Sex Workers' Blogs

Blogs often function as sites of identity negotiation and community building, allowing marginalized groups of people to create safe spaces to speak. Sex workers (particularly escorts, erotic masseuses, and call girls, rather than street walkers, porn stars, or strippers) make their voices heard on the Internet through blogs, and many sex workers find supportive and diversified communities through blogging.

In a Western society that shuns and silences sex workers, their voices and stories often go unheard. Although many documentaries and scholarly articles devote curious and concerned attention to the [Page 457]sex industry, the actual voices of sex workers remain problematically absent. For this reason, there are many contradictory assumptions associated with sex workersthey are alternately imagined as helpless victims, as sex addicts, as desperately caught in the “system,” as empowered feministshowever, these assumptions are rarely, if ever, based on sex Workers' actual lived experiences.

Because of the illegality of sex work, and the women's desire to maintain a “normal” lifestyle, sex workers often choose to live a double lifeknown as a sex worker only to clients, and as sister, daughter, mother, or friend to most everyone else in their lives. They seldom get to tell their own stories, and the silence perpetuates the mystery, intrigue, and downright fascination that Western society seems to have with them. The Internet's seeming anonymity makes blog forums a site of potential empowerment for this silenced segment of society.

Sex worker blogs may be read to imply that sex workers choose to blog because they feel pressure to keep their work a secret, and thus, they have nowhere else to express their working identities other than via disembodied and anonymous communication. Their blogs tend to be a mixture of work-related stories, complaints, anecdotes, insights, fears, worries, humor, and musings. Alongside work-related posts are entries about their friends, family, goals, relationships, and day-to-day mundane stories that occupy any other personal blog.

Many of the women admit to starting the blog for the sole purpose of talking about work, but then realize they cannot really separate their working self from their nonworking self, so that the presentation of identities is carefully negotiated even within the “safe” blog space. Because of the desire to maintain anonymity, some sex worker blogs are closed communities inaccessible to the general public. For example, LiveJournal has a sex worker bulletin board that explicitly states clients, johns, and researchers are not allowed. Applicants are reviewed by a moderator to ensure only sex workers become part of the community. As of 2008, the community had more than 450 members.

Although sex Workers' blogs offer a “safe” space for individuals to share their stories, voice their opinions, and find support via an uncensored medium, it is also important to draw attention to the ways in which the medium limits participation. Although digital media access is growing, the Internet still requires money, and blogging itself requires a certain degree of cultural capital as well as technical prowess and leisure time. As a result, sex worker blogs tend to privilege middle-class call girls as opposed to street walkers and less advantaged prostitutes.

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