Small Town Slut: Why I outed myself.

As always, I only speak for myself and not for the community as a whole.

Outing myself allowed me to maintain a sense of control over my own narrative, this is the most important fact. Sex work has always been beneficial to me as it allows me greater control over my life and my self image. I create my own schedule around my life, I control how people access me, I control who can access me, it affords me independence and financial freedom I didn’t have access to before. Most of my experiences around sex work have allowed me greater control over my life – so why would telling people about it not follow this same precedent?

I’d briefly outed myself in the past when I was still finding my feet in making content as opposed to just live work, I’d posted an onlyfans link to my personal instagram when I first started toying with content under a different name. Within two months someone local to me had screenshot all of my content and started sending it to other people I knew socially, I found out when a friend’s boyfriend had ended up receiving said images in a group chat. At first, I felt rallied around by people contacting me to ask what happened, I soon realised they weren’t asking me out of concern but because this was the newest thing to gawk at. He remained untouched by it – despite the emotional harm it caused me, losing income, having to rebrand my entire career, and then going back into the proverbial sex work closet for another two years. It wasn’t that these people had now seen my genitals (quite frankly I couldn’t care less about that as we all have them), it was that these people had feigned sympathy to gain information – and I had been naive enough to believe it. I think this was probably the first slap in the face for being a sex worker that I received from my wider social group. You never quite get the reaction you’re expecting once you’re one of us – I know whenever someone takes issue with me that this aspect of my identity becomes cannon fodder.

And really, if the worst thing they can say about me is that I’m naked on the internet then I can’t really be that bad overall right? I’ve branded myself with that scarlet letter long before anyone else could.

I suppose it comes from a need to beat someone else to the punch, to exert some kind of control over the whole situation. I imagine it as a big snarling dog dying to get away, my ability to be unashamed is the chain holding it back from utter chaos. The dog itself is quite friendly, it’s other people’s reactions that are the issue. If I’m going to be open about what I do for work, then I’m going to do it on my terms, in a way that allows me an element of privacy. Not telling people things leads to digging, especially in small town communities – if someone gets a whiff of suspicion (and they will, this is inevitable), then they will start looking, and it’s surprisingly easy to get found out on the internet these days. This leads to other people who don’t understand what you do to share this information without your consent, embellishing the truth either deliberately or out of ignorance along the way. Further, not all ‘outing’ will be done maliciously – I’ve had friends very casually drop my work into conversation in front of acquaintances, likely having forgot that it isn’t exactly normal passing conversation and not considering wether I’d want to be ‘out’ to this stranger. It might not be malicious but it’s outing all the same, and that’s why I try to stay ahead of it. Taking away the secrecy takes away the curiosity, which also takes away the power. It doesn’t make for good gossip if it’s common knowledge.

Outing myself also feels like a political act. In a world where the existence of sex workers is so heavily politicized (as well as mostly any other non-majority identity marker), it feels important to be open about my human experience of something as simple as a job. I am privileged, to an extent. I’m working class and neurodivergent, I grew up in an area of high childhood poverty, the area I live now is still considered impoverished, but I’m also white, cisgendered, well educated, and live in a country with a social safety net and national healthcare should my life ever implode before my eyes – should the shit hit the proverbial fan I would still survive.

My academic research is tied to sex work, which allows me more freedom to be out in my academic career too – in my context this aspect of my identity adds credibility to the things I write (I’m also self funded, though unfortunate this allows me some additional freedom without fear of my funding being pulled). For other student sex workers, it’s better to keep this part of their identity hidden away. Being out can lead to issues of credibility being questioned, intellectual property dismissed, and funding being pulled. We’ve all seen the tabloid articles of nursing students being expelled from courses for having onlyfans accounts. It has real world consequences. I only ‘came out’ academically once I started my PhD, I’m very lucky to have a supervisor that champions the underdog and has been very accommodating whenever I mention my work outside of academia – the situation could have been very different had I been out sooner; when I had less degrees, less supportive professors, and less social capital to throw around.

I can only write of consequences from those relevant to myself – I don’t have children, I have very little direct family (I am ‘out’ to my only sibling), my career outside of sex work is academia and writing centered around sex work – but the consequences for sex workers with more responsibility and social roles can be much bigger. Social services (Child Protective Services for the international folk reading), job loss, homelessness, it can get really messy. Therefore it’s easier for me to be out due to my privilege in this sense, I have less to lose. I’ve met a lot of other sex workers; a lot online, some out, some not, some mothers, some not, and all I see are people doing what they can to make it happen. This shouldn’t be something that people have to hide, it isn’t something shameful.

It’s important that sex workers share their experiences either good or bad, because our human experience matters – people will shit all over us regardless so we should at least get some say in the narrative. One thing that always strikes me when I meet other sex workers or even log into the cam sites to work, is the diverse range of all of us. Anyone and everyone is a sex worker, and now when I walk down the street I know I could be walking past one of us at any moment and I’d never know – because we’re just like everyone else. This is what I think is so important for non sex workers to understand, but it’s hard for us to show our humanity in a climate where everything we do is villainised and politicized – and for some sex workers, it’s simply not safe to have that dialogue at all.

We should only talk about our experiences and our identity if it’s safe for us to do so, and for me, it is for the most part, and that’s why I do it. I can deal with a bit of social pushback, and when I think of other sex workers with so much more to lose it’s the least that I can do. Maybe out of some kind of guilt at how my sex work isn’t my survival anymore (it pays the bills but I won’t starve without it), or maybe gratitude for those before me that have endured for me to be able to do this at all today, I’m not sure. But it again ties back to the same idea of controlling my own narrative, and having some say in that of the narrative of my community. Even if it only extends to this tiny part of the internet that I’ve carved out for myself.