In the Independent: what a student sex worker in the UK thinks of her job.
“Sophie” is 22 and paying for her five year course at university via sex work.
“You get a lot of weird requests. Before you meet you get that out in the open by messaging, they [the clients] say what they want, and you say yes I’ll do that, or no I won’t do that,” and, Sophie says, “you hope they pay attention, but they don’t.”
There is no safety net. “I think it’s hard to…you can pull out every stop to make sure you are going to be ok, and it just doesn’t always work that way. You think its ok, and it’s not,” she said.
There’s a long pause. Eventually she says: “It has happened but, I don’t know, it’s part of the job really, it’s a risk.”
After an ‘outcall’ when she couldn’t get away from the client, “I decided I wasn’t going to do it again, and it was too much.” Having quit, she found herself struggling financially and faced with dropping out, she went back to working in the sex industry.
But she didn’t like it. She doesn’t like it.
Sophie is resigned and bitter about the perception of sex work – particularly the character of Belle du Jour. “I hate it. Because, say I work for a hundred pounds an hour, that it makes it sound very classy, whereas I tend to be going to real s***holes … Yeah, it is a hundred pounds for an hour, but you can be thinking about that hour for the next month.”
She wonders how her clients afford her, continuing, “I don’t like a lot of them. I wonder why they’re there. I’m wary of them, why they’re not seeing women their age when they’re a lot older than you.”
Maybe because they don’t like women. Maybe they like sex but not women, and sex for money does away with the need to interact for all that time when you’re not having sex.
Sophie’s work is carefully separate from her university life. “I’ve met my best friends here, and they are my best friends, but I certainly believe they wouldn’t look at me in the same way if I told them what I did.” None of her friends or family know.
It’s difficult for her to keep up a relationship, never mind start one. “There’s guys I like now, and I’d like it to be more, but it’s just not possible, not at the moment. Because this is not ok, and a guy would not accept this.”
“I walk down the street and I think if people knew what I was like, they would not…” She tails off.
“You just do it, get the money and then get on with your life.”
When she graduates she will leave escorting and her clients behind her, but while she remains at university she will carry on working: “I need them [her clients] at the end of the day, but I don’t like them. I don’t like them at all. I pretend to like them, and then get out. Once that hour is done, it’s out the door, goodbye.”
Definitely not Belle du Jour.
So… exactly like my experience of employment in every job I’ve had. Except I’ve never been paid at that rate, or had the luxury of being able to work for just an hour.
@ 1 sonofrojblake
I concur.
For some reason (rooted in religion?, misogyny?) many people seem to have a bizarre double standard when it comes to sex work as opposed to any other profession. That is to say, I doubt we will see an article in the Independent revealing the shocking fact (I think I can safely assume it is a fact) that many students who work their way through college as telemarketers don’t actually enjoy calling random strangers trying to sell them shit, and only do it for the money.
Greta Christina has written many insightful posts on the special stigma attached to sex workers.
What’s she alluding to?
In the first paragraphs Ophelia quotes, Sophie describes being raped by clients – more than once, by the sound of it – and having no recourse. That goes some ways beyond stigmatization of sex work, or “well we’ve all worked jobs we didn’t enjoy”.
@ 1 sonofrojblake & @ 2 Silentbob, that’s a very bad analogy. I have a friend that works as telemarketer, and as much as she hates that job she is inside an office full of people, with her identity and privacy resguarded, basically just talking with people trough a phone. Let’s not pretend that’s the same as having to get yourself alone in the bedroom of a stranger and respond to their sexual demands. Sex work has unique risks, like the constant possibility of getting raped, of not being able to get out of a situation gonne bad, as “Sophie” saddly experienced. So, even if you get paid more for an hour of sex work than for an hour at McDonald’s, I still wouldn’t call it “a luxury”.
By the way, Greta’s article that @ 2 Silentbob links is a great one, but in the particular case being discussed here we ARE talking about somebody that wanted to quit because “it was too much”, but couldn’t because of economic needs.
