The Hypocrisy of Who We Choose to Shame

Most people underestimate harlotry as a form of research. They assume it’s all dim hotel bars, bottomless champagne, and the occasional eye-opening sexual encounter. But if you squint through an academic lens, it looks less like pornography and more like anthropology: semi-structured interviews conducted on hotel sheets. 

Qualitative researchers have long argued that numbers tell only half the story. What matters are the contradictions, the cracks in someone’s voice when they say something they don’t mean. That’s what “the field” is for: you ask open-ended questions, and in the slips, the silences, you get truth. If academia insists on focus groups and surveys, sex work offers something similar, only messier, riskier, and infinitely more revealing. Because where else, other than in a world where people strip down (pun intended) to their soul, do they confess the desires they cannot tell their wives, their therapists, or sometimes even themselves?

In research, data always gets cleaned up: filtered for bias, stripped of noise, adjusted for lies. Harlotry isn’t so different. You learn to separate exaggeration from ache, bravado from vulnerability. And beneath the glitter and the false starts, patterns emerge. I have spent years collecting this kind of data — not in spreadsheets, but in conversations whispered between silk sheets (and, admittedly, in my Notes app). Strip away the champagne and choreography, and you’re left with three things everyone wrestles with: judgment, desire, and loneliness.

Welcome to Success: Please Mind the Cage

I didn’t enter this world free of judgment; I was conditioned by it. Like many middle-class children, I was handed a laminated script: finish school, excel at university, pad your résumé with unpaid internships while working nights, and by twenty-one, take your seat in an office where the fluorescent lighting was so merciless it could have been borrowed from an interrogation room. This was called “making it.” The arts? A holding pen for people who couldn’t do math. The self-employed? Failed unicorn chasers lingering in co-working spaces with bad coffee and worse optimism. Marriage and children by thirty? Mandatory. And loyalty to your job, your mortgage, and your trajectory wasn’t treated as a choice, but as a monogamy contract with capitalism: until death (or burnout) do you part.

And I absorbed it all. I became the worst kind of judgmental: the quiet, efficient kind, mistaking exhaustion for achievement and conformity for virtue. If someone stepped off the conveyor belt, I dismissed them. Not out of conviction, but because society had cast me as its unpaid policeman. It was pure Orwell. Every judgment worked like a telescreen, reminding me what not to become. If someone quit their job to travel, I called it reckless; if they followed a dream, naïve. In reality, it was doublethink: envy rebranded as disdain. And it all crumbled the day I became a harlot. Why I did deserves another essay entirely (and I promise I’ll write it). But what matters here is what came after: I still kept one foot in Orwell’s 1984, but the other stepped into a Brave New World: messy, intoxicating, and far less orderly than the one I’d been promised.

Pillow Talk, Peer-Reviewed

The first thing I noticed was that judgment became impossible once you met people off-script. It turned out to be a luxury you can only afford at a distance; up close, the caricatures dissolved. A banker who admitted he wrote poetry but hadn’t shown a soul since his twenties. A taxi driver who quoted Nietzsche with more fluency than a philosophy professor. Or a married executive who wanted nothing more than to eat Cocoa Puffs in a Ritz-Carlton bed because he was tired of being treated like a money-making machine.

Encounters like these became my field notes in intimacy, and they line up almost perfectly with what psychologists call the Contact Hypothesis. First proposed by Gordon Allport in 1954, and later confirmed in a meta-analysis of over 500 studies,  it shows prejudice isn’t a fixed flaw, but just the by-product of separation. Put people into sustained, meaningful contact with those outside their bubble, and judgment erodes. Most people test this in shallow waters: a semester abroad, a corporate diversity workshop, or a new friend from another country. I, however, was thrown into the deep end. And once submerged, I realized how thin the caricatures really were, and judgment dissolved the moment they talked back.

The Holy Business of Looking Away

But there is a larger paradox at work. My own judgments may have crumbled, but society’s remains ferocious — and nowhere louder than around sex work. Let’s be blunt: we are professional hypocrites. We wear shirts stitched by children in overseas factories and call it fast fashion. We donate to the Church (an institution repeatedly exposed for sheltering abusers) and call it virtue. We look down on the janitors scrubbing our office bathrooms, yet expect them immaculate by morning, because exploitation is tolerable as long as it smells of bleach. But sex work? That, apparently, is the labor line too far. How dare you, society insists, to treat intimacy as work, you dirty dirty girl! 

