What Actually Makes This Hard

On societal stigma and institutional discrimination

Photo by Noah Page on Unsplash

Ask the average civilian (what we sex workers call non-sex workers) what they think are the hardest parts of the work we do, and the responses will likely be as varied as the actual realities. We hear about the most sensationalized stories because they support the existing narrative that all sex workers are victims of exploitation (a notion that I will examine more deeply at a later date), so violence and incarceration tend to be the most often cited. Those are very real risks which cannot be downplayed, but contrary to popular belief, they are not the most commonly experienced.

To better understand the experiences of SWers—including dancers, Dommes, cam girls, adult content creators, erotic massage providers, full service workers, and more—a primer on oppression may be helpful.

Oppression can be understood as ‘a combination of prejudice and institutional power that creates a system that regularly and severely discriminates against some groups and benefits other groups.’¹ It can also be defined as ‘the social act of placing severe restrictions on an individual, a group or an institution [which] occurs at all levels and is reinforced by social norms, institutional biases, interpersonal relationships and personal beliefs.’²

Oppression operating at interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels is exactly the lens we need to understand the experiences of sex workers across the spectrum, because stigma against sex workers operates at all three levels simultaneously.

Now, before I dive into the ways in which oppression manifests at each level, a note on data.

As Laura María Agustín discusses in Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, empirical data on sex workers is incredibly difficult to both obtain and present in an objective, unbiased way. The statistical results of academic research, as well as research conducted by NGOs, are influenced by how data is gathered: who is asking the questions, to whom the questions are being asked, and how they are being asked. Here’s why it matters.

Melissa Farley is perhaps the most cited—and most contested—researcher in the field. Her 1998 paper Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its 2003 follow-up Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries reported staggering rates of violence and PTSD among sex workers, figures that have since been absorbed into mainstream discourse as settled fact. They are not.

The methodological problems are significant.³ Farley’s samples were drawn overwhelmingly from street-based workers and highly marginalised populations—among the most vulnerable subset of a very diverse industry—and her findings were then applied broadly to sex work of all kinds. The consequences of that sampling bias are not abstract: when Chudakov et al. applied Farley’s own PTSD instrument to a different sample of sex workers, only 17% met the criteria for PTSD, compared to Farley’s reported 68%.⁴ Same tool, different sample, dramatically different result. There is also a causal problem that the research never adequately addresses. Even accepting Farley’s figures at face value, her data cannot establish that sex work causes trauma, only that trauma and sex work co-exist in her sample. She makes no comparison with rates of assault or PTSD among other groups of women in precarious labour, and the possibility that respondents experienced trauma prior to entering the industry is never seriously entertained. None of this is merely academic: Farley’s figures have been cited in policy debates, legal decisions, and feminist discourse for over two decades, by institutions already predisposed to the conclusion. The narrative that sex workers are by definition broken and abused was built, at least in part, on research that told the world what it already believed, using a sample that guaranteed the result in advance.

Therefore, I am loath to drop too many statistics in this article, and the unreliable nature of empirical data is precisely why first-person narratives and testimonies are so valuable.

There is a popular saying that the plural of anecdote isn’t data. In my years in the industry, however, what I have largely found is that the hardest part of the job is social stigma. In the absence of unbiased data, patterns of lived experience across an industry are exactly what we should be paying attention to. Here’s what I’ve observed.

At the interpersonal level, it’s the ways in which the very hard work that is required to be successful is downplayed and trivialized. If I had a dollar every time I heard someone flippantly say, “Maybe I should just start selling feet pics” I would be a very rich woman. In fact, I usually respond, “Go ahead. See how long it takes you to make fifty bucks.” The assumption that large amounts of money can be made quickly and easily on fan sites like OnlyFans is a result of skewed reporting. We hear about the top 0.1% of creators earning five-to-six figures monthly. What we don’t hear about is that the median creator makes around $180 per month, with the top 10% of creators averaging $1,200 monthly while the bottom 90% average $50 per month⁵.

That hard work is also largely invisible. It’s the mundanity (and if I’m being honest, sometimes drudgery) of doing your hair and makeup, setting up lighting for filming or camming, the endless volleys of emails and text messages to secure a booking with a client, maintaining a daily presence across multiple social media platforms, chasing down deposits for appointments, and the regular beauty treatments many of us undergo for the upkeep of performing femininity. No one cares to hear about that part.

It’s sometimes subtle, in the way we aren’t allowed to complain about our jobs the way straight workers are permitted to. Responses tend to be dismissive, suggesting we could alleviate ourselves of those issues if we simply found another line of work. When a lawyer complains about a particularly challenging client, we don’t tell them, “Have you considered becoming an engineer instead?”

It’s also the labour of anonymity required as a direct result of social stigma. Many of us aren’t out to friends or family for fear of judgment or repudiation. Most of us who still work corporate jobs deeply fear the repercussions of being outed. There is a fragmenting of your identity that carries an emotional weight.

