How to Discuss Sex Work with Friends and Family

As with many taboo topics, it can be hard to decide how to handle the conversation around sex work when it comes up. Between bills restricting porn access and stories on the news about prostitution stings and brothel raids, discussions are happening more and more within families and friendship groups who would ordinarily avoid discussing sexual matters.

Before getting into these conversations, you’ll want to know some basics so that you don’t fall into spreading whorephobic rhetoric yourself! Some of the major things you’ll want to know are what terms to use and what legal model sex workers advocate for (decriminalization).

My recommendation for people new to the topic is to always use the term “sex worker” and then to describe the type of sex work being discussed, because this is the most broadly accepted term by sex workers that is not considered derogatory. As for understanding what rights sex workers are fighting for and the laws we prefer, overwhelmingly we’re in support of full decriminalization. If you want a source to show friends and family that they’re more likely to respect than a sex worker rights organisation, you can direct them towards Amnesty International’s support for the decriminalization of sex work.

One of the biggest concerns may be around how to bring up the topic at all, and for this I would advise relying on organic moments to mention sex work or waiting for the other person to raise the topic. This might mean bringing up a TV show you recently watched that has sex workers in it (I recommend Pose), an article you read, or just being prepared for when someone you know brings it up themselves.

Let’s cover some specific scenarios where this might come up and options for how to tackle the conversations…

A family member sends you an article about a brothel raid or sex trafficking in your country or local area:

Whether you’re sent an article or end up watching a news segment together, family members might raise concerns with you about sex trafficking and brothels where you live. In this scenario, where they’re already sympathetically viewing sex workers as victims, you can use this angle to your advantage to talk about sex worker rights! In response to concerns about their safety, you can bring up how police involvement actually makes sex workers less safe. Depending on the laws where you live, you can talk about sex workers being arrested or deported during brothel raids or prostitution stings rather than given any kind of support.

If your family member then starts to talk about the prevalence of trafficking and needing to crack down on it, even if they agree brothel raids and arresting sex workers isn’t the answer, you can talk to them about the driving forces behind trafficking. It is a good idea to compare to another industry at this stage, to get away from focusing too much on sex which comes with extra baggage. You can compare the sex industry to the agricultural industry, where people often cross borders for the promise of work which actually involves worse pay and conditions than they were told – most trafficking of sex workers is very similar in how it works. As with all kinds of trafficking for the purpose of exploitative labour, the solution is to end poverty and open borders so people can cross without the need for third parties.

Your friend is considering starting sex work due to financial difficulty:

You may come across friends who talk about doing sex work as a way to make ends meet. In some cases this might manifest as jokes about getting a sugar daddy or starting an OnlyFans, and in others it may be more clearly serious like a friend disclosing that they have an audition at a strip club or were directly offered money for sex. No matter how much they seem to be joking, you should take these comments and respond to them as if they’re sincere. Sometimes people are testing the waters with humour to see if their friends will accept them.

When discussing the prospect of them starting sex work, it is a good idea to mention sex worker organisations in your area or resources they could use to be safer. You might even want to mention a book or article you’ve read on the topic, to signal that this is a topic you care about and that you are a safe person to talk to about sex work. Neither encourage nor discourage their ideas, but instead allow yourself to be used as a sounding board for their concerns and step in to offer information when possible. Just because your friend is considering sex work doesn’t mean they’ll known more than you about the reality of it, so you shouldn’t be shy about discussing safety issues they might face.

If you’re in a position to offer to be a safety buddy or offer general support, let them know.

An acquaintance makes a derogatory joke about sex workers:

When someone makes a joke framing any group negatively, you can always question what the point of the joke was intended to be or take it completely seriously to expose the issue with it. This may be taken as confrontational depending on your phrasing, however it is likely to be viewed as less so than directly challenging the harm behind the comment or claiming offense.

Imagine someone jokes, “How do you make a hormone [whore moan]? Don’t pay her.” Perhaps other people who are also present to hear the joke even laugh. One option as a response is to take the comment as sincere and to respond that it makes a lot of sense for a sex worker to complain if you don’t pay her for the services she performed, as with any job. A likely response to this will be the claim that it’s a joke and mild annoyance, though just as often they will be caught off-guard by the neutral nature of the reply. If the follow-up includes encouragement not to take it so seriously, you can point out that you weren’t sure how else to take it because not paying a sex worker doesn’t seem very funny to you.

