Part I

There is no need to look for the people whom this book is about because you probably already know them. You may work with them, or for them. These are people whom we interact with in our daily lives. They operate in plain sight. Before I tell you what this book is, I will tell you what it is not. It is not an exposé of the work and practices of a subaltern and subversive faction of deviant sex workers who manage to fool us all by also holding conventional jobs right under our noses. It is not an opportunity to gain insights in order to hunt down, name, shame and blame people who are suspected of working this way and launch witch hunts at the office because so and so showed up a little too done-up for a weekday. It is not a book containing the stories of those that one can conflate with modern day slaves, trafficking victims or vulnerable adults, exploited (in ways that differ from other workers), ‘prostituted’ and awaiting rescue.

Instead, this book centres on the experiences of people who live dual lives. They cannot be rescued from sex industries, reformed and delivered to mainstream jobs because they already hold them. Nor can they be convinced that leaving sex industries to take up mainstream work is salvation from ‘deviant careers’ or an escape from a life of sin. They take on the paid work available to them within our precarious labour markets, so no, they are not sex workers exploited by pimps and madams, who can be ‘saved’ in the ways that we are led to believe are necessary through sensationalised misinformation campaigns. In truth, they are indistinguishable from other mainstream workers and cannot be bamboozled into romanticised constructs of square work, and a sole reliance upon it, as being the best way to earn a quality standard of living. Some of them have struggled to survive on benefits and Universal Credit, they have suffered through 10 years of austerity and workfare policies. They drank the Kool-Aid™ and with an established belief in a just world, went to university to get training for good paying jobs to raise families and contribute to the economy. They pose a formidable challenge to representations of sex workers because they defy stereotypes about who sex industry workers can be.