Thread by @CharlotteOU812

Catfishing, Racisim and Sex Work
A Thread

If you’ve been a provider for even a short length of time you’ve had a prospective client ask for photos. Regardless of the fact you may have lots of photos in your advertising, this client wants more.

When you ask them why the 10 or so photos on your ads plus the selfies you place on social media aren’t enough they tells you they’ve “been fooled before”
What they are referring to is something called “catfishing”
We’ve all seen the MTV show.

Person A meets person B online but when they finally meet, person B isn’t who they said they were.
So catfishing in sex work is when the photos in the advertisement don’t match the sex worker in person.

So the other day when asked once again for photos to “prove” I am the person I say I am I set out to explore this phenomenon.
Why would workers put photos up that are not themselves? Wouldn’t they think that was a bad method of advertising?

What about the real provider in the photo? What happens when a client arrives to find out the photos and the provider don’t match and how much does this REALLY happen? I needed to ask someone who was catfishing to get to the bottom of this. Not so easy. But I asked around.

Eventually I found May (Not their real name)
May is from Vietnam and has been working in Australia for 18 months. I don’t want to give away anything about May that is identifiable or incriminating so we’ll just stick with the relevant stuff.

May works in a city, shares an apartment with a few other workers and has an agent. The agent handles all the advertising for May and the other workers she works with. May likes her job but is headed home soon.

When I ask May why her ads don’t match her photos she replied
“Australian’s cannot tell the difference between one Asian and another”
I asked her if she really believed that was true. And she replied emphatically
“Yes”

I asked May if she had ever had walk outs in her job. When a client has realised she didn’t match her photo and wanted to leave.
“No” she replied
Had any of the workers she worked with experienced walk outs because they didn’t match the photos
“No”

May explained that professional photos are expensive, that she felt, and other workers that she worked with felt, that clients were looking for an Asian girl and it didn’t matter if they didn’t exactly match the photo.

I wanted May to elaborate more on the thoughts behind this.
“Our clients want cheap services with an Asian girl. They won’t pay more. They expect a lot for a tiny price. This is how we work it to our advantage”

I asked May if she felt that Asian workers in Australia had to charge less because they felt that racisim made it hard to charge more
“Yes. Asian worker means cheaper worker here. And clients still try to barter. So you don’t get real photos for such cheap money”

Which makes a lot of sense to me. I appreciated May being so candid with me and it gave me a lot to think about in terms of racisim in sex work and sex workers attitudes to others sex workers in this industry. How could we actively be helping each other?

So May admitted to catfishing in the industry and why she did it. What was interesting to me is that she had never had a walk out, regardless of not matching her photos. Nor did she work with anyone who did.
The plot was thickening.

Perhaps I needed another angle?
An acquaintance of mine had had her professional photos stolen a couple of years ago and had found out by accident when looking through Backpage one day.
I knew she had contacted the worker who stole her photos. Maybe she had answers...

Vanessa (again not her real name) was happy to share with me. Yes her photos were stolen a few years ago, yes she contacted the person who stole them. Yes she was able to get the person to stop using them, and yes she found out why this worker stole them in the first place

Vanessa told me
“I rang this worker up and at first I was really angry. She’d stolen my photos and was potentially harming my brand. But surprisingly she was nice and didn’t realise the harm she was causing me.
It turns out this girl was up from the country, homeless and broke”

“She had no money and no photos. I didn’t show my face but she felt our bodies were very similar. So she lifted my photos and put them on her ad. I explained that my regular clients would know they were my photos and get confused. She didn’t realise that”

“She took my photos down immediately. I recommended a good photographer that had a special going at the time. I don’t know if she took the offer up. I don’t know what happened to her”
I asked if Vanessa thought this worker might just go and steal photos from another worker?

“No. I don’t think she understood that regular clients know your photos really well. I think she just thought without a face shot my photos wouldn’t be recognised”
I wondered if the girl who stole Vanessa’s photos had experienced walk outs?
Vanessa didn’t know.

So it seems that the cost of photos was a significant reason for catfishing in both instances. Also in both examples it seems that not a lot of credit is given to clients for being able to recognise that a worker doesn’t match their photos.

And May who never experience a walk out said it didn’t really matter to her clients that she didn’t match her photos. She did not feel that she needed to apologise for that and I must say after talking to her, that I agree.

If catfishing seems to predominately be from an economic necessity, rather than a deliberate and wilful deceit and that at least in May’s opinion is makes no difference to her clients. Why then is catfishing considered such a big crime?

I do understand that like any other service a client has an expectation of a worker matching her photos. And I think that 99% of the time this would be the case. If you as a client have been catfished and feel hard done by, on behalf of my community I apologise.

However I hope that the explanation I’ve given you may help you see the reasons behind catfishing differently. Perhaps rather than seeing it as a story of you being “ripped off” you might see it from the workers perspective.
But now I’m left with more questions still...

Why do I seem to be asked to send photos to someone requiring proof that I match my photos every week? Because catfishing is not a massive thing at my end of the industry. How do so many people even know that catfishing is a “thing”? And what can SW’s do to help CF workers?

Sex worker photo collecting is a thing. It’s a form of timewasting. Thousands of people out there wanting pics to fill up their phones. Could it be, that just maybe, someone twigged that using the excuse of “proof” was a surefire way of getting photos?

Because I’ve never had a booking from anyone requesting extra photos, sure maybe you have. But it wouldn’t be the majority.
So could it be a clever way to get phones and also create a division between sex workers?

Photos cost a lot. None of us want our hard earned money stolen. But if it would help someone make enough money to eat tonight? Girl, take em!
How can we help other workers and take a stand against creating division within our ranks.

Solidarity. Support a worker. When a client tells you his hard luck story of being “ripped off” Maybe this time don’t commiserate. You could say
“Yes well, not the end of the world. Photos are expensive. Not all sex workers are lucky enough to be able to afford photos”

Because if a client shows to a booking and the worker doesn’t match the photo and that is an important thing to the client they have two options
Leave
Stay
If they choose to leave they didn’t lose money. They kept their money
If they chose to stay. That was their choice

I’m going to support workers in anyway I can and that includes those who don’t use their own photos. Because as a privileged worker that’s my responsibility. And as a responsible client, do your research, read reviews and if you find yourself catfished. It’s okay.

Treat the boooking with grace, kindness and understanding. There is a reason why this worker doesn’t use real photos and it’s not to harm you. It’s not to laugh at you or “rip you off”. It’s a bigger picture. See it

Unroll @threadreaderapp