How to Tell a True Sex Work Story

Note: This story takes place in a country called Grand Woni. Its capital city is Port Attcha, and it is made entirely of salt. Another major city here is Royal Fulgur, and this city is made entirely of gold. These facts aren’t true, but they are necessary.

First, you convince the people you love that you won’t get into any trouble. You tell your husband you’ve set up an appointment with a prostitute and watch him freak out for a moment—

“Do you realize how much danger you could be in? What if it’s actually the police on the other side of these texts? You are not equipped for this—you don’t even speak the language.”

He’ll show you countless articles that prove him right:

Attcha Police Arrests Two Prostitutes While Undercover as Clients
Gang Sentenced to Seven Years for Running Prostitution Rings
Facebook Chat Helps Royal Fulgur Police Bust Prostitution Ring

You grind your teeth, bite your lip, nibble at your fingernail—whatever your nervous tick is. Finally, you draw from your limited knowledge of ethnographic research and explain the importance of keeping a safe distance from subjects and building trust with a source.

“You don’t just blindly go into this. You do the research, you’re a bystander before building connections.”

He sighs, knowing he can’t stop you. He’s scared for you, but a part of him is in awe. 

“Great. Will you drive me into the city, behind the Neon Fairy Hotel after midnight?”

***

You’ll hang around shady bars and awkwardly make conversation with women who radiate power and beauty—certainly more than you do. You feel out of place, but you persist as you wait on park benches and observe the passing of cars and street flirtation taking place through horn honking, headlight blinking, and subtle facial expressions.

Ultimately, your way into this world is through TikTok. You find a woman who goes by a name you’ll have to change in the telling of the story, so you decide she’ll be called Belle. Her TikTok account holds countless videos and photos of her—some with the sunlight hitting her blonde streaks as she stands peering from her balcony in a blue striped bikini, others with her in tight jeans, bent over so her perfectly rounded butt is the first thing viewers see. Her WhatsApp number is pasted across these pictures, each with a caption made up of a series of suggestive emojis—eggplants, water droplets, a tongue on the verge of licking an ice cream cone—and hashtags promising a good time, a sensual massage, and the night of your life.

You message her. She initially thinks you’re a client and sends her rates:

$100 for an hour
$180 for two hours, 2 times cum, 1 blowjob

$550 for full night, unlimited fucking, boob sucking, and pussy.

“Thanks for this, but I’m wondering if we could just talk?” you write back.

She stands firm, all business. “Only in my bedroom, sweetheart.”

Of course you understand her concern—most women fear getting taken advantage of even when they don’t work in the sex industry. The way men feel entitled enough to assume they could charm their way into a woman’s body, like they’re the only irresistible fuck out there. 

You do what you’d hope all good journalists would—you empathize. You tell her she’s safe, anonymized, that as a fellow woman you sort of get it. But you’re curious and want to hear her story. Belle stays on guard. She’ll ask you to send a picture and voice note to confirm your identity, so you do. 

Now she finally feels at ease.

“So what do you want to talk about?” she asks. “I’m from Ukraine, what about you? What’s your profession?”

You soon learn that she had been working as a marketing executive but left her job recently. She tells you about her time in the big city—how she lives in a tall glittering tower next to a luminous glass dome and a swimming pool the size of the sky, where mermaids from across the seven seas float around lazily and peer into the mist of Venus. 

It’s beautiful and cruel, she tells you—but it’s not everything. Belle has a boyfriend of three months now. He’s a car dealer, she’s honest with him about how she earns her money, and she makes it clear that she’s not after his.

One weekend Belle considered going to a club in the north of the city to work but decided to stay in with her boyfriend instead. “Besides, I have a lot of men who pay for my bills,” she says. “I don’t even have sex with all of them. This country is full of spellbinding glitter.”  

“And they fucking love women here,” she added. “It’s the secrecy of it all, I think it gets them very excited.”

   ***

But before you find Belle, you hopelessly trawl through the Internet, through Twitter, through the thin salt-encrusted streets. You latch onto flimsy pink, turquoise, yellow business cards, send a flurry of emails to journalists, academics, analysts, pimps—anyone with answers.

A true story has to have verified information. A named source, real places. Stories should corroborate. That is the mark of good journalism, you tell yourself. But you have to be careful and nuanced and accurate and inoffensive—and you must acknowledge that sex work is typically thought of as oppressive and lowly, but the essence of capitalism ensures that everyone sells their body in some capacity, whether sitting at a desk from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. or rubbing skins on a bed from midnight to dawn.

A legal analyst you finally get an interview with advises you to “let sex workers speak for themselves.”

“Don’t portray it as a pitiful profession,” she says. “Because at the end of the day, sex is an industry. But at the same time, let’s not talk about it like it’s the most empowering thing either.”

Imagine running a business and not having the work space, the outreach platforms, or the surety of your safety. In Grand Woni, sex workers line up along crystalized hotels and glide to customers on smoky clouds to avoid detection. With sex work criminalization policies, the workers in the industry have had to be especially resourceful in order to fully do their job. And then there’s the wage gap you’ll soon learn of.  

