Meet the Montreal-based sex worker behind the Instagram page roasting cringe-worthy messages from clients
Maria Penaranda // Arts & Culture Editor
“I need to eat your ass
Tmrw I can eat your ass
I crave your ass”
This message is one of the tamer texts of the dozens that Audrey Watson receives on a daily basis. As a 24-year-old sex worker based in Montreal, these messages don’t exactly shock her. In fact, they’re so ubiquitous by now that she typically doesn’t give them a second thought. “The largest use of my time in sex work is texting people, so it doesn’t bother me exactly—it can be irritating but, no, I wouldn’t say it’s overwhelming,” she told me over the phone.
A little over a year ago, Watson decided to start sharing these kinds of messages online. She created @textstoyourhooker, an Instagram page where she posts screenshots of the most terrifically ridiculous messages she receives as an escort. The page wavers between cringy and hilarious, a small window into the daily experience of a modern-day sex worker. “You get a lot of shitty texts and calls from people and it’s just a good way to kind of laugh about it instead of get[ting] cynical,” she explained. “You get to see kind of an aspect of the absurdity and shitty-ness of people, but first and foremost [the page] was really just for my own entertainment, and I guess partly a way to release the irritation and annoyance and frustration with people.”
It’s been almost three years since Watson first started working as an escort. Originally from the States, she moved to Montreal after high school to study at McGill. As a trans woman and anglophone with no work permit, there weren’t many options or places for her to work. She struggled with escorting at first.
“There’s kind of a learning curve learning to deal with clients practically and emotionally. You’re putting yourself in a very vulnerable, intimate, position and it takes a toll on you,” she explained. “You need to give them the idea that you’re having a good time at least, and you’re seeing people sometimes regularly who you’ll sort of become close to even if you don’t really like them just because you keep seeing them. So you develop some sort of bond, which is also exhausting.”
Watson remembered having to learn to deal with clients offering her drugs appropriately. She’s had clients steal from her and yell at her. “But I guess the most stressful [aspect] is really just dealing with the fact that you’re having sex with strangers—I mean, it’s like, even if you detach yourself, it’s still kind of an intimate position to be in, and it’s pretty exhausting just meeting strangers and continuing to give that energy,” she said. “I didn’t have anybody I knew who could guide me at all, so it was definitely stressful in the beginning, but I feel really entirely comfortable with it now.”
Many of the people who interact with the @textstoyourhooker page seem to be sex workers as well. On one post where one client wrote “I’m sexy as shit. You should[n’t] even be charging me,” someone commented: “I hate when they feel entitled just because they’re attractive. That doesn’t pay my bills.” Another post features a screenshot of a client’s abs. “The continuing saga of undesired/uninvited ab-pics,” Watson captioned it. “It’s like they have decided the dick is the offensive part so sending abs and torsos must be okay except we didn’t ask for any of it…” wrote one person. In a way the page functions as an online space where sex workers can laugh at these messages and attitudes collectively. Since she started escorting, Watson has met and befriended many other sex workers. “At a certain point pretty much all of my friends were sex workers,” she said.
“It’s nice partly because I think very few people who aren’t sex workers understand entirely the strangeness of it—I don’t mean strangeness in a bad way, it’s just there are lots of things that become part of your world that are really just not normal or understandable without being in those positions,” she explained. “There are very few people I could talk to in detail about sex work who aren’t sex workers. I mean, I could talk to them, but for one thing, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and even the people who it doesn’t make uncomfortable haven’t necessarily been in those positions and it’s harder to relate to, I think.”
The conflation of sex work and sex trafficking is a misconception that continues to prevail today. In 2013, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the laws criminalizing sex work were unconstitutional. A year later, the conservative government introduced The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. Sex work activists and rights organizations criticized the legislation for making sex work even more dangerous than before, which was since confirmed by B.C. researchers.
“I think one [large misconception about sex workers] is the idea that sex workers tend to be uneducated or are doing the job because they’re forced into it,” Watson said. “I think a lot of people see sex workers as kind of the trope of a sex worker on the street, and in reality, a large number of sex workers, for one thing, are doing it because they want to. I mean, you make a really high income and, even though the work can be emotionally stressful, it also leaves you a lot of free time to pursue other things,” she stressed, noting that many of the sex workers she knows are very well educated, with some working other professional jobs like elementary school teachers. “In general, most sex workers I know pretty much are normal people with the exception that they tend to be more open-minded than other people,” she chuckled. “I like sex workers.”
You can follow@textstoyourhooker on Instagram
