The EU referendum

On 23 June 2016 a referendum was held allowing the UK public to advise on leaving the EU, known as the Brexit vote. It may seem odd that Brexit features in a study of the most hidden populations of off-street sex workers. Brexit was a prominent theme in the research due to the timing of the data collection phase in the UK between 2016 and late 2017. Sex workers are not considered when assessing the potential risks and benefits of geo-political decisions such as leaving the EU yet what occurs in the political economy affects all workers whether their contributions are recognised as part of formal marketplaces or not. Contributors discussed how Brexit would affect their work. They talked about race, or more accurately, culture and citizenship as phenomena that influenced their earning potential and the way they marketed themselves. Some contributors worked in the EU and shared a sense of uncertainty about how that would continue. Juno, for example, worried about her tax status:

Brexit has been characterised as a protest vote in response to years of Conservative government austerity measures that most profoundly affected working class families residing in the North of England (Seidler, 2018). European and non-European immigrants were portrayed by some in the right-wing media as a threat to Britishness. It was reported that some working class people felt that due to globalisation, London, as the seat of Britain's political elite, was no longer part of, or working in the interests of, ‘their country’.

Media stories that outed sex workers and these contributors are available online in perpetuity and, since their real names were also published, loved ones and aging parents will likely suffer long-term effects. Outing sex workers poses a risk to their livelihoods and future employability. It is ironic that even those who advocate against violence do not come to the aid of sex workers, whom they deem to be victims, when they experience harms such as public shaming. Sex workers are not treated entirely as victims, otherwise stigmatising them would be viewed as distasteful.

A well-known theorist on stigma and identity, Goffman, posits that our social identities have two parts: a virtual social identity that is based on assumptions and demands we make of a person without realising it; and an actual social identity that comprises attributes that can be proven to be true through interaction (Goffman, 1963). Discrepancies between virtual and actual identities cause people to ‘reclassify’ individuals based on attributes that are undesirable or acceptable. In this way, ‘normal’ people assign an ‘ideology of difference’ and inferiority to stigmatised people and treat them as if they are not quite human. Goffman distinguishes ‘discrediting’ and ‘discreditable’ stigma. When a person is known to have an attribute that is undesirable they are discredited, and when the attribute is not known, a person is discreditable but not yet discredited and can decide whether or not to disclose the discrediting information, backstage, to ‘the own’ and ‘the wise’. Discreditable individuals, like contributors here, have a concealable stigma, sex work. They are off-street, educated, working class and middle class, (mostly) white individuals who are situated at the upper end of the stratification with respect to the UK whorearchy, yet they are not protected from whore stigma. Stigma avoidance is a top priority because anyone who has information about their sex working poses a threat to them. The sources of stigma are vast and include landlords, coworkers, friends, ex-lovers, government agents, community services, health practitioners, neighbours and the general public and so on. An anonymous contributor was stigmatised by a despicable group of men:

There are several overlapping themes that relate to identity, avoiding stigma, and managing information and audiences. Role transitioning via commuting and managing technologies are all done by contributors as part of maintaining duality. In this chapter, Goffman's works heavily inform role transitioning, the management of concealed stigma and the Dual-life Relational Paradigm.

Goffman (1959) explains that our social activity involves performance, which is action in front of an audience that has meaning for both the actor and audience. There are settings and changing locations with props that we use in our performances. Our appearance is based on outfitting to coincide with gender, age and so on and we all have a manner, which is how the actor engages with the role and fulfils expectations. Our front is the impression the social actor ‘gives off’, their performance of social scripts that dictate how they should behave, referencing the fact that we have a choice in how we present ourselves to others. Goffman posits a front stage, where behaviours and actions are of the socially accepted variety for a respective audience, and a backstage, where the agent can shed the front stage persona. Stigmatised individuals are surrounded by two types of sympathetic others: people who are also ‘discreditable’ and in their tribe, ‘the own’, that is other sex workers, clients and industry associates; and ‘the wise’ who are individuals who are aware of the stigma and help conceal it. The latter may experience courtesy stigma due to their association and proximity to stigmatised people (Goffman, 1963). There is also off-stage, a place where the actor can engage with audiences where role expectations are relaxed (Goffman, 1959). Goffman suggests that people are the assemblage of adjustments and reactions to the social situations or the fields of interaction that they participate in. This is echoed in Hall's (1994) notion of cultural identity. Duality is operationalised through the organisation of relations wherein information management strategies like these are honed.

