Megan Prescott started her acting career as a 15-year-old on the hit show Skins. This August she will perform her brand-new one-woman theatre show ‘Really Good Exposure’ at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival exploring and reflecting on her diverse career path, including her experiences as a sex worker. Here, Megan discusses how these experiences have profoundly shaped her confidence and creativity, particularly in writing and performing her solo show. She also offers heartfelt advice to her younger self and highlights the broader societal need to recognise and respect sex work as legitimate labour.
What are your thoughts on mainstream portrayals of sex work such as Confessions of a Call Girl, The Sex Business, and Cam Girls, for example?
In general, the overarching theme with shows that depict sex work is that they have almost never had any input from any actual sex workers. The problem with this is that what we often end up with is content that sensationalises sex work: either making it seem like this ultimately glamorous, always-empowering job or turning it into complete trauma porn. The reality is that ‘sex work’ is such an enormous industry, with many different facets; you really can’t generalise like that. The stereotypical portrayals of sex work we see in the media are often harmful to sex workers; they perpetuate the stigma and incorrect narratives the general public have about the work. Sex work isn’t always bad and it also isn’t always good, but that’s true of all forms of work.
It’s frustrating because it’s not like there aren’t enough sex workers who are brilliant writers/actors/consultants etc. It’s just that most shows about sex workers make no effort to include them in the creative process. People are happy to make money off the back of sex workers, but they don’t want them to see any of the profits or get any of the credit. If you don’t want to be associated with sex workers, then don’t make a show about them. If you do want to make a show about sex work and get all the hype about covering a ‘promiscuous’ ‘edgy’ topic, then you better make bloody sure there are sex workers involved. Otherwise, you would be profiting off of a marginalised group of workers without contributing anything in return. That wouldn’t be acceptable with any other marginalised group, so why are we so fine with it when it comes to sex workers?
Although we might not think that a TV show that is fairly inaccurate about the experience of sex workers is harmful, anything that perpetuates the misconstrued ideas we have about sex work is perpetuating stigma, and therefore contributing to the violence sex workers face. People in positions of power, especially in the media, need to do more to support the marginalised workers they so love to portray in their shows, and that starts with viewing sex workers as human beings.
Do you think that beginning a career as a child star sets certain expectations of an actor?
Yes. People have really strange expectations of child stars, and it really is indicative of how we view ‘success’ in general. Many assume that child actors always dreamed of being famous and now that they’ve got their ‘big break’ they’re set for life. This is a really harmful expectation to have of children and young adults, especially if they don’t have the right support system around them. The harsh reality is that a lot of child stars get coerced into acting/singing/dancing - whether that’s by pushy parents looking to profit off them, or by the media narratives fed to these children that fame and fortune equate to happiness. It is illegal to profit off the labour of children in almost all industries, except the entertainment industry, which I find very interesting.
We’ve seen lots of examples of children being used by the entertainment industry, and when they are no longer young enough, pretty enough, thin enough or mentally healthy enough to continue, they are spat out, without the support they need. I think we need to re-look at the type of support and guidance child stars are given, not just when they are working, but afterwards. It just kind of feels a little exploitative if we are using children for their youth, profiting off it, and then leaving them to figure it out for themselves when we’re done with them. Entertainment is such a unique industry and one that can be brutal. I hope one day there will be stricter rules around child performers; more of an effort to support these kids with things like mandatory therapy, media/legal training, impartial financial advice, and other things to help them navigate life post ‘big break’. We’ve all seen the ‘child star to train wreck’ narrative play out far too many times and it's disappointing that so many people blame the child in these circumstances, rather than those around them who failed their duty of care to that child. My Edinburgh Fringe show ‘Really Good Exposure’ is very much inspired by this idea of child stars, the commodification of youth and sexuality and women’s labour being undervalued. I was inspired by a lot of the autobiographies of child stars like ‘I’m Glad My Mum Died’ by Jeanette McCurdy, ‘Where Am I Now?’ by Mara Wilson, ‘There Was a Little Girl’ by Brooke Shields and ‘The Woman in Me’ by Britney Spears.
