My Culture is Not a Costume
An open letter to the Day Walkers...
by Jamila Aisha
Editor’s Note: Jamila’s Open Letter is timely as it points to something I’m currently seeking to define in my own work—sex worker culture. I especially love Jamila’s more general phrase of “erotic labor culture.” Let us know in the comments: what are some of your most cherished aspects of sex worker culture? Or tell us some specific instances where our culture, language, or ethos was appropriated. This piece wraps up perfectly with a salient expression of that culture…do you agree with it? Oh, and sorry for being late to IWD; we’re on ho time. xxo, H.
Last night, after a productive day of event organizing, writing, advocacy work, and community mobilizing, I bought a ticket to the 10pm showing of Boots Riley’s latest film, I Love Boosters. As someone whose social media feeds are saturated with anti-capitalist commentary, the ad for it eventually found its way onto my timeline despite never having seen any promotion for it before yesterday.
I want to make a quick potential spoiler alert and disclaimer: this article is not a film review. However, I do want to briefly discuss one of the film’s central critiques – the way cultural industries routinely strip marginalized communities for ideas, aesthetics, labor, and innovation, then turn around to ridicule and virtually erase the very people they stole from. The fashion industry, for example, has long operated this way. Designers mine working-class communities, queer spaces and underground scenes for inspiration, only to repackage those ideas as luxury commodities for wealthy consumers.
That brings me to sex work.
Over the past decade, symbols, aesthetics, and practices associated with sex work and erotic labor have been aggressively absorbed into mainstream culture. Pole fitness studios occupy suburban shopping centers. Thigh-high boots and Pleaser-esque platform heels, inspired by dancers, appear on high-fashion runways. Pop stars, influencers, and lifestyle brands regularly borrow imagery rooted in strip clubs, pro-Dom communities, camming culture, and adult entertainment.
Yet while the aesthetics are celebrated, the people who created them remain stigmatized.
Society eagerly consumes the products of erotic labor culture while continuing to marginalize erotic laborers themselves. Sex workers still face criminalization, financial exclusion, censorship, workplace discrimination, and social stigma. Their innovations are embraced, but their humanity is not.
This is not appreciation. It is appropriation.
At its core, appropriation is extraction: taking cultural practices, styles, and labor from a community while denying that community recognition, protection, respect, or economic benefits. The practice is familiar because it is profitable.
Pole fitness classes offer one of the clearest examples.
Today, pole studios market their classes as empowering forms of exercise. To be clear, I live for sexual and self-empowerment; however, while I love the emotional and psychological benefits these classes afford, commercial pole fitness studios often erase the origins of the labor behind the practice.
Contemporary pole dancing techniques were largely developed, refined, and popularized by erotic dancers through years of performance. Those innovations did not emerge from boutique fitness studios. They emerged from workers whose livelihoods depend on erotic labor. Yet many studios frequently distance themselves from that history in pursuit of legitimacy. Pole studio marketing campaigns advertise classes as “Not what you think” to appease respectability politics. Social media users routinely post photos of themselves learning pole dance routines while placing the disclaimer “I’m not a stripper,” in the comments, as if they’re some kind of vampiric day walkers, with the ability to assume all the rewards of pole dancing, but none of the risks.
The message is unmistakable: the movement is acceptable, but the workers are not.
Pole fitness is only one example. Across fashion, entertainment, social media, and influencer culture, the labor of erotic workers is routinely repackaged for mainstream consumption. Kink-inspired aesthetics become luxury fashion. Sexual confidence becomes a branding strategy. Intimacy becomes a monetized vanilla content model. Entire industries profit from ideas pioneered by sex workers while refusing to acknowledge where those ideas come from.
The irony is too difficult to ignore. The same society that condemns sex workers continually raids sex work culture for inspiration. The same institutions that exclude erotic laborers enthusiastically market sanitized versions of their innovations.
Their goal is not to stand alongside sex workers, but to profit from them. Whether the benefit is social, or financial profit, is inconsequential because the results are the same. To sanitize the labor while avoiding the stigma, discrimination, and political realities that come with sex work.
Today, in honor of International Whores’ [Sex Workers’] Day, I’m saying that if you want to be like sex workers, then at the very least learn the history. Those who are actively deciding to co-opt the culture must do more than celebrate the aesthetic. They must engage with the history, struggle, and contributions of sex work itself. They can start by learning about the origins of International Whores’ Day, commemorated on June 2, in recognition of the 1975 occupation of the Saint-Nizier Church in Lyon, France, where sex workers organized a strike to protest violence, police harassment, and social exclusion.
It also means understanding the history behind the four awareness days sex worker advocates observe throughout the year. It means celebrating sex workers and appreciating their labor.
For clarity, the issue is not whether people should take pole classes, wear platformed shoes, explore kink aesthetics, or draw inspiration from intimate work.
The question is whether they are willing to acknowledge the workers whose labor and creativity made those practices possible. And, yes, if you’ve ever said Making it rain, baddies, or, I’m going to start an OnlyFans account while perpetuating selective engagement with sex workers, I am looking at you!
The contradiction has always been obvious – society loves the aesthetic of sex work far more than it loves sex workers. Until society is willing to extend dignity to the people behind the aesthetic, the celebration of sex work culture is unearned.
So, I am showing up personally to put you all on notice. Please understand: your superficial hypocrisy has been clocked. The receipts rarely disappear. And a ho never forgets.
Jamila Aisha, an Atlanta native, serves as Division Director of Red Light District by TW!O, an Atlanta-based sex work advocacy organization.
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