My Family Just Found Out I’m a Sex Worker

My nan messaged me at 6pm on a Saturday night telling me she’d been fielding calls all day from other family members.

My secret was out.

My family now know I’m a sex worker.

They know I earn my money through OnlyFans and cam modelling. They know that this is my main source of income. They know that somewhere on the internet, men are paying actual money to look at my tits.

Thoughts and prayers to everyone affected during this difficult time.

After being made redundant recently, I picked up sex work again. It was something I’d done before and, perhaps most offensively of all, something I actually enjoyed.

Yes, it can be hard work sometimes. There are long nights. There are rude customers. There are people who want everything for nothing. There are days where business is slow and days where you wonder whether everyone on the internet has collectively decided to go to bed early.

So, basically, a job.

And it is a job.

I knew this time was going to be different though.

I wasn’t picking up sex work as a temporary side hustle while I figured out what came next. I wanted to make it my permanent and primary income, and that meant treating it like the business it is.

I wanted to grow my following.

I wanted to build a brand.

I wanted to stop acting as though the way I earned my money was something that needed to be whispered about.

Going Public as an OnlyFans Creator

Over recent years, attitudes towards sex work have shifted slightly. Popular influencers have built enormous audiences before launching OnlyFans accounts. Sex workers have built mainstream social media platforms. The internet has made it increasingly difficult to maintain the convenient little cultural fantasy that sex workers exist in some completely separate universe from everybody else.

We are your neighbours.

We are the woman in front of you in Tesco buying an unreasonable amount of Pepsi Max.

We are mothers, girlfriends, wives, students, graduates, disabled women, business owners and women who got sick of spending forty hours a week pretending to be passionate about somebody else’s quarterly targets.

Some of us even have LinkedIn profiles.

Terrifying, I know.

For me, that changing landscape meant I wasn’t particularly afraid of being shunned by other online communities anymore.

My partner knew what I was doing. The people closest to me knew. The people whose opinions actually had the ability to affect my life had been briefed.

Because going public about sex work is something you should think properly about.

The internet has a very long memory and absolutely no respect for context.

Once you attach your face to adult content, you have to accept the possibility that somebody you went to school with will eventually find it. An old colleague might see it. Your neighbour might see it. Your cousin’s friend’s boyfriend’s sister might see it and suddenly become an investigative journalist.

There is no realistic way to build a large public platform while simultaneously guaranteeing that nobody from your real life will ever stumble across it.

So I thought about it.

I am already no contact with a lot of my family anyway. The people I actually care about knew what I was doing. My relationship wasn’t at risk. My home wasn’t at risk.

And once I’d dealt with the people whose opinions mattered to me, something changed.

I stopped hiding.

I made TikToks.

I posted Instagram reels.

I showed my face.

I started allowing myself to exist publicly as the same woman who privately made adult content.

And apparently, somewhere along the way, the family emergency hotline was activated.

Suddenly people who have very little involvement in my actual life were extremely concerned about what I was doing with it.

Which raises a question I think we should probably talk about.

Why Does Everyone Have an Opinion About Women in Sex Work?

Why does everyone feel so entitled to an opinion about a woman’s sexuality?

Because this isn’t really about work.

If I announced tomorrow that I’d started cleaning houses for a living, nobody would ring my nan.

If I became a freelance graphic designer, there would be no emergency family conference.

If I spent twelve hours a day sitting at a desk until my spine fused into the shape of an office chair, people would call me hardworking.

But take my clothes off on camera?

Sound the fucking alarm.

Suddenly my employment becomes communal property.

People who don’t pay my bills want a board meeting about how I pay them.

And that is where sex work becomes such an interesting feminist issue.

Women are constantly told that our bodies are ours.

Our body, our choice.

We hear it in campaigns. We see it printed on signs. We repeat it during conversations about reproductive rights, clothing, relationships and consent.

But society has quietly added an asterisk.

Your body, your choice.*

*Terms and conditions apply. Choices must be approved by the committee.

You can be sexy, but not too sexy.

You can post a bikini picture, provided nobody pays you for it.

You can wear lingerie in an advertising campaign for a multinational corporation and call it modelling.

You can perform a simulated sex scene in a film and call it acting.

You can spend years creating thirst traps to sell makeup, protein powder, clothes or perfume.

But if a woman removes the corporation standing between her sexuality and the money?

Suddenly we need to discuss her self-respect.

Funny, that.

Sex Work, Feminism and Female Sexuality

There is something particularly uncomfortable to society about women directly monetising something society has been monetising on our behalf forever.

Female sexuality sells absolutely everything.

Cars.

Perfume.

Clothes.

Films.

Music.

Magazines.

Social media.

Entire industries have been built around convincing women to be desirable and convincing men to desire us.

