For some graduates in the wake of 2020, sex work offered a rare form of economic opportunity during a time of historic job loss, stagnant wages, and a collapsing job market.
That was especially true during the pandemic, which made sex work more visible — and arguably more mainstream — than ever before.
“Sex work should be high reward and high payoff money-wise, because a lot of us suffer in doing this work,” she says.
For those who aren’t starting their own ventures, the tough job market is making it increasingly difficult to transition out of sex work.
Melissa Ditmore, who has researched the sex work industry in the US, says this dynamic is typical these days.
After earning a business management degree from King’s College London in 2019, Hannah intended to pursue a career in marketing. But after finding it difficult to find employment in her field, she accepted a job at a makeup counter, which barely paid for her central London apartment. She started working sporadic shifts to supplement her income after a friend introduced her to stripping. Hannah quit her job at the store to work as a freelance stripper after realizing she could earn much more money at the club.
She started dancing at private parties a few times a month, earning between $2,640 and $4,000 per event, to help pay her rent after the pandemic struck and strip clubs closed. She resumed stripping full-time after lockdowns ended, and she has continued to do so ever since. “After studying for three or four years, you would think that you could go into a job with better prospects,” she says. She claims that even though she has occasionally applied for jobs, “it seems like the only thing you can do these days and really make decent money is sex work.”. “.
It appears that many other people are in a similar situation. According to the most recent report from its parent company, the number of OnlyFans creator accounts increased from approximately 350,000 in 2019 to 40.1 million in 2023. Meanwhile, according to a Financial Times analysis, the number of provider accounts created on the escort platform Adult Work increased by threefold in 2022 compared to 2019. OnlyFans appeared to be a quick and simple way to get rich thanks to profiles of women like Bella Thorne, who allegedly made $1 million in a single day. For some people, sex work of all kinds began to seem like a feasible career path in the face of emails denying them jobs and degrees from universities that seemed to be useless. Even though the industry has historically favored young people, Gen Z is maturing as a result of an internet-driven boom that is drawing more and more people to the field in search of flexible work schedules and additional income. According to a 2021 study, the average age to begin escorting was 22, and a 2024 survey of US sex workers revealed that roughly 73% of participants were between the ages of 18 and 35, with women making up the majority.
There were soon too many sex workers due to the flood. Rates started to decline in tandem with clients’ tightening budgets. A number of sex workers, whose names have been changed to protect their identities, told me that they turned to sex work as a way to get by during a difficult job market. However, they discovered that the field is becoming much less profitable for some due to an overcrowded market. Sex workers have begun talking about cutting their prices on Reddit in an effort to draw in more customers. I talked to a sex worker who said that since 2019, their pay has decreased by 30%. Those who considered sex work as a potential fallback option now face a harsh reality as the economy continues to lurch into catastrophe.
There has been an event during the last four months of this year. According to Hannah, people are much more frugal now than they were. This year, the club is much quieter. “.”.
Sex work provided some recent graduates with a unique kind of financial opportunity in the wake of 2020, when the labor market was collapsing, wages were stagnating, and job losses were historic. “In times of need, selling sex has always been the quickest and most direct way to earn money,” says anthropologist Laura María Agustín, who focuses on sex work and informal labor markets. This was particularly true during the pandemic, which increased the visibility and, in some ways, the mainstreaming of sex work.
After seeing how much the subjects of the BBC documentary “Strippers” made, Alex started stripping to make ends meet while she was still in school. The 28-year-old learned how to be independent at a young age because he was raised in part in foster care. “I came from a background where I didn’t have money, so I was chasing after it,” she notes. “I’m quite entrepreneurial.”. Following her graduation from the University of Edinburgh in 2019, she kept stripping until August 2020, when she was hired as an executive recruiter. After three months, her initial salary of £20,000, or roughly $27,000, for the office job decreased to £18,000, with commission expected to cover the shortfall. Rent accounted for more than half of her take-home pay.
