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- A LinkedIn user made waves after listing “sex work” under professional experiences.
- Ariel Egozi says sex work has as much room on LinkedIn as any other job.
- Egozi’s sex work has given them financial independence and basic professional skills.
Ariel Egozi, who went viral last month after listing “sex work” as one of her professional experiences on LinkedIn, believes the sex industry is just as worthy of being on the site as any other job.
“Sex work allowed me to see that there are other ways to do it,” Egozi, who identifies as queer femme and uses the pronoun she/they, 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 on July 13 after updating his LinkedIn page to include sex work and sharing a post explaining the decision to his followers. Egozi wrote in the message that sex work allowed them to “overpay” and gave them financial freedom and taught them countless professional skills.
“Two weeks ago I quit a house job with amazing benefits and the reason I was able to do that was sex work,” Egozi shared on LinkedIn. “I saved enough from selling and sharing my image to ask myself if I was happy. I wasn’t.”
Egozi told Insider he was inspired to make the change after quitting his employment company, where he felt “disempowered and challenged” and where his “creative energy was taken for granted.”
“The higher I go in my career, the more I feel like I have to repress different parts of who I am,” Egozi said.
‘The Ugly Underbelly’
While Egozi probably expected to receive a few responses, they never intended to become the “feature” of this issue by highlighting their experiences.
“I have great privilege,” they said. “This agency is not my main source of income, I’m not sure I would be able to afford it if it wasn’t for me.”
Nevertheless, the post garnered thousands of responses and hundreds of comments from all over LinkedIn. Some people made connections between their own experiences and Egozi, while others criticized the post. Some tried to hack Egozi’s social media and bank accounts, Egozi said.
“It really showed me the ugly underbelly of how we view the American work ethic,” Egozzi said. “There were all these people who were posting these disgusting things. These are the ones on LinkedIn with their full names and employers attached. If they think they can say these things without consequence, how can someone like me feel safe in that environment?”
Egozi, on the other hand, said he has received dozens of messages from people with similar white-collar jobs.
“Everybody knows a sex worker,” they said. “People don’t feel safe to go out because of the very isolated and dangerous ways we’ve been treated in society.”
Egozi first entered the industry in 2011. In 2020, after their creative agency lost several clients due to the economic crisis of the pandemic. Egozi was not far removed from sex work as he had worked in the world of sex technology and sex workers in the past.
“Part of it was about money, but I also felt like it was a place where I could face a lot of my own fears and trauma,” Egozi said. “It allowed me to take ownership of myself and my work,” he said.
The actual sex is very small
Ultimately, Igozzi says sex work has given him a number of professional skills — the same kind of job qualifications LinkedIn is designed to promote.
“People forget that the word ‘work’ is associated with sex work – the work of building a brand and a company. There is very little actual sex,” he said.
“I know how to engage an audience and draw emotion from them. I know how to make sales, build and promote my own brand and community. I also identify and screen leads. And all of that doesn’t count. If you make adult content, it’s all creative,” Egozzi added.
Egozi received several job offers after first posting about it on LinkedIn and continuing to work as a consultant and advisor in the tech world. Egoize says they don’t plan to leave the industry, but the popularity of their LinkedIn posts has made their job more risky and they’ve begun to come up with a plan to address security concerns.
“I will not give up my agency, and I have yet to see a company I can trust to give myself up to,” they said. “I’ll keep doing it until it feels good and stop when it doesn’t.”
Do you have a similar story? Contact the correspondent by email if not from work gkay@insider.com
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