How can sex workers stay authentic?

The night I first committed to starting sex work, I spent hours poring over info online. There were so many acronyms, references, and attitudes that I simply didn’t understand. Working through all the blogs, forums, and threads I could get my hands on, I kept finding two consistent and completely contradictory pieces of advice. Conceal my true identity. Be fully authentic.

I didn’t understand the intensity of the stigma that sex workers faced before I became one. Or rather, I did – but only implicitly, through my own judgements of sex workers. I never consciously admitted anything to myself, or friends.  It was impossible for me to not see sex workers as we are constructed in society – as dirtied and waylaid. It was only when I considered doing sex work that I had to brush up against this stigma from the other side. I learnt quickly that protecting my identity was imperative, because the stigmatisation and criminalisation of those who sell sex can cost us everything.

I didn’t understand the intensity of the stigma that sex workers faced before I became one. Or rather, I did – but only implicitly, through my own judgements of sex workers.

On the flip side, I was reading repeatedly that in a hypercompetitive market, the only path to success was being true to myself. After a few years of sex work, I have to agree. Authenticity of our personalities and sexual interests helps us stay individual in an oversaturated market. Being false to ourselves leads to interactions we don’t really want, and eventual burn out. From a client’s perspective, authenticity is what creates pleasure! Clients want to know they can trust the person they’re with to be emotionally and physically engaged on a genuine level. Authenticity is the bridge between clients and sex workers to create a mutually enjoyable experience.

Early  in my career, I felt caught between these contradictory tenets of sex work. I chose ‘personas’ that were completely different to who I really was to keep myself safe, and then returned home from clients, exhausted. I burned out way too soon, yet seeking advice from fellow sex workers complicated the issue even further.

I was reading repeatedly that in a hypercompetitive market, the only path to success was being true to myself.

Many of us are familiar with the whorearchy, a concept that positions different types of sex workers, subject to the varying degrees of stigma and criminalisation they experience. Those with little to no contact with clients, such as cam workers, sit at the top, while  full service street workers form the base. Often, this marginalization is reinforced and held up by sex workers ourselves. Learning about the whorearchy early in my journey in the sex industry helped me to parse a recurrent experience that until then, I hadn’t understood. The less criminalized contact a sex worker had with a client, the less they had to justify their position as a sex worker. It could be more of a vocation, or even a conversation topic at parties with civilians. The more criminalised, the more the worker had to justify why they were doing the work. The less they were seen as authentic in their role, the more they were seen as coerced - dirtied and waylaid.

Within this, I kept coming up against an additional complication. The market does not always necessarily want authenticity from certain types of sex workers. For example, sex workers of colour face racist assumptions and projections — authenticity could run the risk of reinforcing those stereotypes or breaking the fantasy. Often, sex workers of colour are working to industry standards of presentation and comportment that white workers have set. Our marketing has to accommodate for that, and consider whether an ‘authentic’ trait may actually be a detractor in an industry that is not at all ‘colourblind’.

The market does not always necessarily want authenticity from certain types of sex workers.

These complications bring us to the crux of the issue, which is that sex workers are taken to be the sum of our marketing. As increasing criminalisation of sex worker advertising spaces pushes us on to more mainstream platforms, we move from being in sex worker and client only spaces, to brushing up against the public. We now potentially share our pictures with everyone from clients to journalists to meme accounts. At the same time, this very criminalisation means we have to keep our identities private. Sex workers who are face-out and speak publicly are often always promoting their brand at the same time – as our bodies are our brands, it's impossible not to. The result is that the general public takes sex workers’ marketed personas to be the verisimilitude of our personalities. In the midst of this knot, managing a balance between privacy and authenticity can feel self-contradictory, or even impossible at times. So, how can we reconcile this? How do we maintain positive, authentic relationships with our clients and ourselves?

Some time into grappling with these questions, I was planning for my first photoshoot. I had already chosen my lingerie and was curating a moodboard, focusing on the sensual, luxurious, confident, and loving experience I wanted to bring to mind. It was when I was choosing between colour palettes that I had a eureka moment – this was a creative practice! Considering the experience I wanted with my clients, crafting my marketing accordingly, tinkering over every detail from lighting to poses – all this was a creative process. Creativity lies somewhere between expressing an authentic feeling, and using imagination for embellishment.

Talking to fellow sex workers, I learnt that many of my colleagues had a similar understanding of authenticity. Choosing a persona to market doesn’t have to be a choice between anonymity and veracity. It's about tapping into a part of you to explore, dressing up, and having fun. All interaction does this, to a degree. After all, we dress and speak differently at the office compared to how we do at the social event afterwards. We certainly adopt a different side of ourselves in kink – not one that we display at all times, but one that is genuine, nonetheless. No one persona in our lives encapsulates all of us, but our different personas express different parts of us. Adopting this approach has helped me to tap in to the elements of myself that genuinely adore being a girlfriend and mistress. Creativity around those elements results in what we call marketing. In this way, I’m actually all the more present with my clients than I was at the start of my career.

All this was a creative process. Creativity lies somewhere between expressing an authentic feeling, and using imagination for embellishment.

In turn, understanding sex workers’ authenticity as a creative process benefits everyone who consumes sex workers’ labour. Whether passively through shared online spaces and the media, or actively as clients, those who interact with sex workers benefit from seeing our personalities as an authentic part, rather than the whole sum, of ourselves. Clients who can appreciate this meaning of authenticity can truly relax, knowing that they are enjoying a shared moment of play with the person they feel attracted to. And perhaps it can encourage clients to tap into a different part of themselves too. After all, people are so multifaceted that authenticity can seem like an impossible ask. But play isn’t!

Are you a sex worker with a story, opinion, news, or tips to share? We'd love to hear from you!

We started the tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify those who aren't handed the mic and bring attention to the issues ya'll care about the most. Got a tale to tell? 👇☂️✨