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My new piece with @thegoodclientguide is now live!

Ever wondered how to be the perfect cam client? ✨🤫

You can read the full article on their website here: https://goodclientguide.com/cam-girl-etiquette-sex-worker-blog/

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.

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

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