. Since sex workers are also likely to be marginalized in multiple ways, this is a great chance to delve into the ways your character holds relative privilege or is particularly oppressed compared to the other sex workers they know.
Be careful not to make these other sex worker characters one-dimensional or to imply that your main character is so much more complex than they are. Surrounding your well-rounded character with a bunch of caricatures will make your story less compelling no matter how well your main character is written.
What if you’ve done all of the above, asked yourself these questions and done research, but you’re still worried that your depiction might be offensive or harmful?
First, I want you to know that by reading an article like this and even thinking about this issue, you’re already miles ahead of the average person who adds sex workers to their writing. Thank you for that!
If you’re still worried, talk to sex workers about your concept. Ask one to beta read for you, or pay one to be a sensitivity reader. How much work it’s reasonable to put into this will depend on why you’re writing and what kind of audience you’re creating it for. Fanfiction will need less scrutiny than a book you intend to publish and advertise as a progressive romance with a sex worker protagonist.
Ask yourself what someone would think about sex workers, reading your work, if they didn’t know much about the topic and were open-minded enough to read about the topic. What sort of impression do you think it would give them about what sex work is like? Do you think it would make them more or less bigoted towards sex workers?
Only you can define the goal of your writing and what sort of impact you’d like to have on the reader, but I hope this article helps you to write more accurate sex worker characters!
Jack Talks About Sex Work 