These interpersonal dismissals don’t emerge from nowhere—they are the everyday expression of a culture that has decided, in advance, who and what sex workers are and what they deserve. This is visible in the news media that sensationalize certain stories while overlooking others, namely the conflation of consensual sex work and trafficking. It is also woven into the entertainment we consume, in how sex work is portrayed (often incorrectly and reductively) in film and television.

Cultural stigma is felt in rescue narratives. Rather than seeing sex workers as workers with agency, the dominant (paternalistic) view is that sex workers exist to be rescued from their circumstances. It is worth noting that within mainstream progressive circles, we have broadly come to understand that saviourism causes harm—that the assumption of superiority embedded in "I know what's best for you" undermines the self-determination of the very communities we claim to support. We see this acknowledged in discourses around Indigenous sovereignty, in critiques of white saviourism, in the hard-won understanding that centring the rescuer over the rescued is itself a form of oppression. And yet, when it comes to sex workers, that framework seems to evaporate entirely. Suddenly, non-sex workers (including many who would bristle at the suggestion they were being paternalistic in any other context) are remarkably confident about what we need, what we should want, and when and how we should exit the industry.

It is the way sex work is viewed as a pit stop on the way to bigger and better things, instead of viewing it as a valuable form of labour in and of itself. For some SWers, this is indeed a short-term means to an end and is a temporary way to support one’s ambitions, but that is not a universal experience. When we are asked the question, “What are you going to do after this?”, there is first the assumption that you necessarily age out of this industry, which is not always the case. The second assumption is that this is an unfortunate but (mercifully) temporary way to earn income. The third, and most bafflingly, is that any of us, straight workers included, could possibly know exactly what we will do for work in five, ten, or 15 years. The landscape of work shifts endlessly, as evidenced by the way AI has impacted the labour market. What we don’t talk about is how sex workers are actually uniquely positioned to navigate job precarity and pivot as needed, due to the resilience and ingenuity required to perform a job that society has worked so hard to eliminate.

It is felt in the immediate dismissal in mainstream feminist discourse—the frighteningly normalized internalized misogyny that allows so many women to feel comfortable speaking for and speaking over sex workers, in ways they wouldn’t speak over other marginalized communities. It’s the assumption that we are too stupid to see or too morally bankrupt to care that we are purportedly being exploited by the patriarchy.

Cultural stigma also informs the ways our institutions operate. Attitudes about sex work impact legal decisions around criminalization: where and how we work, and how safe we feel working. They impact access to housing and employment. They factor in when there are custody battles. They factor in when we seek health care. They factor in when financial institutions freeze our bank accounts.

It’s the institutional power of social media platform policy that results in an endless battle of being censored, shadowbanned, demonetized, or outright suspended from social media platforms where we are required to post just so the world knows we even exist. It’s the frustration of meticulously crafting your social media presence with coded language and censored imagery, ensuring you are compliant with the platform’s TOS and community guidelines, and still having your account axed (meanwhile, Grok was permitted to produce child sexual abuse material, and violent hate speech still runs rampant across many platforms).

Many of the aspects of our work that make it hard may seem trivial when the worst thing that can happen to a SWer is indeed violence. Reducing social stigma may seem like less of a priority when we are talking about safety; however, these are directly connected. Violence against sex workers would occur far less frequently if we treated sex work with the same respect as any other form of labour.

If you’re still wondering how we improve the material conditions of sex workers across the industry, there’s a much deeper conversation to be had about legal frameworks, but it starts at the cultural level. Stigma is not a soft problem sitting alongside the material conditions of sex workers—it is the material condition. It shapes every interaction, every institution, every legal framework we operate within. And we cannot change laws if we cannot change minds.

Yours in solidarity,
MC

1. Leaven Center for Women’s Healthcare Education and Visions, Inc., “Power and Privilege Definitions,” reproduced by NYC Department of Youth and Community Development, 2019, https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dycd/digital_toolkit/family_engagement_toolkit/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Power-and-Privilege-Definitions5.14.19.pdf.

2. University of Michigan School of Social Work, “P.O.D.S.: Privilege, Oppression, Diversity and Social Justice,” accessed June 2026, https://ssw.umich.edu/about/why-michigan-social-work/privilege-oppression-diversity-and-social-justice.

3. Ronald Weitzer, “The Mythology of Prostitution: Advocacy Research and Public Policy,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 7, no. 1 (2010): 15–29.

4. B. Chudakov et al., "The Motivation and Mental Health of Sex Workers," Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 28, no. 4 (2002): 305–315.

5. Alan Walker, "OnlyFans Income Statistics: Hacking OnlyFans Income Growth: From a Newbie to Top Earner," OnlyMonster Blog, February 6, 2026, https://onlymonster.ai/blog/onlyfans-income/; "OnlyFans Statistics 2026," OFStats, accessed June 2026, https://ofstats.net/. Note that OnlyMonster is a creator management platform with a commercial interest in how OnlyFans income is perceived; figures are cited here because they align with independent data from OFStats and other aggregators. OnlyFans does not publish creator earnings data directly. The platform has no incentive to publicize median earnings, and viral headlines about top earners function as free advertising. That asymmetry in what gets reported tells you everything about whose story gets told.