As the Online Safety Act comes into effect in the UK, impacting websites where sex workers advertise our services, we find ourselves on the cusp of a nation-wide censorship effort that will push sex workers towards third party managers and brothel or street work. Requirements for age verification of viewers (for everything from nudity to written sexual fantasies) puts platforms in a position where they must work out a way to store extremely sensitive personal data of their users at a significant financial cost. Since clients are unsurprisingly reticent to verify their identity with escorting sites, particularly in a country where efforts are being made by certain MPs to criminalize the purchase of sex, this restricts sex workers’ ability to reach clients online.
Adultwork, a very popular UK escorting site, recently published the changes they are making as a result of the new legislation. They’re as frustrating as expected. All free images and text must now comply with their standards for what is Safe For Work, with the content of our main profiles (where we explain our services) about to be age-restricted by July 1st.
The expectations when it comes to visual content are ludicrously strict. They expect sex workers’ pictures to include them in either “modest attire” or for more revealing clothing to be worn in an “non-sexualised context”. Given that the context is an escort advertisement, it should be obvious how ridiculous this standard is. How they will determine what is sexualised is not entirely clear, but the list of things that are explicitly banned is long and many of them are ridiculous.
Among the things that are banned in image or video form are nudity, “sexual poses”, sex acts, the presence of bondage gear, “arousal-focused framing”, “suggestive poses”, and the use of emojis or light suggestive phrases like an egglant or 18+ sign!
Adultwork considers these pictures to be “sexual arousal poses” which could now only be shown in paid private galleries behind an age gate. As expected, the new legislation is causing platforms to panic and limit the content they show as much as possible to lower the risk of being considered non-compliant, in part because the Online Safety Act is intentionally vague at points. We can’t even make the images compliant with emojis or black boxes across them, because nudity and sexual posing being implied is considered to be an issue as much as showing skin is.
Text content also faces restrictions on Adultwork, in tag lines and image descriptions. These rules do not only ban graphic descriptions of sex acts. Writing is also not permitted to be “intended to cause sexual arousal”. We’re limited to suggestive and flirty.
Instead of being able to write “trans man (FTM) with a pussy!” as my tagline, I’m limited to the far more generic “trans man (FTM) looking forward to meeting you” – the intent of this change being that the publicly accessible advert has plausible deniability about offering sexual services. In practice, it would mean my clients are less likely to be aware of my anatomy when booking me because so many of them are uneducated. Many sex workers use these taglines in similar ways, to make our clients aware of parts of our anatomy or specific services we offer. If all we’re going to get to show to users who aren’t logged in is the tagline, this becomes even more vital.
Placing the rest of our profile besides the pictures and tagline and our contact information behind an age gate means that clients will be even less likely than they already are to read our terms in advance. Sex workers will no longer be able to lay out our boundaries to clients in a concise way and will have to repeat them all to each individual person who contacts us, wasting far more of our time and leading to a higher rate of misunderstandings. It also means we can expect to see a lower rate of inquiries in general from clients who give up on websites where independent sex workers advertise and turn to agencies or brothels instead because it’s easier to be matched with someone who adheres to their preferences there.
Adultwork is not the only site that will be putting these measures into place, though each site will have their own standards based on how they interpret the new expectations outlined by the UK government. We can expect the effects to be sudden and harsh, since our clients are not as aware of legislative changes as we are. A lot of my own clients don’t even realize it’s legal for me to be selling sex to them! This means they’ll suddenly be confronted with the changes when they next seek to make a booking, after the changes take effect. We can, at minimum, expect a very quiet period as they adjust. Most of us can’t afford that during a cost of living crisis.
Ultimately, this law will do the exact opposite of what the MPs who backed it said it would; it will push sex workers into more exploitative agreements with third parties and street sex work, because it will make online work without a manager less viable. More workers will be selling sex in situations which can be legally defined as trafficking. Online advertising is a tool sex workers can use to retain control. That isn’t to say that the platforms we use don’t already have their issues, but that this makes them worse instead of better.
We need the ability to advertise freely, making it clear exactly what services we offer without relying on euphemism. Placing advertisements should be free, because these sites cannot function without us doing so, and additional promotion should be fairly priced. Categories should function to allow clients to find the specific kinds of sex workers they’re looking for in the quickest and easiest way, not according to transphobic standards upheld by the owners of the sites. We can achieve this by unionizing and putting pressure on platforms, especially in circumstances where it’s easy for us to created platforms of our own or where we have many options so we’re not stuck with following the rules of one. The law doesn’t need to get involved and every time a government tries to legislate us away, it only makes us work in more dangerous and difficult circumstances.
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Jack Talks About Sex Work 