February 12, 2026
Chart wars, hot takes, and side-eyes
Sex Workers Are Built Different (Graph Dump)
Big survey says many sex workers like their jobs — the internet fights the graphs
TLDR: Huge kink survey says sex workers rate the job slightly positive (porn highest, full-service lowest). Comments explode over whether controlling for childhood abuse hides harm, questionable sample stats like “61 clients,” and “chart crimes,” turning it into a data-vs-morals slap fight worth watching.
A massive kink survey dropped a pile of charts claiming this shocker: people doing sex work, especially at a career level, mostly rate their jobs slightly positive — with porn performers the happiest and full-service workers the least happy, but still above neutral. Cue the comments cage match. One camp is furious that the author controlled for childhood abuse, arguing that scrubbing that out hides the darkest part of the story. Another camp is side-eyeing the numbers themselves, calling out eyebrow-raisers like a “full-service escort” average of 61 clients and a strange racial split (only 5% Asian vs 12% Indigenous). The vibe: Is this data legit or just vibes with math?
Meanwhile, the stat-nerds are memeing the charts. “Averaging discrete categories” (think: taking the mean of relationship statuses) became the day’s running joke and a new entry in the “chart crimes” hall of fame. Others note the sample skews very young, very liberal, and mostly female — so of course the results look a certain way. But defenders clap back: people who hate the work quit early; those who stay actually like it. It’s messy, loud, and very online — which is exactly how this topic always goes.
Key Points
- •Large online survey (BKS) with ~970k respondents; sex-work questions added later produced a subsample in the low 200ks with ~15k reporting sex-work experience.
- •The dataset skews young, predominantly female, and very liberal; the author controls for age, biological sex, and childhood abuse to reduce confounding.
- •Sex workers appeared more liberal, but the author chose not to weight for ideology to avoid over-weighting and due to the overall liberal sample.
- •Average satisfaction across sex-work subtypes was slightly positive; full-service rated lowest and porn highest; more experience correlated with greater satisfaction.
- •Additional observations: higher BMI among sex workers appears concentrated among those with worse childhoods; a small Facebook-sourced subsample likely came from a sex-worker group.