dehumanising

When we’re not being used as disposable symbols of violence, we’re normally presented as the butt of a joke. Queen of televisual whorephobia is Tina Fey , who, despite being so frequently championed as a feminist idol, litters her TV shows with constant digs about "hookers", "strippers" and "whores". These range from the basic conceit of "LOL, this respectable person has been mistaken for a prostitute, how AWFUL!" to the more pervasively violent misogyny. “This is where we used to hold retirement parties. The balcony below is probably still littered with stripper bones,” jokes Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock. But it’s not just Tina Fey: Arrested Development, Californication, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Game of Thrones all rely on nasty, spiteful humour about how we are simultaneously disgusting and vulnerable to male violence.When you work in an industry as stigmatised as the sex trade, jokes which dehumanise workers and normalise violence have a considerable impact. As long as the viewing public continues to get a kick out of tropes such as "dead hookers in the boot of a car", the violence some of us encounter at work will be seen as inevitable, and, worse still, unchangeable.In 1978, the "Green River Killer" Gary Ridgeway confessed to the murder of 48 women, most of whom were sex workers. He targeted them, he told police, because he thought he could "kill as many [prostitutes] as he wanted without getting caught… I thought I was doing you guys a favour, killing prostitutes,” he said . Almost 40 years later, and not much has changed; in 2015, former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted of 18 counts of rape and sexual assault. Holtzclaw specifically targeted vulnerable women he thought would not be believed – namely black women with a history of sex work.The media alone didn’t make Ridgeway or Holtzclaw, (or many, many other men) target sex workers. Of course not. However, their crimes can be situated firmly in a cultural understanding of sex workers as deserving of violence, and of our lives being less significant than "good women".A lack of realistic representation of our lives on telly only contributes to thisattitude, and pushes us further to the margins when it comes to the way society sees us.There are shows which claim to be accurate, narrative-driven dramas about sex work. US network Starz's recent offering The Girlfriend Experience claimed to be a realistic drama about a woman who escorts to fund a placement at a prestigious law firm. Predictably, the show focused instead on the supposed cost of living a double life, and the moral corruption that seems to befall all characters who make money from their sexuality. In her life as an escort, protagonist Christine is subject to a slew of high-stakes consequences – as if she must ultimately be punished for being such a (successful) slut.Even Orange is the New Black, which has good form when it comes to representation and diversity, doesn’t feature a single sex worker – despite being set in a prison in a country where sex work is fully criminalised.It offends me as a sex worker, but also as a writer. These tired old clichés about prostitution are as lazy as they are unrealistic. These shows are all so clearly obsessed about the sex component of what we do, when in reality, that’s the least interesting part. Like the fictional Christine, I have done plenty of "girlfriend experience" work. Mostly it involves pretending to be interested in rich men who believe they’re great at sex. Reader, you may not be surprised to learn that this is incredibly dull; labouring at the coalface of the male gaze is generally formulaic and tedious.