Alex became interested in the lifestyle and the potential earnings after a strip club friend began escorting. After working as a recruiter for a few months, she started doing escorting on the side. She soon earned £6,000 a month. Two years later, she quit her day job. She claims that “my managers weren’t respecting me.”. “They don’t promote independent, critical thinking, and there’s this notion that juniors are meant to stick to their studies. “.”.
When Maria, 28, became disillusioned with traditional employment, she also turned to sex work. Before relocating to London and accepting a position as a receptionist at a law firm, she had worked as a paralegal in Australia. She quickly grew weary of the longer hours, lower pay, and lack of flexibility. Not until she met a coworker, a fellow receptionist who danced in strip clubs to augment her income, did she start thinking about taking a different route. She quickly exchanged the legal office for strip clubs in the US and London.
But the work hasn’t been as profitable lately. Maria claims that even though she has six years of experience, her pay is comparable to what she earned as a “baby stripper” in 2019 when she was completely inexperienced. “The clubs had a lot more foot traffic back then,” she says. “Now, customers are definitely stingier,” she says. She works three to four nights a week for about £5,200 a month. “I should be earning more because I have so much more knowledge and experience,” she asserts.
That, Maria says, is because of the recent economic slump. “People no longer want to spend as much and are more economical. “Many men continue to say, ‘I can’t afford that, it’s the cost of living crisis,'” she says.
In the r/sexworkers Reddit thread, a number of American posters claimed that they started to notice a drop in earnings at the same time that economists began discussing a recession following President Donald Trump’s tariff announcement. More posters have recently claimed that clients are becoming more demanding and that business is unusually slow. After 15 years of monitoring the sex work industry, data analyst and TheFinanceNewsletter founder Andrew Lokenauth claims that revenue at clubs in major US cities fell by 35 to 40 percent between 2022 and 2024. He has seen strip clubs close, lay off employees, and shorten their hours due to the economic downturn in his role as a financial advisor to these establishments, and he anticipates more will follow.
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“A winter sport is strip clubs. According to Hannah, winter is when you should earn the most money. “The earnings weren’t as good as we thought they would have been,” the report said. “..”.
She claims that prior to the pandemic, she was earning between £5,000 and £7,000 per month for working four nights a week. For the same amount of work, she now makes, on average, between £4,000 and £5,000. Hannah remarks, “Older girls say they easily made £1,000 a night before 2008, but since then, that’s pretty rare in London.”.
She continues by saying that she’s fortunate to have a few regulars who visit on a regular basis; she’s observed that many girls wind up just hanging out at the club because there aren’t enough patrons. She says, “You just have to work really hard, but you can still make good money.”.
There is no longer a middle class in sex work.
Even though some OnlyFans creators continue to earn over $100,000 per month, according to Lokenauth, average monthly earnings on the platform have decreased from roughly $600 to less than $200 in just two years. There is no middle class in sex work anymore, according to the sex workers and ghostwriters Pejcha has interviewed at major agencies. (A lot of popular OnlyFans creators now employ ghostwriters to compose posts and respond to messages. ).
Charlotte was an eyewitness to this. At the age of 19, she started stripping while attending college, right before the 2008 recession cut corporate entertainment budgets and caused club profits to plummet. In her early 20s, she left the industry to pursue traditional employment. After purchasing an apartment in London, she paid off her mortgage and went back to sex work last year, this time as an escort. She is currently in her mid-30s. After a decade away, she discovered that the environment had changed significantly, with burnout, declining rates, and oversaturation now commonplace.
She claimed that she was earning up to £2,000 per night dancing in a strip club prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Because escorting entails a higher degree of intimacy, she anticipated it to yield even more. Although her hourly rates have capped at £300 to £400, she now makes an average of £1,000 to £3,000 per week, which is frequently less than what she used to make in a single night during the years of the strip club boom.