And yet the question lingers: why does intimacy carry a heavier moral charge than every other form of exploitation we casually accept? Science, inconveniently, offers a few clues. Evolutionary psychology suggests humans didn’t just evolve to survive; we evolved moral reflexes: gut-level alarms that trigger when a behavior feels like a threat to the group. If someone takes without giving back, the disgust switch flips. But sex got coded differently. Because it touches reproduction and inheritance, so it became a kind of sacred currency. Who sleeps with whom shapes lineage, property, and alliances. Commercializing that currency feels like breaking a primal contract. Which is why the alarms blare louder at paid intimacy than at a $10 T-shirt sewn by a twelve-year-old.

Anthropologists call this kinship: the way human groups have always built moral rules around family, purity, and loyalty. In societies with tight family bonds, those rules lean heavily on loyalty and sexual purity; in looser ones, morality tilts toward universal fairness (Shweder, 1997). But whatever the setting, the wiring is the same, because moral emotions are fast-acting. Disgust, shame, purity: they’re all pop-up ads in the brain—instant, visceral, impossible to close. Daniel Kahneman (2011) calls this “fast thinking”: the gut punch lands first, rationalization limps in later. Which is why we can scroll past 200 headlines about labor exploitation in our iPhone supply chain without blinking, and yet clutch our pearls at the thought of someone being paid for sex.

The Roles We Play For Others

Sociology sharpens this picture. Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life casts everyday life as theater. On the front stage, we perform the roles expected of us: competent employee, dependable parent, loyal friend. And behind the curtain is the backstage, where the masks slip — where people worry, contradict themselves, or quietly collapse. The unspoken rule of social life is that the backstage stays hidden, but sex work collapses that curtain. In the room, both client and worker are drawn into an unmasking. The executive who performs stoicism all day admits he feels invisible. The woman who spends her life projecting competence confesses she just wants, for once, to be cared for. These aren’t odd exceptions. They’re exactly what Goffman described: the backstage selves that everyone carries, suddenly exposed under conditions of intimacy.

And society doesn’t just dislike that exposure, it actually punishes it. Research on impression management shows people experience acute stress when their public and private selves collide (Leary & Kowalski, 1990). To preserve the play, we punish the one who breaks the fourth wall, because society likes the illusion. That’s why sex work feels more transgressive than office corruption or unpaid domestic labor: it forces the audience to see itself in the performance. And so society punishes the messenger for revealing the lie we all live: that everyone has a backstage, but only some of us are allowed to keep it hidden.

Energy Prices Just Went Up Again

If we go deeper, Donald Winnicott’s concept of the false self and true self offers potent insight. The false self is the socially acceptable mask we put on to meet external demands; the true self is the inner subject yearning to be known. Most of us live behind false selves, but sex work forces the split into the open. I’ve seen it play out countless times — and psychology shows why this is so charged. Research on self-discrepancy theory (Higgins, 1987) demonstrates that the gap between who we present and who we privately feel we are creates specific forms of distress: guilt when we fail duties, shame when we miss ideals, anxiety when the masks collapse. You can pretend in the office, at church, at Thanksgiving dinner, but in the charged intimacy of a hotel room, the disguise often falters. Empirical work reinforces this: studies on authenticity (Kernis & Goldman, 2006; Wood et al., 2008) consistently show that people who feel able to express their true self report higher well-being, stronger relationships, even lower depression. Neuroscience adds another layer: fMRI studies find that suppressing emotions spikes stress responses, while expressing authentic ones activates reward pathways (Lindsay et al., 2013). In other words: masks are expensive. The energy price for masking is extremely high, yet we’re all paying for it.

The Polished Cage Will Kill You

And this is why sex work draws such judgment. It isn’t about immorality; it’s about exposure. The escort becomes the scapegoat, punished not for breaking the mask but for holding up the mirror. And here’s the twist: this isn’t just about clients. It’s about all of us. Research on impression management (Leary & Kowalski, 1990) confirms that people curate different selves depending on audience: professional, romantic, familial. When someone says, “just be yourself,” they usually mean, “present yourself in a way that still fits the script.” The gap never disappears. Intimate settings just make it harder to ignore. And the truth is, what terrifies people isn’t shamelessness—it’s recognition.

So what do we do with all this? You’re right, I can’t cure centuries of judgment with one essay (and if I could, I’d be charging for it). But maybe my field notes can at least serve as food for thought. The point isn’t to suddenly abandon our false selves, or to pretend we’ll stop judging silly things (I certainly won’t). It’s simpler, and harder: throw yourself into the unfamiliar. Into rooms with people you’d normally avoid. Into conversations you’d never expect to have. Into roles that don’t come with a laminated script. Because that’s where growth happens: in the discomfort, the contradictions, the parts of life that feel too strange or too raw. And growth is the only real currency of happiness. So if the choice is between being terrified or being static, choose terror every time. Because static is death. And nothing feels more like death than staying perfectly respectable, perfectly groomed, while constantly lying to the person you should be most honest with: yourself.