PBA Reporter
A LinkedIn user, Arielle Egozi, made waves after she listed “Sex Work” under her LinkedIn professional experiences.
For Egozi, sex work gave them financial freedom and foundational professional skills, saying the sex industry is just as worthy of being on the site as any other career.
She said: “Sex work allowed me to see that there were other ways of doing things,” Egozi, who identifies as queer femme and uses she/they pronouns, told Insider. “It taught me that there are a million other ways to sell your body, your mind, your soul, whatever it is.”
The 31-year-old first made waves after updating her LinkedIn page to include sex work and sharing a post to her followers explaining the decision.
In the message, Egozi wrote that sex work has given her financial freedom by allowing her to “charge exorbitant amounts” and taught her countless professional skills.
She demonstrated: “I left an in-house job with fancy benefits two weeks ago and the reason I could do that was sex work. I had just enough saved from selling and engaging my image that I could ask myself if I was happy. I wasn’t.”
Egozi said, she was inspired to make the change after quitting their position branding company where they “felt disempowered and objectified” and like their “creative energy was taken for granted.”
“The higher up, I’ve gotten in my career, the more I’ve felt that I had to repress different parts of my identity,” Egozi said.
The post quickly garnered thousands of reactions and hundreds of comments on LinkedIn from all sides. Some people appeared to draw correlations between their own experiences and Egozi’s, while others criticized the post. Some even tried to hack into Egozi’s social media and bank accounts, according to Egozi.
“It really showed me the ugly underbelly of how we look at the American work ethic,” Egozi said. “There were all these people posting these disgusting things. These are people on LinkedIn who have their full names and employers attached. If they think they can say these things without consequences, how can someone like me feel safe in that environment?”
“Every single person knows a sex worker,” she said. “People just don’t feel safe coming out because of the highly stigmatized and dangerous ways we’ve been treated in society.”
Ultimately, Egozi said sex work has given her numerous professional skills the same types of job qualifications that LinkedIn was designed to promote.
“People forget that the word ‘work’ is attached to sex work the work of building a brand and a company. The actual sex is so little of it,” they said.
“I know how to engage audiences and elicit emotion from them. I know how to make sales, build my own brand and community, and advertise it. I also identify leads and filter them. And all of that is not even taking into account the creative production of all of it if you do adult content,” Egozi added.
Follow Us