WHOREBAITING: When Sex Work becomes “cool”

*This is the original pre-edited version of an article featured in the HuffPost in May 2025 (personal portfolio purposes only).

It was a rainy evening and my colleague and I were on the train, on our way to work. I have hopped from strip club to strip club for seven years, and my friend for five. We have been in the adult industry long enough to know all its downsides: precarious working conditions, an unstable income, inescapable discrimination.

“Look,” my colleague handed me their phone. “There is something off with this.”

Their Instagram feed suggested a pop-up event organized by a group of pole dancers using the catchphrase “unstigmatize the stigmatized” to describe themselves. The word stigma in the context of pole dancing left a weird taste in my mouth. It reminded me of another reel I found on an influencer’s page, which tackled the question “Should you quit your muggle job to go into pole full-time?” - a blatant copy of one of the questions sex workers get asked the most by people who fantasize about getting into sex work. The word “muggle” itself is a pole-fitness-world translation of the sex-work-coded term “civilian”, which is how we call non-sex workers: a copycat that shows a lack of understanding for the need to establish a community feeling as sex workers. It almost ridicules it. We don’t separate “us” from “them” because we want to gatekeep; we don’t believe sex work gives you Potteresque magical powers. The importance of defining our community stems from the isolation and discrimination we experience.

This reminded me of queerbaiting, but in sex work.

The debate around queerbaiting, the practice of hinting at a possible queerness as leverage without actually being queer, is quite present in the cultural scene nowadays. I believe we need a similar conversation within the sex-positive movement because I keep seeing too many people playing the sex-worker minority card without actually being one. I couldn’t find a word for this behaviour, so I started thinking about it as “whorebaiting.”

I define whorebaiting as a phenomenon where people in sex-positive communities appropriate sex work narratives, language, and labels to market themselves and profit off it - for money and for clout.

Whorebeiting can be broken down into two major behaviours. The first one is the appropriation of sex work language and discourse.

Going back to the victim narrative attached to the word stigma, a comment in a Reddit thread on the issue of stigma being attached to pole dancing reads: “Stigma is why I only have “dancing“ in my CV instead of Poledancing”. Yet, as of January 2025, there are no laws that police and criminalize pole dancing; I have not read about increasing rates of violence against this community either. Is it really systemic stigmatization what these people are experiencing?

Harry Styles, a white cis-gender man, was chosen by Vogue for their December 2020 cover. On that cover, he is posing in women’s clothes, stating that he has felt an attraction for women’s clothes since he was a child. Vogue highlights his words in bold: “Anytime you are putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means.” This sounds disturbingly similar to queer narratives - yet Styles never identified as queer. It was Billy Porter, queer icon from the series Pose, who called out this behaviour, denouncing: “You’re using my community – or your people are using my community – to elevate you. You haven’t had to sacrifice anything.”

The stigma attached to men wearing women’s clothes is in relation to these male-presenting people being seen as queer. In the same way, stigma is not attached to pole dance itself. Take cheerleading: the performers are highly sexualized, but they are not stigmatized because they are conforming to traditional sexual norms. In pole dancing, stigma comes because people associate the pole with strippers; it comes only in relation to its roots in sex work.

Victim narratives are often being adopted by kinky performers, burlesque and pole dancers, and sex-positive people as bait to attract a bigger audience. If we can all agree it wasn’t Style’s (amongst others) place to speak for queer people and to play the minority card to attract more followers, we should translate the same idea into this context too.

The second behaviour characteristic of whorebaiting is identity appropriation.

Actress Julia Fox has used her six-month experience as a dominatrix in myriads of interviews as a marketing tool, making it the title and central topic of discussion. Diablo Cody, screenwriter of the film Juno, worked in a strip club for barely a year and turned that short period into a memoir titled Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Author Emma Becker has gone as far as working in a brothel with the goal of doing research for her novel. It’s also not uncommon to find dancers who have worked a couple of shifts in a strip club using the label "stripper" as their marketing identity, to teach stripper-style classes and lap dance workshops, or to be hired for jobs as the diversity element.

If your experience as a sex worker is very limited and the marginalization that comes with it hasn’t had any influence on your life, does that give you the right to appropriate the label to your advantage?

I am always suspicious of people who claim they have been sex workers, but who are very vague about details - especially concerning how long. Whorebaiting behaviours aim at creating an ambiguity where sneaky people can thrive. This ambiguity puts them in the same box as sex workers who genuinely cannot be open about their identity because of possible repercussions. In case of ambiguity, it is an ethically questionable choice to ask people if they are really queer or if they are really a sex worker. Many seem to agree on this: you can’t force people to come out. Yet, I don’t fully agree with this stance.

If you use a hinted queerness or hinted sex-work experience as leverage, the questions are inevitably going to come. If that’s your marketing strategy, I don’t think it’s so out of place for the community to verify you are not appropriating something that doesn’t represent you. By carrying your body as a possible representative of a marginalized community, you automatically acquire a responsibility. It might be different in your private life, where you can choose who you open up to, but, when it comes to public image, there is no in-between: either you are closeted or you are not. The moment you are hinting, you are outing yourself already.

Harry Styles reacted to the accusation of being queerbaiting, calling the need to define one’s sexuality outdated, and stating in an interview that we don’t have to label everything or clarify what boxes we are ticking. Good for you if you can escape labeling, Harry, because most of us can’t. Labels matter the moment you experience violence because society hates you, and the moment there are laws in place to criminalize your own existence. Our label is a legal record and it’s very hard to come off, Harry.

Now, why does talking about whorebaiting matter? And, most of all, why would people try so hard to be seen as whores?

R.F. Kuang, author of the bestseller Yellowface, explains in an interview in The Rumpus that the wish to belong to a minority group is based on the flawed perception that marginalized people have acquired an advantage in today's society. The word “diversity” is shovelled in everywhere, and so many institutions, from the media industry to local companies, want to give the impression it’s what they are striving for. But the realities of minorities’ everyday lives tell a different story.

I have recently pitched a feature to a feminist magazine about the sex-worker cabarets we organize with Slut Riot. The verdict from the editor was: “We already wrote about one sex-worker group.” The article in question is one year old and is about an escort agency that does very different work from ours. In other words, the editor thought they had already fulfilled their duty by featuring one sex worker group, one year ago. The alleged obsession with diversity is just a facade: having a little bit of minority stories is good for reputation, but let's not exaggerate. Whorebaiting, queerbaiting, and all-kind-minority-baiting show a total disconnection from reality.

At the end of the day, whorebaiting is a way of cultural appropriation. It takes away income, space, and visibility from sex workers. Being a sex worker is not a fun thing to have on your CV, and if whorebaiters had really been sex workers, they would know. The label “sex worker” comes with violence, laws that police our bodies, criminalization, travel bans, fear, limited access to bank and payment services, erasure from history, censorship and silencing on online platforms. And the list goes on.

The spaces we can reclaim are very limited and so are the advantages and the working opportunities - we have to ask you to leave them to us.