One of the benefits of brothel and parlour work, besides the safety and solidarity you feel working with other women, is that it makes you aware that you’re part of both a community and a marketplace. If you undercut the other girls by offering extra services for free or at a considerably cheaper price, you are likely to get confronted. What you do in the privacy of the room has an impact on the other workers, especially when it comes to decisions around protection and prices, because you often share clients.
Street-based sex workers tell me it is similar for them—there would be direct confrontations if someone was perceived to be negatively affecting another’s income, and colleagues often informally set rates as a collective so they can present a united front to low-balling clients.
A problematic side-effect of the shift away from in-house sex work and towards independent escorting—a change driven by the ease of advertising yourself on the internet—is that many sex workers lack the experience of working in a community. Escorting can be quite isolating and siloed, so many people working in this way have an individualist approach to the industry. Workers have lost the advantage of spending time with other workers—and the conversation and skill-sharing that a girls’ room can bring.
To work entirely freelance, or on a platform that takes a percentage of your earnings such as OnlyFans, is to participate in a gig economy model that keeps workers disunited. This manifests in the way in which some escorts feel no responsibility for each other’s health, crying “my body my choice” when any critique is made of their decision not to use condoms, for example. I understand the appeal of this term—we are women making personal choices with our bodies in a job that is deeply stigmatised—but I wonder whether it applies when we are also workers in an industry together, in which our choices affect each other.
Condoms are a “tool of the trade”, with sex workers across place and time arguing for the right to work with them in spite of client pressure to go without. One of the reasons we have been able to retain the decriminalisation of sex work in New South Wales since 1995 is that we have safer sex practices and lower rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) than the civilian population—partially because sex workers lobbied for free condoms to be available in brothels during the Aids crisis and for the use of condoms to be normalised for anything penetrative.
Sex workers are always viewed as vectors of disease, when in reality it is more likely to be our clients who spread illness; as a cis woman the majority of my clients are straight, cis men, and this demographic is the least likely to get regularly tested for STIs, partially because they are not encouraged to. When I use condoms with them I am not just protecting my health from someone who has no regard for it but protecting the health of my colleagues and community.
Of course, there are always situations when workers don’t use condoms. In exclusive sugar baby arrangements, “natural services” can be part of the arrangement, and in the gay male world there are plenty of people who use pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) as a replacement for condoms instead of an addition. However, the absence of a condom in vaginal, oral or anal sex has often been a reflection of a power imbalance between client and worker, with the worker unable to negotiate the use of one, or feeling at risk of losing the job if they insist on it.
I have nothing against workers who are doing unprotected services because they can’t afford not to, but I am against the normalisation of services given without condoms in the female escort world because, when cis, white, non-migrant women like me, who are prioritised and privileged within the industry and have the ability to say no to things, integrate any unprotected service into their standard service, that impacts women who are marginalised and less able to negotiate.
In-house work taught me that we have a responsibility to each other, and that it is naive—albeit intoxicating—to think that our choices with clients exist in a vacuum. As sex workers, we should be asking ourselves: do we owe each other more care and consideration, as part of a collective group of women and workers, than we currently give? Should we sacrifice some income now to allow a better standard to be set for others in the industry in future?
