What the stories get right and what they get wrong

Australia has never been short of stories about sex workers, but most of them are told by people who have never met one. The result is a catalogue of stock figures: the tart with a heart, the tragic addict, the glamorous escort with a penthouse and a secret. These characters are easy to write and easy to sell, and they crowd out the far more ordinary reality of a job that, in most Australian states, is legal, taxed and regulated.

That gap between fiction and fact matters. When someone searches for stories of prostitutes, or asks why songs about prostitutes so often end in violence, they are usually trying to make sense of a culture they have only encountered through a screen. The better question is which depictions came from workers themselves, and which were invented to make an audience feel comfortable.

The clearest example of the invented kind is the long tradition of the saintly or sacrificial figure. Saint Nicholas is often cited as the patron saint of prostitutes, a link built on a legend about dowries rather than on anything the workers themselves asked for. It is a tidy narrative — rescued, redeemed, grateful — and it has survived for more than a thousand years because it flatters the rescuer.

Why a century-old film still gets quoted

The 1923 silent epic The Ten Commandments put a biblical sex worker on the screen at a scale nobody had attempted before, and people still argue online about who played the prostitutes in 1923. The answer is less interesting than the technique: Cecil B. DeMille cast dancers and extras, dressed them in costume jewellery and gold paint, and built a tableau of decadence that had almost nothing to do with the ancient world and everything to do with 1920s moral panic.

That approach — spectacle over testimony — is the template for most on-screen depictions that followed. It is why Sacred Prostitutes: The Animation, a Japanese release that circulates in Australia through niche streaming and fan forums, reads as fantasy rather than documentary. The ancient temple prostitute is a genuinely contested historical subject, and animated treatments tend to settle the argument by inventing a version that looks good in a frame.

The songs that keep the myth alive

Music does the same work in less time. The Pop Group’s “We Are All Prostitutes”, released in 1979, is the rare case of a band using the word as a political weapon rather than a punchline — everyone, the lyric argues, sells something. It sits oddly beside the mainstream tradition of songs about prostitutes, which more often use the figure as a metaphor for a ruined city or a ruined man. David LaChapelle’s photographic series pairing artists with prostitutes took the same collision of fame and sex work into galleries, and it was praised and criticised in equal measure for turning the worker into a prop.

None of this is neutral. A listener who has only encountered sex work through a three-minute song arrives at the policy debate with a set of images already installed.

The international search trail behind Australian curiosity

Look at what people in Australia actually type into a search bar and you get a map of the myths. Queries about the percentage of Thai prostitutes with HIV, or whether sex workers in Thailand have STDs, spike whenever a news story about Phuket or Pattaya runs. The honest answer is that HIV prevalence among female sex workers in Thailand has fallen sharply since the 1990s, when condom-use campaigns pushed it down from double digits to low single figures, and that Thai sex workers are not a single measurable population — street-based, brothel-based and internet-based workers have very different health profiles.

The same curiosity reaches further afield. Searches about prostitutes in New Zealand follow the country’s 2003 decriminalisation, which Australian researchers cite constantly because it is the closest large-scale comparison available. Interest in prostitutes in Costa Rica or Kosovo tends to follow tourism and peacekeeping news respectively. The phrase “we are all prostitutes” gets borrowed in all sorts of contexts, from football forums to finance podcasts, which tells you something about how flexibly the word is used.

Legal facts that cut through the fiction

In Australia, sex work law is a state matter, and the differences are large. It is decriminalised in New South Wales and, since 2024, in Victoria, licensed in Queensland, and heavily restricted in South Australia and Western Australia. A worker in Brisbane operates under a different rulebook from a worker in Sydney, and readers who think a single national law exists are usually working from television.

The pricing questions readers ask most often — what does a prostitutes price list look like, how much do prostitutes charge for head — tend to come from people trying to benchmark against what they assume is a market rate. Typical advertised rates in Queensland and Victoria for a standard half-hour booking sit somewhere between $150 and $300, with extras negotiated separately. Those figures vary with city, venue and time of day, and none of it is a secret: legal brothels publish rates the way any business does.

Regional pricing is its own small economy. People look up the cost of Rockhampton prostitutes, or prices in Bundaberg and Gladstone, because mining-town demand pushes rates around in ways that coastal tourists rarely notice.

What the fiction rarely captures is how ordinary the working day is. A private worker in an Australian city spends more time on screening calls, tax records and booking software than on anything dramatic. The emotionally attached client, the one convinced the worker genuinely likes him, is a well-documented hazard — and one that labour protections exist to manage. Stories built on tragedy and glamour miss the part that matters most: this is work, and the people doing it would rather be paid properly than saved.