Everybody knows telemarketers hate their jobs anyway. But a lot of people think (and the media often insists, as in Belle Du Jour) that sex work is exciting sexy fun, the sort of thing a housewife (never a man, for some reason) might do for a lark. That idea needs to die.
“In the first paragraphs Ophelia quotes, Sophie describes being raped by clients – more than once, by the sound of it – and having no recourse.”
Yes. But there are people in the comments section who can’t be bothered to closely read the actual words of a sex worker. They will, however, make sure to talk about themselves. And perhaps mention that they dislike the stigmatization of sex workers. But to actually read what one has written – nope, too much for them.
I’m aware that Greta has written many insightful posts on the special stigma attached to sex workers. This article is more about the actual experience of doing sex work. Some of what “Sophie” experiences and feels about it probably is because of the stigma, especially the part about friends and a (potential) boy friend, but not all of it is.
The chief benefit of this article is that it does a good job of highlighting the law of unintended consequences, which is the real bear when dealing with sex work. Whether it’s prohibition, de facto decriminalization or de jure legalization, there doesn’t seem to be a legal position on sex work that does NOT come with a host of unintended consequences. And because we live in a patriarchal society, the vast majority of those consequences fall on women, across the board.
I think I’ve figured out my rough position–legalization with strict laws protecting the rights of prostitutes, AND a strong social safety network that reduces the economic coercion (preferably to the point of oblivion) that drives most sex workers to take up that line of work in the first place. I think the second half is more important and desirable. I used to think the former was more achievable, and that thus it should be gone after first–now, I’m more inclined to say the safety net MUST come first, in order to ensure that once legalization happens, we don’t end up with a modern variant on Scrooge’s lines to the Ghost of Christmas Present, declaring that the starving women should just go work in the legal brothels.
A five year degree? That would be a medical or veterinary degree.
I didn’t RTFA due to the paywall. But why do people imagine the quasi-legal status of prostitution in the UK helps matters for sex workers?
What paywall?
To the commenter @1 who seems a bit unhappy that he can’t get £100 for one hour of prostitution. Your worries are over. You can. There are plenty of male prostitutes. They almost invariably serve men, but don’t let that worry you. You won’t feel any less attraction to your customers than female prostitutes do. And then you can come and report back in exactly what ways that job was just like the office job you didn’t like, but this time based on experience.
What office job? Always with the smug assumptions.
From the article:
Then it appears she can’t afford the choices she made, whether that’s the city she’s chosen to study in or the course she’s chosen to study. Other people might choose to get a job until they’ve saved enough to be able to afford their course. Others may choose to study something/somewhere cheaper (it’s obviously very expensive to study in London, much less so in other regions.
Also:
Belle du Jour is not a “character” – it is a pseudonym for a real person, Dr. Brook Magnanti. A person, moreover, who was lambasted when she related her personal experience of sex work in her pseudonymous blog. Accusations against her included that she was making it all up and that she was, in reality, a man portraying a fantasy. While it was appalling and wrong that she was eventually “outed” against her wishes, one result was that she was able to lay to rest the canard that she was making it up.
Most women doing sex work are there because of a lack of choices. “Sophie” has, and has made, choices, and is now being given the forum of a national newspaper in which to bleat about the consequences. In the language so commonly used in these circles, she should check her privilege.
You’re characterizing a woman talking about her rape(s) as “bleating about the consequences” of her choices. Does that not give you pause?
(Is the word “office” all you got out of quixote’s comment?)
A lot of the people engaged in sex work do not want to be, and it’s worth paying attention to their accounts if only because in general, people would rather not believe that others are suffering. It’s all too easy to look at a minority who have managed to do sex work without suffering for it, and believe that they are the rule, rather than the exception. It’s worth pointing out that Belle du Jour herself has said that she was raped at least once while working.
That said, it’s not sex work itself that is the problem. I think a decent society would probably enable people to do it without suffering physically, mentally and socially and most importantly without being raped. It’s not helpful to say that after money changes hands a sex worker is expected to meet a client’s ‘demands’. The word should be ‘requests’, and any time it isn’t there is a problem.
