Gatekeeping might not be such a bad thing.

As always, I don’t speak for everyone in my community, just for myself.

A lot of us are fiercely protective of our community, it’s a very precious yet secretive place. I have some community friends I’ve known for years but I couldn’t tell you their government name if you held a gun to my head. There’s a level of understanding that we all have with each other, an unspoken respect, a perverse camaraderie.

Civilians (for the uninitiated, in the industry this refers to non-sex workers) will often try to come into our communities, often due to morbid curiosity, some kind of identity crisis, or sometimes for more sinister reasons. When this happens it’s a reminder that we are still the outliers, it’s like the zoo animals noticing the glass – our cultivated spaces don’t feel quite as safe anymore. Obviously civs will join the community, nobody is born a sex worker after all, but there’s a difference between the hobbyist not yet ready to commit and someone who wants to wear our skin like a costume.

I once helped an old school acquaintance get set up to be a webcam model, after she’d asked for information about my work due to finding herself in an uncertain financial position. I spent a lot of time explaining everything and helping her get set up. She did one shift. In that one shift, she earned well, as most of us do on our first shift when we’re new and shiny and the clients think they can take advantage. In that one shift, of approximately 3 hours, she had learnt more about sex work than I could ever know having done this for years. She was an expert now, the pioneer of all sex work. There’s something especially perverse about a civ with 3 hours of sex work experience trying to tell me how to run my business. She stopped talking to me and didn’t work another shift. A few months later she asks me for info on getting onto a guest list for a private fetish event. I ignored her. She unfollowed me.

Now, she’s a born again Christian, sober, all the virtue signals one could include in an instagram bio – complete with a video of being dunked in a kiddy pool by a smiling American with the white picket fence teeth. Her existence now centers around a belief system that vilifies my very existence, our existence as a community. We will all burn in eternal hellfire and have metal rods poked through our eyeballs while being spanked by naked devils or whatever the gospel says. Maybe Mary Magdalene wasn’t a whore after all.

A large part of not wanting to help people get into the industry comes from a place of knowing that eventually there’s a possibility that they will turn on you and the industry as a whole. A lot of civs come to us with the belief they will make life changing income in a short amount of time, that they will be doted upon by adoring fans and money lavished upon them with ease. This is just delusion. Yes, there are times where it will feel like money is abundant, but there will also be nights where you talk to strangers for 2 hours to make the equivalent of your coffee order – that side of the work doesn’t quite make it to StripTok, Switter, or the glamorous Instagram pages. They don’t show when a client will come into your chat room or to your stage and demand an act for a few pennies, or calls you a string of derogatory slurs when you don’t obey (though they are the ones seeking us out in these spaces, creating demand for our supposed disgustingness, the cognitive dissonance is impressive). When a civ cosplaying as a sex worker has one good shift, it solidifies the bastardization that we all make endless money for barely any work. They didn’t make a lot of money because sex work is easy, they made a lot because they were new, the new slide on the playground, the shiny new Pokémon card in the deck, give it a week and the novelty will have worn off and they’ll be having to focus like the rest of us. It is a job, after all.

And when that one shift goes badly, like they often do, then sex work is the root of all evil; nobody can consent to it, we’re all being pimped out and are victims of our situation. The failed sex worker to SWERF pipeline is a quick one. But simply not being cut out for sex work is a conversation a lot of them aren’t ready to have yet. I’m no good at organised sports, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to start campaigning for footballers to have their bank accounts closed and their children taken away.

Being a sex worker has very real real-world consequences, especially for those in our community who come from disadvantaged backgrounds – which is most of us. Poor, disabled, neurodivergent, queer, trans, the list goes on. Not to forget people of ethnic minorities and immigrants who are statistically more likely to experience institutional harm before we even add in the dimension of the sex worker identity.

Being targeted by a pissed off civ that’s turned SWERF is a very frightening risk; there’s something more insidious about an acquaintance with a political ideology and a bridge to burn than a fanatic client who wants you to meet their mother. The fallout can be lesser, such as having social media mass reported, accounts shut down, maybe content leaked, but things can go as far as having social services called on families, losing civilian jobs, threats of violence, stalking, and even murder. There’s a very real and bubbling hatred for sex workers with the recent rise of Andrew tate-esque podcasters and right wing media, being doxxed online is like being served up on a platter to a right wing lunatic frothing at the mouth to become a martyr of some kind.

It’s times like this that we tend to batten down the hatches, we get defensive and more careful in what we discuss, even in our ‘safe spaces’. This is something I’m noticing a lot in the online communities I’m a part of – there’s less lighthearted talk about how work went, more code words and acronyms, no discussion at all about screening and secret safety tips – everyone feels the surveillance and potential risk of anon accounts using this information to try to identify or harm us. I’m even finding myself being defensive in real life, ready to bite at the slightest comment about my work.

We shouldn’t lock the gate completely, but maybe keeping it on a heavy latch for now isn’t such a bad idea.

A. x