For my first blog post I’ve had a few half written things knocking around but this felt especially relevant. As always, I don’t speak for everyone in my community, this blog is a space where I’m sharing my personal experiences and thoughts, unaffiliated with anything other than myself.
When you start doing sex work, you’re warned; don’t let your family find out, be careful, don’t get stalked and/or murdered. But little warning is ever given for the personal effects of coming out or being outed by people in your local community. A lot of my working friends live in big cities, and I’m sure that the stigma surrounding sex work is still a massive detriment to their personal relationships, but there’s a special kind of ostracization that comes with living in a small town. I started my own sex work career a few years ago, at first I was very secretive about any aspect that wasn’t just posting lewds and nudes – these I could get away with, in the age of instagram models and Love Island, a photograph of a nude body was hardly scandalous. Things started to get messy for me when I started being more open about my cam girl work, when I started posting video content, when people started to be confronted with the reality of my work and not the bite size wank bank images posted for free on social media.
I will firstly mention that I have some very beautiful and supportive friends, ones that will listen to voice notes of me detailing my latest weirdest client ever, answer the phone late at night when I’ve had a bad shift, and read over my articles before I send them away (no matter how crude the content) – they never speak to me like I’m different, there’s never a secret sexual motivation, to them I am just me, and for this I love them endlessly. My heart and home will always be open to these people, and very little could ever change that.
Unfortunately, not everyone will view it this way. I’ve had old friends turn their backs on me completely since I started my work, I’ve been told about the comments they make when I’m not around, the outlandish tales made up, I’m even surprised by the creativity of some of them. This in itself doesn’t bother me, I’m more surprised by how openness around sex and pleasure has the ability to destroy someone’s opinion of someone else so instantly. People I’ve held while they drunk sobbed about their boyfriends and cleaned up their vomit now won’t associate with me due to disgust around my work and fear that I’ll now obviously want to fuck their partners, like I’ve been bitten by some radioactive horny sex work spider that has taken over my ability to think rationally. The constant pendulum swing between “dirty scum” and “seducing everyone” is eternally tiring. I respect a boundary and will step back if someone doesn’t want me to exist around their partner due to their preconceived ideas around sex work and their own insecurity – I get it, I really do, I’ve been that girl checking a man’s phone, I’ve been that girl crying over a man who won’t stop liking someone else’s photos, I really get it. And I think that’s what hurts most.
Navigating what’s left after the initial blow out is its own experience. Now that it’s out in the open, people know, and now your friends are associated with you and by extension your work, you’ll start to figure out a bit more about where you stand in people’s lives. Being in a small town makes this harder, the people you’re around are often the same people you’ve been around for years. People also talk, and word spreads fast. In my own experience I find that small town people are less tolerant to sex work than city people, friends I’ve made in major UK cities have hardly batted an eye when I’ve disclosed my work, more concerned about our mutual interests than having a moral panic. But I also think people will treat you differently regardless of setting.
My single friends still largely treat me the same, I’ve unfortunately experienced some single male friends shift their view of me and suddenly become overtly sexual – but I find these people probably weren’t very good friends to begin with. A lot of the issues with sex worker adjacent friendships comes from partnered people, or more specifically, their partners (I don’t like to generalize, but it’s usually straight cis women). A lot of my male partnered friends often come to me with questions around their sexual relationships with their partners. I’ve got the same hardware but I’m not going to shy away from telling them the gory details because I’m so desensitized to the sticky stuff. Some will mention wishing they were femme presenting so they could cash in on sex work – I suggest maybe making some content with their girlfriends to spice up the relationship and have some extra income for dates. Otherwise it’s like any other friendship – to me anyway. But by virtue of my job and the way I present (especially online, where my presentation is directly tied to my income) it doesn’t get viewed this way, especially to their romantic partners. Being a sex worker means that friends that may have stuck around after the initial blowout may disappear completely one day, either by sudden disgust, being groomed by right wing media, or simply because their partners have disallowed them from being around us – this is often done without explanation or any communication, and you learn to live with the ambiguity.
If a sex worker is friends with a person, it usually means that they are a good person. We deal with people day in and day out, abusive people, rude people, creepy people – we can sniff out an ulterior motive like a bloodhound on a crime scene – this is our livelihood. Maintaining friendships as a sex worker is hard, generally people will alienate you completely or start to view you as an object for sex and nothing else – so if we maintain a friendship with someone it usually means that they’ve done neither of those things. It means they’re nice, it means they’re not trying to use us, it means we feel safe around them and by extension we feel safe around you too. I have the utmost solidarity with other womxn – and it saddens me that I could have been a cause to another persons sadness and fears, because I’ve been there myself. But it’s always a kick in the teeth, the knowledge that my friendships mean nothing by virtue of my job.
The inverse is also true, where I’ve had female friend’s boyfriend’s not let them hang out with me because I’m a “slag” or a bad influence purely because of my job. This is an issue of misogyny, abuse, and power. A subject I don’t feel comfortable addressing in this blog post, as the year leads up to the second anniversary of my own attack at the hands of a romantic partner.
Dating is a whole other ball game, somehow worse, but also not as bad. I value friendship more so over romantic relationships these days – but when I was still infatuated by the idea of love this was an especially hard pill to swallow. I’m going to be writing something up relating to that soon, maybe continue the Small Town Slut heading as a series of accounts of my own experiences. It’s a very cathartic outlet.
As I write this, it feels good to spew out all of those thoughts at once despite how negative it may all seem, but I’m comforted by the knowledge that this weekend I’ll be laughing around friends that I’ve known for such a long time – before the sex work, before the stigma – who still just see me as me. Nothing more, but more importantly, nothing less.
A. x
CYBER HARLOT 
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