Finding friends who will accept you being a sex worker can be difficult. Sometimes we miss the red flags or ignore them, when someone comes along who doesn’t take issue with our work, because a lot of us are lonely. People take advantage of that for their own ends.
The Cool-By-Proximity Friend
Boring people, who don’t want to experience the bigotry that would be levelled towards them if they did something taboo for themselves, may attach themselves to people they find interesting to be seen as cool by proximity.
These people will out their sex worker friend to people constantly, repeating stories they’ve heard about their work and sensationalizing them. They may interject in conversations about sex workers to say they they know one, only to make recommendations that harm sex workers as if they are an authority, because they want to seem like they know what’s best for us without actually taking the time to learn.
Sex workers make a great conversation piece at any party, if someone wants to be the centre of attention for a moment. We can be brought up a hundred different ways. Is everyone about to play “never have I ever”? They can say their friend would be putting a finger down for every sex question. Has someone asked them what they’ve been up to recently? They can mention going to sex worker events or learning about sex work.
Seeming cool isn’t always about being edgy, but sometimes about appearing progressive. Leftists who know very little about sex worker activism, yet recall the importance of people like Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera for the queer rights movement, can react with embarrassing admiration for people who claim to support sex workers directly or be our friends. Sometimes these faux progressives aren’t even seeking to look good in front of leftists; they may want to shock their conservative parents using the aesthetic of supporting sex workers.
I’ve even had this technique employed on me when I mention my profession, by people who fall over themselves to inform me that they’ve been friends with sex workers before. I can immediately tell that they’re exaggerating their closeness, usually because they lack any sort of deep understanding about the work and fall on one-dimensional empowerment narratives to discuss how their friend feels or felt about doing it. It’s as if they expect me to instantly trust them, using the approval or another sex worker to gain mine.
Knowing I am used the same way by acquaintances of mine makes me incensed. I feel sick at the thought that people will claim to be experts who others should listen to on matters of sex worker rights, purely because of their proximity to me. Any time I have caught someone using me in such a way, the friendship is immediately over for me, even if it takes a while to fully remove myself.
One online friend of mine used to talk about me in group chats and completely misrepresent my experience in sex work to make points. I joined a voice chat on Discord once and caught her arguing that sex work should be legal (even though I was already a staunch advocate for full decriminalization a the time and had explained this to her on multiple occasions), using me as an example of someone who chose to do sex work for empowerment and who likes the job and who therefore shouldn’t be kept from doing it. At that time, I was working long brothel shifts that I hated and I’d regularly cry in the shower at the end of them. I started at 17, because I was homeless without better options. I was disgusted.
Another friend of mine who was clearly using knowing me to seem progressive came home from work one day excited to tell me that she’d corrected someone during a conversation about sex work. She told me that she overheard a co-worker defending his decision to hire someone working in a window in the red light district of Amsterdam. I expected her to tell me that she’d steered him away from using slurs, or corrected claims he might have made about how much the average sex worker enjoys the job. Instead, she told me she’d admonished him with the claim that most sex workers in Amsterdam are sex trafficked. If she’d ever listened to me talk about sex work any of the times I’d complained about the terrible definitions given for sex trafficking or the inaccurate data, she’d have known how much I’d hate what she said and how wrong she was.
I’d rather have friends who don’t pay attention to my doing sex work at all, even if that means lacking support, than have friends who claim to support me as a sex worker only to use me as a conversational prop.
The Fixer Friend
Keeping a friend as a pet project is appealing to a lot of people. The more stigmatized our issues are, the better they get to feel about themselves for providing friendly support.
Christian proselytizers want to bring hookers to Jesus, wannabe therapists seek to find a childhood trauma that will explain why we sell sex or strip or make porn and heal us of it, and self-important entrepreneurs want to turn us into wealthy business people who don’t need to do sex work to make ends meet.
In their quest to fix us, these fixer friends fail to consider what our issues really are. I’ve had devout religious people tell me that I need to turn to God instead of engaging in sin, not understanding that if they offered me money instead of worship then I’d stop. Dozens of sessions of therapy have never uncovered some sort of catalyst to turn me into a whore, yet random untrained people who think of themselves as empaths believe they’ll be able to find something. Men with jobs in finance try to give me advice on saving money, as if the problem is that I’m spending frivolously instead of not earning enough to start with.
When someone’s only interested in you as a project, they’ll leave if they realize you don’t want to be ‘fixed’ or can’t be. Their end goal is for their friend to cease being a sex worker. For a while, they might act as a much-needed shoulder to cry on, but that only lasts as long as they still get a dopamine hit from feeling like they’re improving their life. Once some comes along who is easier to support and acts more grateful for it, they’ll ditch them.
Any progress a sex worker make towards their goals, or changes in their life that lead them away from sex work, are attributed to the friend. Suddenly all the efforts being made by a sex worker to claw themselves out of poverty will be dismissed as having been the result of hard work and willpower, so that the friend can take credit for motivating them. Other people will be told how far they’ve come, as if they’re a pet that was particularly difficult to house train.
Sex workers aren’t broken, so we don’t need friends to fix us.
The Mooch Friend
Sex work isn’t as lucrative as some sensationalizing articles would have you believe, but it is a method of earning income which continues to be available to people who are struggling. For sex workers who use doing sex work as a way to pull themselves out of severe financial struggle, people around them who are in a similar position may view them as a meal ticket. If they are earning large sums, then a lot of people are going to want a piece.
Partners also frequently fall into this category, accepting their partner’s engagement in sex work only when their partner uses that work to pay the bills. That way they can tell themselves that they’re earning money from other people’s attraction to someone (something) they get sexual access to for free, rather than viewing their partner as a full person who has a job involving selling sexual activity which isn’t about them.
No matter the precise reason that mooching friends and partners decide to profit from the sex workers they meet, their actions have the same result. If we are providing for someone else, we have to see more clients to earn that money, and that extra work can take a toll. Burnout can happen, leaving us exhausted and too tired to find our own clients or make content, at which point these mooching friends either leave or step in and turn themselves into pimps.
The Friend Who’s Holding Out For a Hook-Up
Selling sexual services doesn’t automatically make you more promiscuous in your personal life, but some people befriend sex workers under the assumption that they are. Sex workers are imagined to be uniquely skilled at sex, largely because people don’t realize that the skills you need to satisfy clients are not the same as those you need to have mutually satisfying recreational sex.
Why would a sex worker want to do extra work for free? We often require more of an incentive to have sex with someone, not less, equipped with the knowledge that we could be getting paid for it.
Usually friends who just want sex will weed themselves out quickly. They won’t take on the emotional labour of supporting their friend through their struggles and don’t want to have deep conversations. Instead, questions about sex work revolve around the idea that it’s enjoyable or titillating because it’s taboo, whilst they visibly battle with their jealousy.
When my work comes up in conversation and I choose not to lie, I notice people who previously found me uninteresting will become magnetized to me. My personality and appearance don’t change. The knowledge that someone else finds me desirable enough to pay for my company is what lures people in and makes them pretend to give a shit about the words that are coming out of my mouth.
It’s not real friendship when someone’s only putting in the effort to keep you around for long enough to fuck you.
As you can imagine, I often struggle to make friends.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 