My Hooker Has a Face!
WHEN DELILAH began work as an escort last year, she chose to blur her face in the photos she posts on her website and Twitter profile. The Ottawa, Ontario, college student made the decision to hide her features to keep her sex work from her conservative Muslim family and so she can transition smoothly and without stigma into a different career when she graduates.
But hiding her face has its drawbacks. “I would certainly get a lot more clients. And no one would be in for a shock when they saw me,” says the 23-year-old, explaining that her baby face can surprise new clients. “I wish we lived in a world where I could show my face.”
An escort’s decision to reveal or obscure his or her face online sheds light on the complicated issues sex workers navigate as they seek to balance profits and competition, their plans for the future and potential attention from law enforcement. Several escorts also told Newsweek they show their faces in hopes their “coming out” will help strip the shame from sex work and add momentum to their work toward decriminalization—a focus of media and nonprofit attention this year.
Hilary Holiday, a Minneapolis escort, says she covered her face in photos when she began sex work in the early 2000s. Then, about six years ago, jealous competitors began posting in online escort forums that she must be hiding her face because she was hideous, and Holiday grew frustrated. She finally posted photos to prove them wrong. “My income, like, doubled when I showed my face, so I kind of got addicted to showing,” Holiday tells Newsweek, explaining that her annual earnings spiked from $150,000 to $300,000.
Now Holiday posts photos with her face uncovered, both for the money and because she’s proud of what she does and what she’s accomplished. “Everybody knows I do this with integrity. My kids have gone on nice trips; we have a hot tub in the yard. I’m a good provider,” says Holiday, who doesn’t see smokers or men under 35. But she warns new sex workers that covering their faces in online photos doesn’t guarantee their protection or privacy. “You’re probably eventually going to get outed, so you should really be comfortable with it,” she says.
Sex work can also put an escort at a disadvantage in a custody fight, especially when an angry ex-partner uses it to argue the sex worker is an unfit parent. “As soon as there’s a dispute with an unscrupulous partner, the partner just says, ‘Your honor, my ex is a sex worker!’ And what do you think happens?” says escort and sex work advocate Maggie Mcneill. She adds that her decision to show her face was made easier by the fact that she doesn’t have children and doesn’t plan on a future career that could “potentially be bombed” by her long history of sex work.
Mcneill, who blogs as “the Honest Courtesan,” says new escorts weigh multiple factors when deciding how open to be with their images online. “I tell young girls, ‘You might want to really consider whether you want to show your
face or not,’” Mcneill says. “‘You may get married, you may have children. Even if your family of birth is cool with it, how do you know your in-laws will be cool with it?’”
Prostitution has been a center of conversation in the media this year, with New York magazine running a cover story, “Is Prostitution Just Another Job?,” in March and The New York Times Magazine doing the same in May, with “Should Prostitution Be a Crime?” Then, later in May, Amnesty International published its policy on protecting sex workers from abuse, which recommended the decriminalization of consensual sex work. “This is based on evidence that these laws often make sex workers less safe and provide impunity for abusers, with sex workers often too scared of being penalized to report crime to the police,” the organization said.
Like other issues surrounding prostitution and decriminalization, choosing whether to reveal one’s face online is a bigger concern for well-off escorts who charge $400 an hour and have their own websites and Twitter profiles, while poor and marginalized prostitutes have other, more pressing worries.
Escorts still risk arrest. Posting their faces online can help law enforcement investigate and prosecute sex workers. “Having your face on Twitter could be an opportunity for police to reach out to you and entrap you,” says Philadelphia escort Mike Crawford, who calls himself a “fulltime queer, part-time cashsexual” on his Twitter profile. “If you have the same image on your Facebook page and on your ads, an investigator could quickly use Google search to match them up.” (When Holiday was arrested on prostitution charges in 2013, police said they matched photos on her escort website to her driver’s license.)
Still, Crawford says his decision to show his face is cemented by his work as an advocate for sex workers and decriminalization. He and other advocates believe sex worker rights today are evolving but are at the point where gay rights were in the 1950s, where coming out can jeopardize a person’s job and family ties.
“I’ve had sex workers apologize to me for not being out,” says Mcneill. “And I’m like, ‘Oh honey, don’t apologize to me! You have a life. I made my decision. If I were 30, I might not make the decision to show my face.’”
“MY INCOME, LIKE, DOUBLED WHEN I SHOWED MY FACE, SO I KIND OF GOT ADDICTED TO SHOWING.”