I wanted to write about this the last time there was a Sexy Sex Worker Has Blog of Fabulous Sexiness (I think it was to due with the Belle du Jour phenomenon) but I wasn't a commenter then and thought it would be too weird to do for a first comment and probably wouldn't be approved. So it will be more about the sex worker celebrity phenomena rather than the social welfare issues.

I want to talk about the elephant in the room when it comes to the glamorfication (totally not a word I know) of the self-employed, in-control sex worker: beauty privilege.

Generally speaking, the $1000 a night/hour/whatever sex workers, including the "celebrity" blog ones, and including people like Australian writer of "In My Skin" (I do think that one is just as much, if not more, about Kate's heroin addiction as about her work in the sex industry, from street level to a high class place, as well as being very well written) come from a place where they are able to do all that is necessary to adhere to conventional beauty standards. They've come from backgrounds where they've had the benefit of good health and welfare, education and empowerment to make informed choices, and are stable and healthy enough and had enough disposable time and income in the first place to maintain personal appearance standards that made them big earners in the first place, and to maintain those standards once they were working consistently.

When women talk about sex work as if it's always empowering, including several Australian actresses on a cable TV show here set in a high class brothel called "Satisfaction" in which very glamorous and conventionally attractive actresses play very glamorous and conventionally attractive call girls, they're not thinking of the trafficked women, or abused or disempowered women, or even just the not quite as stunningly beautiful women who work at the low or middle level of the industry, who don't enjoy the benefits and privileges that come from looking like Hollywood's image of a high class callgirl.

I am totally not saying that in order to be a successful sex worker one has to look like Billie Piper, or the original Belle. But in an industry where, to unfortunately paraphrase the movie "Moulin Rouge" a woman is only worth what a man considers her to be worth, a lot of that is based on how she looks. Let's face it, when a client goes to a place and is introduced to all the girls present, he probably isn't (I never saw it) having a five or 10 minute conversation with her first, getting to know her as a person, and making his choice based on both her looks and what he thinks of her character and personality.

Please please don't think I'm getting into Derailing for Dummies territory, or making the mistake of thinking things I've seen for myself and heard people I know discuss means that anything anyone else has seen or discussed is irrelevant. But from what I've seen of the sex level industry, emphatically at the lower and middle levels, the girls who weren't absolute stunners had it tougher. They had to work on other ways to attract clients, from changing wigs and personas from shift to shift trying frantically to gauge what worked best, to offering services they weren't totally comfortable with, or lowering rates significantly.

I knew a girl in an agency once, who was stunningly conventionally attractive. She was one of the biggest and most consistent earners for the agency. She was fully booked every night, and never had to do anything with clients she wasn't comfortable doing. She was also one of the most horrible women working at the agency. In the girls' lounge, in front of colleagues of Indian, Asian and African descent, she would say loudly and repeatedly how she never went with Indian or Asian or black men as "Boongs and chinks and darkies" "turn [her] stomach" and "make [her] want to puke". If a client who wasn't white turned up she wouldn't ever even go out for introductions. The other girls of ethnic descent were upset and discomfited by her racism, but were too intimidated to say anything as, in most workplaces, if you make waves about someone who happens to be one of the most popular and influential employees there, there will be negative consequences of some kind. Someone did complain once, and was put on another, less busy, shift.

Stuff like that is why I am patently disinterested when another glamorous sex worker turns into a celebrity. Because she wouldn't be talking about how glamorous it is, or how it's totally the best way she could imagine earning an income, if instead of the tall leggy creature of desire with the background and privilege that developed in her the nous to see right through a man and know specifically how to cater to his whims and fuel his fantasies/delusions, but instead the shorter, less toned, less groomed, less privileged girl in the corner who had to agree to anal sex in order to get a booking . . . well, yeah. She wouldn't be where she is today, reminding the rest of us just how society tells us life would be easier if we looked and acted a certain way. Because we don't get reminded of that often enough.