To someone unfamiliar with sex work, and the constant existential threats sex workers face, being a sex worker might seem like being part of an aspirational cool-girls' club. "Everything cool gets co-opted, and whores have always been the coolest people in the room," said Jacq the Stripper. Strippers working the pole or posing with stacks of cash on Instagram look cool, because strippers are cool, but co-opting sex work as a personal brand without actually being one isn't. "If you take our rhetoric, our style, and our organizing strategies without showing us actual support—and, yes, I mean money—you are part of the problem."
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