But apparently the radical part happens when the woman sends the invoice herself.

That’s when everyone gets nervous.

Of course, the immediate assumption is that a woman doing sex work must have somehow been forced into it.

Maybe she is desperate.

Maybe she has low self-esteem.

Maybe she has been manipulated.

Maybe she doesn’t understand what she’s doing.

Anything except the deeply inconvenient possibility that she considered her options and chose it.

That doesn’t mean exploitation doesn’t exist within the sex industry. It does. It deserves to be taken seriously.

But exploitation also exists in agriculture, hospitality, domestic work, warehouses, care work and corporate offices. Strangely, we don’t respond to exploitation in those industries by declaring that everyone working in them has lost their dignity.

We talk about workers’ rights.

Perhaps sex workers deserve the same courtesy.

I am not asking anybody to become a sex worker.

I am not claiming it is the perfect career.

I’m certainly not claiming everyone would enjoy it.

I am saying that I am an adult woman who made an informed decision about my own life.

I know what the internet is.

I know screenshots exist.

I know people gossip.

I know some people will judge me.

I considered all of that before I started publicly attaching my face to what I do.

The fascinating thing is that people often assume sex workers haven’t thought about these consequences.

Trust me, we have.

We’ve probably thought about them significantly more than the person who discovered our account yesterday and immediately started ringing relatives.

Why I Choose Sex Work as My Job

And yes, there are risks.

There are also benefits.

I choose when I work.

I choose what I show.

I choose what I don’t show.

I decide my boundaries.

I decide my prices.

I decide which customers get my attention and which ones get blocked.

There is something almost comical about being told that sex work automatically strips women of agency while I’m sitting there operating my own business, deciding exactly what happens to my body, when it happens and what somebody has to pay to access it.

Compare that with how much control women are expected to surrender in perfectly respectable workplaces.

We tolerate employers controlling when we wake up, when we eat lunch, when we can take holiday, what we wear, where we sit and sometimes even when we can go to the toilet.

That’s employment.

But charging someone to watch me take my bra off from the comfort of my own bedroom?

Apparently I’ve surrendered my autonomy.

Make it make sense.

I’m a Sex Worker. I’m Not Ashamed.

What I also find interesting is the shame hierarchy.

Because there is an expectation that once your family discovers you do sex work, you should be embarrassed.

You should panic.

You should delete everything.

You should issue some sort of statement explaining yourself.

But I don’t feel ashamed.

That makes the whole thing slightly awkward.

You cannot shame someone very effectively when they refuse to participate.

Yes, I make adult content.

Yes, men pay me.

Yes, my family now know.

Anyway, what are we having for dinner?

I understand that some relatives might feel uncomfortable. They are allowed to.

They are also allowed to exercise the revolutionary technological advancement known as not looking at my OnlyFans.

I would actually strongly recommend it.

There are some boundaries families should maintain.

But their discomfort doesn’t automatically become my shame.

Those are different things.

I think women spend far too much of our lives carrying other people’s discomfort for them.

We make ourselves smaller because someone might gossip.

We dress differently because someone might judge us.

We avoid talking about sex because somebody might think we’re promiscuous.

We stay quiet about money because women aren’t supposed to talk openly about wanting it.

We apologise for being visible.

Eventually, you have to ask yourself whose life you’re actually living.

Because there will always be someone with an opinion.

If you’re fat, someone thinks you should lose weight.

If you’re thin, someone thinks you need to eat.

If you’re single, someone wants to know when you’ll find somebody.

If you’re married, someone wants to know when you’re having children.

If you have children, someone thinks you’re raising them incorrectly.

If you don’t want children, someone wants a PowerPoint presentation explaining why.

And if you’re a woman making money from sex?

Well.

Apparently they ring your nan.

What Happens When Your Family Finds Your OnlyFans?

I don’t know exactly what happens next.

Maybe more relatives will find my accounts.

Maybe somebody will dramatically announce that they’re disappointed in me.

Maybe I’ll become the interesting topic at family gatherings I wasn’t attending anyway.

There are worse things to be.

What I do know is that I’m not going back into hiding just because the secret isn’t a secret anymore.

In a strange way, the thing I was protecting myself from has already happened.

They know.

And the world has continued spinning.

My dogs still need feeding.

My bills still need paying.

My partner still loves me.

I still have work to do.

Perhaps that’s the anticlimactic truth about being “exposed” as a sex worker.

Eventually, after the whispers and phone calls and screenshots and outrage, everyone has to get on with their own lives.

Including me.

The only difference is that now I don’t have to wonder what will happen when they find out.

They did.

I’m still here.

And I’ve got a shift tonight.

And in case you didn’t get the message about how ashamed I am not, find me @mistresslillie on OnlyFans.