Goffman suggests that to avoid extortion and other harms, individuals lead secret, double lives or maintain ‘double biographies’, a reconstructed life history that disassociates past from present.

This short chapter will summarise the major themes presented in this book and some issues that arose for contributors as they pertain to representation and power. The chapter will be split into two sections that will discuss the arising concerns under headings: ‘If sex workers were in control’ and ‘If sex workers were really treated as victims’. The book ends with a brief summary of major contributions and aims for future research.

If sex workers were in control

Sex workers are diverse as we see here, and a single label or moniker masks (deliberately or otherwise) who really trades sex. Those who stand to gain from the mischaracterisation of sex workers and their industries benefit from ensuring that workers have little political power and no means to gain control over the industries that they work within. Keeping industry workers from enjoying the benefits of labour rights in the UK means that for many, their work will always be mediated by third parties, some of whom, but not all, are dangerous extortionists. We must acknowledge that there is work in exploitation and exploitation in work across all industries. Supporting sex industry workers in continuing to unionise and to self-regulate, as well as in setting policy and standards is critical for the future. This is crime prevention by environmental design, where sex workers can eliminate the conditions, roles and practices that cause them harm. The sex industry as a service industry will shift from being wholly a client and third party-driven industry to one with a more cooperative flavour, where workers’ rights are part of the ethos.

We can begin first by acknowledging that for the vast majority, sex work is work.

Existing law, such as the brothel-keeping legislation, section 33A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, are harmful because they negatively affect sex workers. This legislation forces off-street workers, to work in isolation instead of with others who are lateral to them in role.

Although this book is not about how people leave sex industries and instead how they maintain employment relations between the sex industry and mainstream markets, a brief review of ‘exit’ research is warranted. This will highlight some of the factors identified among mostly streetbased sex workers and will problematise in/out binary frameworks as embodied by contributors to this book. This will be followed by a fuller exploration of sex working within and alongside mainstream precarious labour markets. In doing so I highlight motivations for duality as the drivers that influence and orient us all in our approaches to work in markets that are increasingly shaped by corporate interests. This chapter will end with a presentation of the Continuum of SIWSQ Involvement as a framework to understand (sex) work and transition and to situate duality within our culture of capitalism.

In or out?

Much of the literature on ‘exiting’ is based in role transition theory and cites former nun Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh (1988) who theorised a staged process of change where people change careers, move from contemplation and exploration to planning and execution, but never fully let go of elements of former roles because they may struggle with eliminating residual social labels. Several past studies on sex working populations (Potterat et al, 1998; Månsson and Hedin, 1999; Hedin and Månsson, 2004; Dalla, 2006; Sanders, 2007; Mcnaughton and Sanders, 2007; Baker et al, 2010; O’Neill et al, 2010; Matthews et al, 2014) interpret sex work as harm and as exploitation such that a failure to leave is hinged to personal characteristics or a combination of will and access to resources, as well as many structural issues. Factors that influence one's ability to leave sex work include: money woes; drug addiction; holding a criminal record; age; violence; type of sex work; location of sex work; the length of time involved in the industry; health issues; pregnancy; challenges with managing internalised stigma; motivation; frustrations dealing with clients; and the existence of or lack of supportive relationships, to name a few. Some researchers note that sex workers have incomplete role transitions because they fail to let go of aspects of sex work while moving on to more ‘acceptable’ labour and highlight the need for supportive relationships and therapeutic interventions to heal from childhood trauma and subsequent sex work involvement (Månsson and Hedin, 1999; Hedin and Månsson, 2004; Baker et al, 2010).

