Apparently My Opinion Stopped Counting When I Became a Sex Worker

There is something fascinating about watching your perceived IQ drop in real time. Not your actual IQ, obviously. Your socially assigned one. For years, I was a teacher. I have a degree in education. I worked with children and young people, sat through safeguarding training, wrote reports, attended meetings, studied research, dealt with professionals and generally existed in the world as somebody people assumed was reasonably capable of forming a coherent thought. Then I became a sex worker. Or, more accurately, I became open about being a sex worker. And apparently somewhere between uploading my tits to the internet and putting 'OnlyFans creator' in my bio, my degree evaporated. Nobody told the university. Since going public about what I do for a living and scaling up my social media presence, I have noticed a genuinely fascinating contrast between how people responded to my opinions before and how they respond to them now. I expected some backlash. Of course I did. I am a woman on the internet, after all. Men on the internet have always been rude, spiteful and occasionally so spectacularly incapable of constructing an argument that any disagreement eventually arrives at the same devastating intellectual conclusion: 'You're fat.' Groundbreaking. I could be discussing politics, education, feminism, the weather, the correct temperature at which to cook a chicken or whether a zebra is black with white stripes, and somewhere there will be a man furiously typing that I am fat as though he has just discovered a previously unpublished branch of philosophy. So yes, I expected that. I also expected the morality brigade. I knew there would be people concerned about my immortal soul. People who had never met me suddenly deeply invested in where I might spend eternity. I expected 'find God.' I expected 'have some self-respect.' I expected people to tell me that no respectable man would ever want me, which is always particularly funny when you already have a partner and are not currently accepting applications. I expected the standard arguments about sex work. What I didn't expect was how quickly sex work would become a way of dismissing anything I said about anything else . Because apparently sex work isn't just a job. It's a rebuttal. I can make a point about women and somebody will respond: 'Well, you would say that. You're a sex worker.' Would I? Why? Which part of my employment contract requires that opinion? I can talk about misogyny and suddenly my occupation supposedly invalidates my analysis of misogyny. I can talk about relationships and apparently being a sex worker means I cannot possibly understand them. I can talk about feminism and somebody will announce that my opinion doesn't count because I sell sexual content. I can talk about something completely unrelated to sex work and there will still be someone who seems to believe that the existence of my OnlyFans account constitutes a peer-reviewed rebuttal. And men, in particular, have started doing something else. They assume I'm stupid. Not all men, before somebody starts warming up their keyboard. But enough of them that the pattern is impossible to miss. There's this assumption that a woman doing sex work must have ended up here because she had no other options. That perhaps I simply wasn't clever enough for a 'proper' career. That I must be uneducated. That this is the only thing I am capable of doing. Which is particularly interesting in my case because I made what is probably one of the biggest possible jumps in socially perceived respectability. I went from teacher to sex worker. I didn't lose my degree somewhere along the way. I didn't wake up the morning after my first cam show unable to read. My knowledge didn't drain out of my body alongside my dignity because, inconveniently, I don't appear to have lost that either. I'm the same person. That's the part I find so fascinating. My brain hasn't changed. Your perception of me has. Before you knew I was a sex worker, you might have read something I wrote and engaged with the argument. Now, if you disagree with me, you have an escape hatch. You don't have to prove me wrong. You can just prove I'm a whore. Except I already told you that. So congratulations, detective. People have always stereotyped sex workers. The only difference for me is that I have moved from being quiet about it to being open about it, which means I now get to watch those stereotypes being applied to me in real time. And it has taught me something uncomfortable about the way we perceive women. Because women's credibility has always been conditional. We are allowed authority as long as we perform the right kind of womanhood. Be educated, but not arrogant. Be attractive, but don't know you're attractive. Be sexual, but only in ways considered acceptable. Be confident, but don't be intimidating. Have opinions, but preferably ones that don't make anybody uncomfortable. And above all, if you want to be taken seriously, make sure your sexuality remains respectable. That last part matters. Because I don't think this is actually about intelligence. Nobody genuinely believes that creating pornography damages the frontal lobe. I hope. What they're really talking about is worthiness . Sex workers are treated as though our perceived moral status determines whether our thoughts deserve consideration. And women participate in this too. That has probably surprised me more than anything. There is a particular flavour of misogyny that becomes socially acceptable when the woman being targeted is a sex worker. People who would otherwise consider themselves progressive suddenly become remarkably comfortable reducing a woman to her sexual behaviour. Her education doesn't matter. Her experiences don't matter. Her argument doesn't matter. She's a sex worker. Case closed. And I find that fascinating from a feminist perspective because isn't that exactly what we've supposedly spent decades trying to move away from? The idea that a woman's sexual choices determine her value? That women can be divided into respectable women and fallen women? That you can decide whether a woman deserves to be heard based on what she does with her body? We've changed the vocabulary. I'm not convinced we've changed the thinking. There is still a socially acceptable woman and a socially unacceptable woman. And once you've been placed into the second category, people feel entitled to treat you differently. That's the bit nobody wants to admit. Sex workers are useful targets because society has already decided we're fair game. You can call us degrading names. You can speculate about our intelligence. You can question our parenting. You can question our relationships. You can question our mental health. You can tell us nobody will ever love us. You can suggest we're incapable of understanding feminism because apparently feminism only applies to women whose decisions you personally approve of. And somehow people doing this will still manage to believe they're the enlightened ones. There's another assumption hidden underneath all of this too. That sex work and intelligence are somehow incompatible. As though nobody with choices would choose this. That's perhaps the most patronising stereotype of all. People want every sex worker to fit into one of two narratives. Either we are desperate victims who need rescuing or stupid women who don't understand the consequences of our decisions. The possibility that an adult woman might understand exactly what she is doing and choose it anyway makes people deeply uncomfortable. Because then you have to actually engage with her choices. You can't pity her into silence. You can't dismiss her as stupid. You might have to accept that she considered the options available to her and chose the one she preferred. You don't have to make the same choice. You don't even have to approve of mine. That's the beauty of adulthood. But disagreement is not the same thing as invalidation. If I make a bad argument, tell me why it's bad. If my evidence is wrong, correct it. If my reasoning doesn't make sense, challenge it. If you think my perspective is biased because of my experiences, fine. We can talk about that too. But 'you're a sex worker' isn't an argument. It's a job description. And if the only way you can defeat my point is by reminding everybody that I've shown my vagina on the internet, I'm going to assume the point was probably doing quite well. My career has changed. My CV is certainly more interesting than it used to be. But I'm still the woman who studied education. I'm still the woman who taught. I'm still capable of reading research, understanding evidence, forming opinions, changing those opinions when presented with better information and recognising when I don't know enough about something to speak authoritatively. I also happen to sell sexual content. Both things can exist inside the same woman. Women are actually quite complicated like that. And perhaps that's the thing that bothers people most. Because the stereotype of the stupid sex worker is comfortable. She doesn't challenge you. She's easy to dismiss. She allows you to maintain the reassuring belief that clever women make respectable choices and only a certain kind of woman would ever do this. Then someone like me comes along and ruins the sorting system. Teacher. Graduate. Sex worker. Feminist. All at once. Sorry about the administrative inconvenience. Going public about sex work hasn't changed who I am. It has simply changed what other people think they know about me. And watching that happen has made one thing incredibly clear. When somebody stops respecting a woman's intelligence the moment they discover she's a sex worker, they haven't learned anything about her intelligence. They've revealed something about their own prejudices. My opinion didn't suddenly become less valuable when I started taking my clothes off for money. You just decided you didn't have to listen anymore. And those are two very different things.