One ad posted on Twitter advertised Vietnamese, Thai, and Indian women. The rates?

$25 for 60 minutes, no sex, only body to body and hand job
$35 for 60 minutes, no sex, only body to body, 2 times cum, blowjob

The account sends you a location—the haunted hair salon. It was rumored to devour its visitors, promising them eternal pleasure but forever keeping them prisoner. It is said that those who went in never came back. They opened for business at 10 p.m. and closed at 1:50 a.m. 

The oracle on the other side mentions that if you plan to swing by, they would be willing to accept Pakistani, Indian, and Filipino customers as well.

Then you tell them you’re a writer. They instantly block you.

Shit.

You’re confused. A part of you knows you’re way in over your head. You’re no investigative journalist—you write press releases about SpongeBob visiting the shopping malls for a living, goddamnit. Reporting on sex workers? You couldn’t even get an interview with a professor at your own alma mater. 

You vaguely consider whether anyone would even notice if you... simply made it up. Who would cross-check? How would they do it?

***

One forum almost resembling an online anonymous boys’ locker room calls the former Hurricane Club by the port of Flying Harpies “The United Nations of Whores.” In describing it, one user says, “If you’re looking to get laid, this is the place to be. There’s a bunch of Chinese working girls with those small bodies and big boobs which are just heavenly. Lately I’ve noticed there’s been more and more Nigerians here though.”

Another user added, “They literally have everything. French girls, Ukrainian girls, Chinese girls. I even met a British chick working there once. But I agree, it has been overtaken by African women lately—which is fine if you’re into that.”

Why did these men seem so disappointed that this high-end club suddenly had an abundance of Black women?

The central problem this fetishization opens up is that while sex workers are providing a service, it is difficult to control to what degree their clients will view them as people and not simply as bodies for use. Three years ago, a lifestyle magazine interviewed a pimp—or perhaps he was a genie—whose job was to set up sex parties for billionaires in Royal Fulgur. “This is a bad boy paradise,” he says. “These [wealthy businessmen, politicians, and celebrities] can forget about the real world for a bit.”

The strangest parties he’s had to organize took desires to an extreme. One U.S. American businessman wanted 10 women in cloaks to fly in on a magic carpet and meet him in a tent under the stars. His only other request was that they strictly not remove their face coverings when they removed their clothes. A local had supposedly requested a party of 30 African women and “enough Viagra to kill an elephant.” Consider it done with the snap of his all-powerful fingers.

While men immerse themselves in their fantasies, many women use this profession as an escape. This is the only work that will provide them with enough money to sustain flourishing businesses they have back home. For women like Tiff, sex work in the capital is the way she is able to earn large amounts of cash in a short time to sustain her boutique business back home in Nigeria.

“I always tell myself, I am a businesswoman first,” she says. “And even here, this is what I do. I do business with these men.”

The problem with sex work is that it is inextricably tied to the male gaze. Sex workers can manipulate the male gaze for profit. But ultimately, a sex worker’s “worth” is largely defined by their clients’ interest. The reason Grand Woni is a hub for incoming sex workers is simply because its visitors and residents prioritize having their needs met. We see it in all the Perrier lakes with lemon wedges, the way luxury is thrown around like a notary stamp—why would we not see it in sex?

As the information slowly comes together, you lace your story. Sex work gets criminalized in the context of trafficking. And while trafficking is indeed a large problem, the narrative of abuse and coercion is used to create moral panic and justification for policing. Many women are exercising agency by migrating on their own, choosing their clients, and manipulating male gaze fantasies for their own benefit. But the patriarchy sees to it that sex workers are instantly condemned in the guise of moral righteousness. Shamed, jailed, violated, used. 

Tiff has been returning to Grand Woni every year for the last five years now to supplement her earnings. Unfortunately, the work is not without its risks. Over the years, Tiff has experienced significant changes in client demands. 

“Some of my clients have suddenly changed and started demanding anal sex. I had a terrible experience recently with a European that I met inside an elevator at a big hotel,” she explained.

“We exchanged contacts after he paid $300 for a blow job in the elevator. Then, we met for dinner and he offered $1,000 for sex in his apartment. I thought he was a decent guy until I got to his apartment. He threatened me with a knife to accept sex with me through the anus or he would kill me.”

“You have to take care of your safety first,” Belle says. “You have to learn how to get a good sense of people—and always meet them in your apartment if you can.”

You think about the fantasy, haunting, and dystopia of this country. The way fairies flit from city to city reveling in women’s racial disparity, hypnotizing the male gaze, harnessing the magnetic turbulence of women’s value and safety. 

You wonder if anyone would believe you. 

You did promise to not get in trouble. 

You hope no one cross-checks. But even if they did—they’d get a completely different story. Because in Grand Woni, a true sex work story can only be told in secrets, as fiction.  

Artwork by Myriam Louise Taleb