I admit, I have met a few sex workers in their professional capacity, because my disabilities make that my only opportunity for intimacy. There are those like me for whom sex workers are invaluable. I have little to say when it comes to working out how to change the world for the better, but personally I have at least one rule. When meeting someone, I will give them money, after which if they choose to have sex with me I will be happy, but the money does not negate the choice. In fact, it should be entirely separate from the choice, in my opinion.
That’s one of my biggest concerns when it comes to the ‘legalisation’ of sex work. I fear the day when someone can take another person to court for not having sex after money changed hands.
Hm, reminds me of Jury acquits escort shooter
@sonofrojblake #14
The original “Belle du Jour” was indeed a character, in a film by Luis Bunuel.
Excuse me. Belle de Jour. I assume that’s the character Sophie meant to reference.
What makes you assume the movie is (directly) referenced?
[There was a movie called Action Jackson, the title entered youth language here mainly via two musicians, kids think they coined it]
I’m not crazy about my job and I’ve certainly made some poor choices. That’s been true since the moment I started working in my teens. But no one beats me up or rapes me in the office.
Yay OSHA?
So yes. Those choices were hers. The rest of them? The part where there’s no OSHA or where getting shot in the head is in the arbitration clause that one bothered to mention? Seems to me like the rest of us had some choices to make too.
@Lady Mondegreen 18:
Odd. I did a text search on that page, and can’t find a single mention of the word “rape” anywhere, not even in the comments.
My point, which you have wilfully missed, is that rape and other violence are entirely predictable consequences of sex work to anyone with the slightest amount of intelligence. I’m not pretending that that is anything other than a bad thing. But this woman, this intelligent woman, unarguably went into sex work by choice from a position of privilege and is then using the platform of a national newspaper to complain about the entirely predictable consequences of that choice. Boo and indeed hoo.
And all quixote got out of my comment was my dissatisfaction with my pay rate. I felt comfortable ignoring most of the point of their comment since they felt comfortable ignoring most of mine.
@ 22 sonofrojblake
What the ever-lovin’ FUCK!! NO!!! Rape is not the entirely predictable consequence of sex work. Nor is it the entirely predictable consequence of wearing a short skirt. What the fuck is wrong with you? Your “slut-shaming” and victim blaming utterly disgust me.
If you keep in mind “that rape and other violence are entirely predictable consequences”, well, then the first bit Ophelia quoted from the article can be decoded as alluding to it.
I was stupid to reproduce the formulation … sorry (_ _)
Oh… so sex work is safe? Really? I wonder why this young woman is complaining about it then.
Straw man. Fuck off.
I’ve done neither. This woman has made a choice to engage in sex work. I have not judged her for that. You apparently have, and are projecting that judgement onto me. If she’s been raped – speculation, since the article does not say she has, which seems oddly coy given the subject matter – that is on the perpetrator, 100%, no question and I never suggested otherwise. Straw man again.
I question what this article is for. “Student discovers sex work lucrative but not very nice SHOCK”. What is it we’re supposed to want to change here? It seems the youn
It seems the young woman doesn’t like sex work but engages in it anyway, and in this case it is unarguably her choice. Since she’s a student in the UK she can get a preferential-rate loan to cover her living expenses. The article says the loan isn’t enough… but presumably it’s enough for the other students on her course, or others at other institutions. Sure, some will be supported by parents, but many won’t. Many work other jobs, less lucrative ones which are perhaps less risky and less unpleasant.
What is the article saying? That students should be better financed? Or that sex work should be safer? You’d have a hard time selling the first to an electorate that would have to pay for it. You’d have a hard time selling the second at present, although to me it seems unarguably desirable. Or (since there’s no explicit discussion in the article of safety) is the argument that sex work should just be, in some indefinable way, “nicer”, so that this woman could make her money without having to have such an unpleasant time? Good luck with that one.