Travelling requires constant vigilance—at least, it does for me. When speaking to strangers, the question of “what’s your job” comes up so quickly that I have to make a snap assessment mid-sentence about whether it’s safe to reveal I’m a sex worker. In Australia, I rarely move outside circles where people either already know what I do for work or are certain to receive the information positively. (The only strangers I consistently interact with are clients, who obviously know about my profession by virtue of them paying for my services.) Because of this, I am unaccustomed to lying, and don’t have a fake life I can roll off my tongue with ease. Perhaps I should create one, but when I did so in my early twenties, the story would fall apart after a few questions, and I found it less stressful just to tell the truth.
Attitudes to sex work in the UK are markedly different to those in Australia, not only because of the difference in government policy, but because of a difference in culture. The well-established trope of British prudishness is not unfounded. In Britain, I am used to considering myself “undateable” by most people’s standards, and a YouGov survey of adults in Britain found that 87 per cent would be unwilling to date someone currently working as an escort or prostitute. However, what upset me more was discovering that 46 per cent of respondents would be unwilling to even be friends with someone currently working as an escort or prostitute (interestingly, only 33 per cent of women would be friends with a current escort or prostitute versus 49 per cent of men). That survey is from this year, but I have long felt such hostility, and it has made me much more hesitant to disclose my line of work to Londoners than to, for example, Berliners.
If I do disclose, I risk a bad reaction—from a response that is downright dangerous (such as a man suddenly seeing me as sexually available to him) to one that treats me as a circus animal, an object of curiosity that exists to answer every possible inappropriate question. If I don’t disclose, I risk hearing all the casual and deeply upsetting whorephobia that people throw around. When I encounter this whorephobia, I often try and steer the conversation towards politely educating the listener: “Oh, I know some people who’ve done sex work and [insert mundane but eye-opening piece of information that attempts to combat prejudice here]”, I say. But I would still prefer not to get insight into how the average person views me; I just don’t need or want to know, because I’m not a masochist.
I was reminded of this catch-22 on my first week of my annual whore-liday in June. While waiting to board my flight to London, an English woman started up conversation with me and, inevitably, asked me what I do for work. I answered honestly, out of reflex, because I had not switched into self-protective travel mode yet and had been lulled into a false sense of security by my Sydney surrounds. She was affronted, and her attitude towards me shifted immediately. “Well, I wouldn’t be quick to tell people in England you do that. You’ll be kicked out of the country,” she said. Then, her curiosity overcoming her initial hostility, she peppered me with a million questions, which I answered with a docility unusual for me because I wanted to mitigate the tension and any idea she had of me as a threat.
When, a few days later, I caught a cab home from a night out after missing the last tube, the driver asked me the same question. With that memory at the forefront of my mind (and acutely aware I was alone with a strange man), I dissembled and distracted him with another topic. I had safely navigated away from one pothole, I thought, until we passed through Soho. The driver started to go on about how “disgusting” prostitutes are and how he couldn’t understand how anyone would ever pay to touch one. I regretted my initial prevarication, thinking it would’ve been better to sit in awkward silence for the trip than to listen to his uncloaked views—except by this point it was too late to confess, in case it escalated into conflict. So I went down the safe route of vaguely talking about people I knew who had done the work, and why they did it, and why clients booked them and why it was different to what he thought. In his defence, he was receptive to what I had to say, but I could’ve done without that glimpse behind the curtain, revealing the revulsion that those survey results had captured.