“I’m having a hard time,” she says. “Am I the only one having trouble?” “This just doesn’t feel normal.”.
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Charlotte ascribes the change to the oversupplied market. She claims that “it ruined everything.”. Sex could be purchased by men for as little as ordering Uber Eats. “,”.
Even so-called “high-end” escorts, or “posh English girls with premium high rates,” as Charlotte describes them, had to change their methods due to the intense competition for reservations. Her words, “Even those of us on AdultWork dropped our rates to ensure we got bookings,”.
Charlotte argues that the nature of sex work, which she characterizes as inherently “violent” and frequently dangerous, warrants a higher rate of return, even though £1,000 to £3,000 per week may seem like good money to many. She claims that since many of us suffer while performing this work, “sex work should be high reward and high payoff money-wise.”. It’s all about making enough money to get by. I would absolutely never want to have sex with any of these men. I desired a ridiculously high salary. “.
At first, many of the women I interviewed believed that sex work was a way to get financial independence sooner than traditional jobs would allow if one hustled hard enough. Flexibility, independence, and a large income were promised to a generation that was brought up on self-branding and independence; it was a sort of short cut to the American dream.
The slowdown, however, demonstrates that the same market forces that govern other industries also govern sex work. According to a University of Chicago study, prostitution “is more sensitive to changes in unemployment, income, or other macro factors that decrease consumer demand” following the 2008 recession. The sex industry, in other words, shrinks when the economy does.
The easy money from the boom days has made some people reconsider going after other types of employment. When the pandemic struck, Asia de la Rosa was 15 years old and began selling foot photos and catfishing content on Snapchat. Over the course of one summer, she earned $45,000, “the most money I’ve ever touched in my life”. Although the app eventually banned her profile and cracked down on sex work, the money altered her perspective on life. Twenty years old and earning $16 per hour in a Manhattan bodega, she has no interest in pursuing a traditional career. She claims, “It’s like, ‘That’s not my worth,’ after seeing how much money I made and returning to regular work.”. She still makes a side income from selling fetishists pictures of her feet.
Alex, who is enjoying herself and making up to £10,000 a month, is also not interested in returning to the workforce. She claims that “clients who like me, still like me,” which helps her withstand the effects of saturation. She intends to continue escorting until she turns 35, possibly even later. “I make a lot of people happy, and if I stopped, I would feel bad for them. She might envision working for herself or launching her own company if she changes her course in the future.
Moving away from sex work is becoming more and more challenging for those who aren’t launching their own businesses due to the challenging job market. With ten years of experience in and out of the industry, Zoe, 32, is concerned that her decision to pursue sex work could ultimately backfire. She asks, “How am I going to explain two years out of work on my CV?”. She lists “client relations” on her resume, but she is at a loss for examples when recruiters ask for them. “I am unable to state that I have dinner dates with Google executives. “.”.
In her thirties, Maria is also concerned about her capacity to move into more traditional employment. “I had no plans for my career when I first entered the field. Stripping was a good fit for my “live in the moment” philosophy, which has always been to do what makes you happy at the time. However, I’ve come to the realization that I haven’t really figured out what I want to do after perhaps spending too much time in the present. So, stripping might have hindered me in that way. “..”.
According to Melissa Ditmore, who has studied the US sex work industry, this dynamic is common in the modern era. She claims that “youth is connected to some of this.”. But some of it is structural; with traditional routes to upward mobility becoming less viable in today’s labor market, career planning is more difficult. “,”.
The money from a stripper now supports Hannah’s lifestyle, and she believes that it’s a better option than going back to a 9 to 5 job for the time being. With the intention of eventually leaving the industry, she started a clothing line last year. “Sex work is a really good way to learn how to manage a business, as businesses are very unpredictable,” she says. She isn’t hopeful about leaving anytime soon, though.
Freelance writer Megan Robinson writes about intimacy, culture, and work. She also writes about how culture and economics interact as an editor at Dough! magazine.