Would you say sex work has positively or negatively, if at all, affected your confidence when it comes to writing and performing your own solo show?Sex work has been instrumental in building my confidence when it comes to my creative freelance career. I have always been performing, and started professionally acting in 2008, when I was just 15. I’m sure any millennial woman will tell you what a hellscape the late 90s/early 00s were for body shaming, peer pressure, diet culture, mental health stigma, victim blaming and socially accepted sexual harassment. So it's not really a surprise that I, like most other millennial women, struggled with confidence my whole life.
I worked in all kinds of industries in the 15 years after my acting debut; hospitality, childcare, bodybuilding, retail (you name it I’ve probably had a job in that industry). I found that being a woman negatively affected me in all those industries. Whether it was how I was spoken to, how much I earned, or how I progressed in the company/industry, I always found that women got the shorter end of the stick than the men, except in sex work. When I was stripping, it was the first time I felt even remotely safe in a club-like environment. Any woman who’s been within ten feet of a London bar/pub/club will tell you that the behaviour of men in these places is often straight up disgusting. At least when I was stripping, I could get security to remove people behaving like that pretty fast. Obviously I can’t speak for all sex workers because I am coming from a position of privilege, but the ones I worked at I always felt like security had my back in the clubs I worked in… (management are a different story for a different day)...
Feeling safe(er) in an environment populated by a lot of men was the first step to building my confidence, but working with other sex workers, getting to know them and watching them work was life changing. I watched these women doing their own marketing, sales pitching, brokering, psychoanalysing and seducing all while the men they were doing it to had no idea what brilliant businesswomen they were. I learnt almost everything I know about how not to get screwed in a business deal from sex workers. In sex work, I found that things were often more black and white than in other situations I’d been in. I felt like there were far more grey areas in acting than sex work, and as a young, autistic woman, being unsure of people’s true intentions really chipped away at my confidence in the acting world - I always felt like there was this secret code that I just never got the memo about. Doing sex work taught me that it is not unprofessional to ask for clear terms of engagement in a business deal and that you are well within your rights to be paid fairly for your labour.
It seems like as soon as women start laying out clear rules, boundaries and terms of service, we feel uncomfortable. I started to realise that it’s not that we have a moral issue with transactional relationships (those have existed since the beginning of time), what we actually have an issue with is paying women for the type of performative sexual labour that men feel entitled to for free. This realisation was the pinnacle to building confidence in myself and my work. I was only diagnosed as autistic in 2021, so a lot of my life has involved me masking - performing the version of myself that I thought was acceptable to the general public. Anyone who also spends a large portion of their life masking will tell you that it is utterly exhausting. Sex work taught me that if I am going to funnel my energy into something - be that acting, writing or pretending to be interested in Nigel who’s thinking about leaving his lucrative-yet-soul-destroying career in finance, I need to be compensated fairly for that labour.
I also want to highlight exactly how liberating and confidence-building it is to have financial stability. Something I did not have until I started doing sex work. I started my OnlyFans page in April 2020 and it changed my entire life. I finally had the financial freedom to not have to work 7 days a week at 0-hour-contract, exploitative side jobs. I could afford to rent a place where I was not being exploited by a cowboy landlord who slept on the sofa whenever he pleased. I could afford to eat better, I could afford to go out with my friends, I could afford to visit my sister on the other side of the world. These things were all instrumental in me learning who I am and gaining confidence in myself and, by proxy, my creative work. And it’s literally all thanks to sex work. I get completely naked in my solo show and there are some storylines that came from very personal experiences. I don’t think I would have had the confidence to write the show, and (quite literally) bare all if it weren’t for my experience in sex work.
What life lessons have you learned that you would tell your younger self before embarking on an acting career?
I’m so glad you asked this question because I have just finished recording the first series of my podcast (also titled ‘Really Good Exposure’) and the tagline for the podcast is ‘Telling you all about the life lessons I learnt the hard way, so you don’t have to’!