Using the correct terms without actively correcting language (like if the other person is calling sex workers whore or prostitutes or hookers) also tends to help re-set the tone of the conversation to a more humanizing one which centres us as working people without making the argument into a semantic one.

If the joke is more extreme, veering into the territory of dead hooker jokes, you can also react with surprise over how casually they’re discussing sex workers’ deaths. Bringing in a personal element here is the most effective at shutting down the hateful comments quickly. If you know a sex worker personally, this is a good time to bring them up with no identifying information. You can mention how the violence rate against sex workers makes you worry for your friend who is one. If you don’t know any sex workers personally, you can use a public figure who is a sex worker or a recent news story about someone for the same purpose, to reframe the joke around real people who are at risk.

Your family member brings up the idea that sex workers are objectifying themselves and frames sex work as inherently degrading to women:

Both feminist and conservative family members may sound as though they share a perspective here, so how you tackle this argument will differ depending on what you known of their political alignment. While both a conservative and a left-wing person may say they think sex work degrades women, the reasons underpinning this can be very far apart.

If your family member is using a feminist lens to argue that sex work is degrading, you can talk about how the stigma against sex work is built upon foundations of sexism and wanting to penalize women who do not conform to patriarchal expectations. The fact that women who sell sex often suffer violence at the hands of clients is evidence of them being further disrespected, not the work being inherently degrading by itself. Challenge the idea that there is anything wrong with the boundaries women put in place regarding when they have sex and who with, including when it is money. From here you can also talk about how not all sex workers are women, but you should avoid starting with this point! Since the majority of sex workers are women, those who are primarily concerned with women’s safety will see this as dismissive. Focus on how lessening the stigma is what makes women safer.

If your family member is using a conservative lens to argue that sex work is degrading, you are likely not going to change their mind without significantly shifting their entire worldview. That’s not going to happen in one conversation. Instead of aiming to change their view, it is a better idea to ask questions in a way that will make them uncomfortable enough not to want to raise the issue again in future. Consider asking why it’s degrading, pointing out that the majority of those who pay for sex are conservative men, and continuing to speak positively about sex workers until they give up on the conversation.

Your friend starts talking about OnlyFans and saying it is essentially prostitution in a negative way:

A lot of the arguments against independent porn performers involve comparing them to sex workers who work in person and sell sex, with comments like “OnlyFans is basically prostitution” being very common. It’s easy to want to jump to defending porn performers by pointing out the ways it is not the same as selling sex, however this approach can be viewed as throwing sex workers under the bus. Why would it be bad if OnlyFans was essentially the same as selling sex? What’s wrong with selling sex? Try asking these questions. Don’t capitulate to the idea that selling sex is bad and that doing porn is less bad by comparison.

From here, you can get into their real objections to online sex work. Is it that they hold a negative view of people who pay for porn, whom OnlyFans creators profit from? Point out that people pay for all kinds of other media, like TV and film. Is it that they think sharing sexual images and videos is disrespectful to future relationships that person might have? Acknowledge that not everyone deals with the level of jealousy they do and that sex workers have no reason to cater to the preferences of people they could potentially date in the future as a way to decide their present actions.

However you broach these topics with your friends and family and co-workers and acquaintances, always keep in mind that you don’t need to know everything and that outsourcing is okay! It’s alright to say that you’re not sure about something and to look into it, or to encourage people you know to look at resources created by sex workers ourselves and by the advocacy groups we form. By challenging this rhetoric, you’re already doing better than a hell of a lot of people.

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The prompt to write this article came as a result of common responses to a survey I conducted, “What Are Your Thoughts About Sex Work?”, the purpose of which was to gather ideas for the most useful themes for Transactional Intercourse, an anthology of trans and intersex sex workers’ writing.

If you want to see a variety of other resources and extra articles stemming from that survey, you can sign up here on Substack where they’ll be posted very soon. You’ll get updates with more information about trans and intersex sex work and the launch of the anthology on Kickstarter. You can also sign up to be notified on Kickstarter directly here, if you just want to know then the project goes live.