It wouldn’t be new or original of me to say that poetry has changed in recent years. Poetry come to be seen as capital “P” Poetry, an institution surrounded by walls of pretention and inaccessible knowledge. But poetry has no fixed address; it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) belong to a particular voice or face or place. To say so would erase the unquantifiable amount of shapes that the genre has taken over the years.

Following along the same path as my last article about books by sex workers, I want to continue talking about the importance self-representation through other forms of media. Films and TV shows offer some added benifits when it comes to self-representation; they’re fairly accessible to audiences and provide visual representation, challenging physical assumptions of what it means to be a sex worker. Podcasts have entered our daily lives in such an influential way that they provide an outlet free for many to access and in a format that allows complex content to be unpacked over an hour or so.

Donate to the Sex Worker Mutual Aid Fund here. So you’ve seen Hustlers? Or maybe you saw Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and thought ‘hm, that doesn’t seem like such a bad job?’ Wherever your image of sex workers has come from, chances are it probably didn’t come from an actual sex worker. And if recent debates have taught us anything about self-representation, it’s that it matters, like really matters.