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.

The Continuum of SIWSQ Involvement provides a framework for situating contributors’ working lives into distinct yet overlapping labour markets; however, contributors must engage in these diverse fields in ways expected of them while concealing the information about them detrimental to respective environments. The focus of this chapter is sharing the intricacies of moving between jobs for contributors and comprehending them through identity (re)formation as it relates to role transition and ‘rituals of movement’ (Ashforth et al, 2000). We will be touching on impression management and stigma avoidance as important elements involved in successful role transitions (these techniques will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 5). The chapter ends with commentary from contributors about managing duality and role transition while working from home.

Identifying with (sex) work

Several contributors identified with both jobs as expressions of who they are, and some resisted the idea that they ought to identify with work at all, and even challenged the line of questioning. Juno explains her feelings about both jobs:

Joy does not identify with sex work:

This book offers insights about both sex as work, and sex work and work that include the Continuum of SIWSQ Involvement, the Duallife Relational Paradigm and the UK whorearchy. The Continuum of SIWSQ Involvement is a framework to situate the practices of people who blend sex work and square work and a way of talking about human behaviour in this context in ways that were not seen in some research about ‘exiting’ and in some analyses of UK labour markets. Although the practices of blending sex work with other jobs exists throughout history and across cultures, ‘Duality’ is a nascent concept and needs some further development as to its value in describing contemporary populations who work this way. Furthermore, the Continuum of SIWSQ Involvement can be expanded or contracted as we learn more about the practices of duality and how the people who work this way choose to have their activities represented.

The Dual-life Relational Paradigm is represented within a rudimentary Venn diagram that describes the complex fields that contributors operate within and containing their on-and offline trans-actions and relations. There may be some diversity in how these fields overlap, and how performances and audiences are managed, and even how the Continuum of SIWSQ Involvement is situated within this paradigm. Similarly, the UK whorearchy as it unfolded for these contributors may be only a starting place, to fully understand stratification within sex industries as co-constructive and co-dependent upon the ordering and valuing of bodies in mainstream societies.

All of these contributions and themes require targeted study. The original research ‘In Plain Sight: An examination of ‘duality’, the simultaneous involvement in sex work and square work’ (2018) was exploratory in nature.1 Insights from this work can inform a more complex mixed-methods study involving a much larger sample now that there is some clarity around what themes to investigate. The lived experiences of those who live dual lives are reflective of the values and conditions that exist in mainstream society. Survival sex/forced labour, poverty, racism, sexism are all the by-products of our priorities. If we do not like what we see reflected back to us in the stories of these contributors, we do not set about destroying the mirror, we change ourselves and thus our society from within.

In this chapter we take a deeper dive into the challenges, frustrations and fears that contributors have with duality in our current labour market. Sex as a side hustle is frowned upon yet the process of precarisation threatens all work, even for these most highly skilled and educated workers, who spent more time in libraries than they did in pubs. Duality funds ‘flexicurity’ for them, where there is little safety net; however, they lack protections in both of their jobs because sex work is not fully accepted as work, and they can lose square jobs if their past or active sex work becomes known. Some held jobs in the public trust and examples are used to highlight their challenges here.

Although contributors may betray the trust of loved ones and associates by lying about sex working, they feel deceived by the entire system. In their minds they have done everything expected of them in terms of getting an education and working in mainstream jobs. They stayed out of trouble hoping that they could earn a good living, only to experience a ‘dream deferred’ (Hughes, 2001). An anonymous contributor shares her thoughts and frustrations:

This contributor entered the sex industry the day after finishing a PhD. This is the reality for many and makes duality necessary and rational but alienating.