I’ve learnt so much through my, shall we say ‘eclectic’ life experience; I’m a twin, I’ve been a child actor, a stripper, a bodybuilder, a nanny, a bartender, a waitress, a distillery tour guide, a chocolate factory worker, and an OnlyFans content creator (just to name a few). I have ADHD and I am autistic. I also have parents who took a very ‘hands off’ approach to raising children. Having had to deal with this collection of circumstances, I’ve learnt almost everything I know the hard way, especially within the acting industry. If I was able to speak to my younger self I would first and foremost tell her: ‘You are neurodivergent. You see the world in a very unique way. Stop wasting your energy trying to pretend that you are like everyone else and embrace your differences. You will only start to succeed when you stop ignoring your gut instincts, so listen to them! Ignore people who tell you that your ideas/projects won’t succeed simply because they’ve ‘never been done that way’. The world is set up for neurotypical people, which is why you’re struggling to fit into the predetermined box you’ve been given by society, your peers and your industry. As soon as you stop trying to fit that mould and start having the confidence to do things your own way, you’ll thrive. So, f**k the mould.
The most important lesson I learnt in life is that despite their conviction, other people are not always right, and just because something’s ‘always been done that way’ it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it differently. A lot of successful people, projects and partnerships have one thing in common - they did things like they’d never been done before. I would also tell my younger self to stop trying to act until she figured out who she was. I spent a good amount of my early adulthood playing other characters, but I had no idea who I was. I think that’s part of the reason why I wasn’t getting where I wanted to in my career.
Some other life lessons I have learnt are:
The squeaky wheel gets fixed. But not everyone has the privilege to be able to squeak, so squeak for yourself but also squeak for the people who would face much worse consequences than you would for squeaking.
Don’t waste your time or your energy trying to fix someone else instead of working on yourself. Too often, amazing people spend years trying to fix someone else’s problems for them. So many of them never reach their potential because half of society has been trained that the ultimate ‘success’ is finding a partner that approves of you… don’t waste your time trying to get someone’s approval who isn’t worthy of that energy. Put that energy into yourself and investing in your life. The people meant for you will radiate towards you, you should never have to try to change them or convince them that you are worthy of love - and that goes for partners, friends and family.
Sex work is real work - how long do you think it will be before society views it that way?
I genuinely believe there will be a time in the not too distant future when we look back at how we treated sex workers and be ashamed of ourselves. The sad truth is that a lot of people don’t see sex work as work and see sex workers as disposable. They don’t see them as deserving of the same basic human rights as everyone else. This is based on outdated, patriarchal views on how it is acceptable for a woman to behave, and it is high time that we dismantle these ridiculous narratives. Sex workers are an enormous group of marginalised workers who are discriminated against constantly and the only way to start to fix this is to decriminalise sex work.
The sooner we start viewing sex work as exactly what it is: work, the sooner we’ll stop portraying it as some sort of monolith and start doing the important work that needs to be done to dismantle the stigma sex workers face in society. It is the stigmatisation of sex work (and the discriminatory laws in place around it) that makes it dangerous, not the work itself.
The older I got, the more I realised that transactional relationships are happening all the time, everywhere. But when I started doing sex work, I realised that the less black and white a transaction is, the more likely one party is to get screwed over. How many times have creative freelancers heard that they should do an unpaid job ‘for the exposure’? Exposure is not quantifiable. Money is. People say they find the idea of sex work ‘icky’ but maybe that’s because we’re not used to women demanding their labour be valued. How many jokes have we heard about women not enjoying the sex they have with their husbands, but doing it anyway to keep him happy…? I feel way more icky about that situation than I do about sex work. We’re so used to there being grey, unspoken areas in work and relationships that almost always end up disadvantaging women, that when women start asking to be paid fairly for their labour, we throw our toys out of the pram. Our society is built from the ground up off of the unpaid physical, emotional and affective labour of women - is it any wonder that when a group of women start realising how valuable their labour is, society starts to panic and demonises those women?
OnlyFans announced in August 2021 that it would ban explicit content. I think OnlyFans expected people to support their decision, but the overwhelming reaction of the general public was outrage. So much so that OnlyFans reversed this decision just five days later. I hope the public’s reaction to this signals the beginning of a massive (and long overdue) cultural shift in how we view sex work. Gen Z’s views towards sex work does give me hope for the future for the most part, but we must never underestimate just how far anti sex work groups will go to spread lies and hatred towards sex workers in an effort to advance their own deeply troubling political agenda.
Really Good Exposure will be performed at 5.20pm in Underbelly Cowgate (Belly Button) from 1st – 25th August (Not 7th, 13th or 20th)
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