Inside British TV’s Long, Ugly History of Slut-Shaming Sex Workers
In the U.K., reality TV shows don’t come much bigger than Love Island. In 2017, the third season of the dating show—which sees a squad of single ‘Islanders’ transported to a Mediterranean villa in search of “love” and fame—became an unexpected cultural phenomenon. The ITV show’s runaway success created a wave of British reality-star influencers, with millions of young viewers leading to Instagram fame and lucrative brand partnerships. International versions of the show soon followed, including the U.S. and Australia.
This summer, after taking 2020 off because of COVID, Love Island will return to U.K. screens. And it’s been reported that producers are “cracking down” on contestants who have profiles on OnlyFans, a platform where “fans” pay to see exclusive pictures and video—which can (but don’t always) include nudes—from content creators. Apparently, a platform that is used by celebrities, fitness professionals and sex workers “isn’t compatible” with the show’s audience. When asked to confirm these reports, ITV didn’t respond to requests for comment.
This reported exclusion seems bizarre, given that Love Island is a show that revolves around sex and desire, where strippers and models have been cast alongside doctors, gym trainers, and bomb-disposal experts. One of the show’s most iconic former contestants, Megan Barton-Hanson—who worked as a stripper before appearing on the show in 2018—claims she has made millions from OnlyFans since then. Producers are also known for casting influencers from other platforms, like Instagram, so allegedly excluding OnlyFans stars in this way feels agenda-driven.
Rebecca More—a sex worker, performer, and OnlyFans creator who you might recognize as one half of the ‘cock destroyer’ meme duo—tells The Daily Beast that sex workers being excluded from British TV shows is nothing new. “It’s not a shock... Clearly someone doesn’t want to give sex workers a platform,” she says. “Sex workers don’t trust mainstream because of how we are portrayed, either.”
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It does feel like antagonism toward OnlyFans as a platform feeds into a long and complicated relationship between British television and sex work. This reflects Britain’s strange and often contradictory attitude toward sex—and wider political conflicts over the legality and place of sex work in the U.K. today.
When British reality and factual television shows aren’t allegedly excluding sex workers, they have faced accusations of exploiting and failing to protect them. In 2012, Channel 4 aired a show called Sex Lies and Rinsing Guys. It followed several young women, including Danica Thrall, who make a living “rinsing” men for money and gifts. What viewers saw was similar to “sugar daddy” arrangements or “financial domination.” After the show aired, several of the women said they’d received death threats and felt unsafe.
From 2005 to 2019, it was common to turn on TV in the middle of the day and see Jeremy Kyle—the host of a Jerry Springer-style TV show that was eventually cancelled after a guest took his own life—screaming at “prostitutes” with addiction issues. One sex worker even claimed Kyle told the audience to heckle her.
On Britain’s reality TV shows, glamour models have been regular cast members since the early noughties. But beyond modeling, when reality stars were accused of having a history of escorting, it’s a very different story. Escorting is the practice of being paid to accompany someone on dates, trips or to events. Services provided vary depending on the arrangement and sometimes include sexual activity, but this isn’t always the case.
After tabloid reports that Maria Fowler, former star of structured reality show The Only Way is Essex, had been an escort before her stint on the show, she was reportedly threatened with being fired—even when she strongly denied the reports and said they made her feel suicidal. Reality star Chloe Khan said the tabloid storm over her alleged history of escorting, which she insisted was limited to being “paid to party” and not sexual encounters, almost ruined her life after she auditioned for Simon Cowell’s British singing competition show The X Factor in 2010.
There’s a long history of young women in particular being shamed in this way, More says: “Anytime a woman has put herself out there about enjoying sex, or making money out of sexuality, they get rejected.” And there’s a definite double standard, she argues, where influencers, models and actors are treated differently to sex workers, who are stigmatized. She remembers a tabloid furore when Hayley Dollery—a contestant on U.K. dating show Blind Date—was discovered to be an escort in 1997, but she doesn’t think things have improved dramatically since then.
Last year, a sex worker filmed in Louis Theroux’s BBC documentary Selling Sex complained they were mistreated and presented in a “manipulative” way. Ashley wrote: “Since the documentary aired, none of my family will speak to me.” After she made a formal complaint about how she was treated during filming and how the documentary was edited, the BBC said there wasn’t evidence to support claims of misconduct and insisted duty of care is important to them.
Ashley said that the people who made the documentary had a “shallow” understanding of sex work. And across British TV—including fictional representations—there seems to be a lack of nuance or realism. There’s been glamorous representations like ITV's Secret Diaries of a Call Girl (2007), which followed the exploits of high-end “call girl” Belle de Jour (Billie Piper). But at the time the English Collective of Prostitutes, a network of sex workers campaigning for decriminalization and safety, dismissed the show as “a rose-tinted, commercialized view of the job with a bit of soft porn thrown in” that “doesn’t touch on many of the daily realities.”
At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a wide range of dramas about sex workers who have been brutally murdered, like ITV’s Five Daughters and series 2 of BBC’s Happy Valley. There have been famous cases of sex workers being murdered in the U.K.—Steve Wright, the “Suffolk Strangler,” killed five women in 2006. But high-profile murder stories aren’t always representative of the types of day-to-day violence and marginalization sex workers are more likely to experience.
Adeline Berry—a PhD student, trans activist, and former sex worker—tells The Daily Beast that British TV is unlikely to platform realistic portrayals of sex work unless sex workers are involved in making it. She cites American content such as Disclosure (a Laverne Cox-produced Netflix documentary about Hollywood’s portrayal of trans people) and Sense8 (a Netflix science-fiction drama created by trans siblings Lilly and Lana Wachowski) as examples of how trans representation has improved through trans creators.
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But sex work, particularly on British TV, is lagging behind. “The first time I ever saw even halfway accurate portrayals of trans people, it’s because trans people were involved. And I have yet to see a realistic portrayal of a sex worker on TV,” she says. “It comes down to the fact that there can be nothing about us, without us. Until sex workers are making their own shows, there isn’t gonna be an accurate portrayal and it’s only gonna feed into the ridiculous shit that’s thrown at us.”
Involving sex workers is a very simple thing that British TV can do to mend trust with a community who’ve long felt exploited and excluded. After all, portraying sex work isn’t necessarily a simple job. There’s lots of different types of sex work (for instance, Ashleigh claimed BBC producers didn’t understand that she wasn’t “new to sex work,” just new to escorting—a key misunderstanding that made her uncomfortable). People get into sex work for a variety of reasons—including poverty, abuse, and addiction issues—yet these are not a part of every sex worker’s story. Like people working in many industries, sex workers have different feelings about the work they do and its place in their lives and wider society. Reflecting such a complex reality isn’t easy, and will be almost impossible without including sex workers in the creation process.
“I’m still waiting for TV representation of gay men who do sex work, and trans people more importantly,” Aidan Ward, a London-based sex worker and OnlyFans creator, tells The Daily Beast. It’s thought that around 85 percent of sex workers in the U.K. are women, but male and LGBTQ+ sex workers are virtually non-existent on British TV. Ward tells me that he’d welcome sex worker stories on TV that challenge deep-rooted stereotypes, instead of reaching for extremes. He is sober, for example, but feels like sex workers are almost always portrayed as addicts. “There is a spectrum of sex workers, there are some of us that lead benign and ‘normal’ lives,” he says. “Many of us are tax-paying individuals who contribute to the British economy. Some of the work we do is therapeutic for some of our clients, who might be recovering from abuse, sexual trauma or looking to explore their sexuality for the first time in a situation they have more control over.”
Of course people shouldn’t need to contribute lots of money to the economy or avoid substance issues to be treated with respect—in ‘real life’ or on TV. But Ward sees a double standard in the way sex is viewed in wider society: “Sex is still taboo, and yet violence is glorified in every medium.”
The current state of sex-worker representation on TV is connected to how sex workers are treated in the U.K.—and a national dialogue around sex that often feels grounded in shaming and prudishness. There’s “a weird line,” Ward argues, where sex work and sex steps over the ‘acceptable’ boundary. “Women can be sexy, but not too sexy, because then they are seen as sluts and whores. There is so much stigma.”
There’s also political disagreements over the best way of reforming Britain’s laws relating to selling sex. The exchange of sexual services for money is currently legal, but a number of activities, including soliciting in a public place, owning or managing a brothel and pimping, are considered to be crimes. There are concerns that the proposed “Nordic model,” which would criminalize those purchasing sex but not those selling it, makes sex workers less safe and doesn’t achieve its aim of reducing demand.
These arguments form part of a bigger conflict between those who think sex work is always exploitative and inherently misogynistic, and others who think that sex work is work. The latter camp would be more likely to argue that sex work, like many jobs and industries, can be harmful, dangerous or exploitative, but the extent of this depends on a variety circumstances.
As these debates rage on, many sex workers now have social media accounts on a variety of platforms and a more democratized way to tell their own stories and make money. Love Island’s former star Megan Barton-Hanson says she’s received misogynistic abuse from men and also criticism from “feminist” women after joining OnlyFans. But as long as no one was forced into the work, and is using their body on their own terms, she doesn’t think there’s a problem. “When someone is happy and has an income that can allow them to provide for their families and be able to contribute to society by paying their taxes, I can’t see any issue with that.”
Love Island’s reported decision to exclude OnlyFans creators like Barton-Hanson seems like a missed opportunity to evolve with the times. Despite the many failures of the past, it does feel like there’s now a desire to portray sex work in a more humanizing, realistic way on British TV—regardless of how well that is being achieved at this exact moment. Reality TV could be the start of that.
Rebecca More says she’s glad social media has allowed people like her to diversify the ways they can make money—and do it safely. OnlyFans creators aren’t all sex workers, and the ones who are aren’t necessarily representatives of sex work as a whole, but the app has put sex workers on the map. More thinks this makes now a good moment for a British TV shows to be brave enough to involve them in the storytelling process. “There’s so many of us… and it would be wonderful to have a show that did something positive. We are just humans,” she says. “I think there will be a show about us soon. Things happen so fast these days.”
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