Kate Iselin: What it's really like to be a sex columnist

What it's really like to be a sex columnist (and not the Carrie Bradshaw kind). Photo / Supplied

For more than a year, sex worker and writer Kate Iselin has been educating readers as news.com.au's sex and dating columnist. Since her very first article, Kate has stripped bare the topics others wouldn't dare to write about. She's revealed all about love, life and the modern woman while introducing us to a smorgasbord of complex characters. And after writing about everything from dominatrixes to casual sex, today Kate writes her last column for news.com.au.

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When I was a teenager, I used to wag school and sneak home to sit in front of the television and watch Sex and the City.

Keeping up with the adventures of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, Charlotte, and their endless array of fashionable friends and sometimes-questionable romantic partners felt infinitely more interesting than poring over next week's homework in my high school Literature class.

So home I would go, in the middle of the day, to flick on the television and escape to cosmopolitan New York for half an hour. I'd sit hypnotised and dream that maybe one day I would become a sex and dating columnist, just like Carrie Bradshaw was.

I would spend every night out on the town at a different party, have dramatic romances with handsome leading men, and — here's how you know it was really a teenage fantasy — I would live in a one-bedroom apartment in the heart of the city that I somehow still managed to afford despite a growing collection of Manolo Blahniks in my wardrobe.

Although I have grown up to own only a single pair of Manolo Blahniks (bought on sale), I don't have too much else in common with Carrie Bradshaw beyond the extremely superficial.

The apartment definitely never happened: the closest I got was the front room of a terrace house in Sydney that, although beautiful, crawled to life with huntsman spiders when summer hit. And although I did manage to make it to my fair share of parties; I never quite met my Mr Big.

I started writing this column when I was still fairly heartbroken after the end of a relationship.

And when I pushed all those feelings of sadness and loneliness to the side so I could go about my everyday life unhindered, they popped up waiting for me to examine them when I sat down at my keyboard.

It was actually intensely therapeutic to have to sit down and write once a week about the very topic that I spent most of my day trying to avoid, even though I very frequently joked to friends that I was the sex and dating columnist who never had sex, and never dated.

As my heartbreak started to fade, though, and I ran out of anecdotes to share about dating apps (for the record, they still terrify me and I still can't keep one on my phone for more than a day), I wanted to write more and more about the topic that I often saw represented so incorrectly in the media: sex work.

It felt like I had spent my entire life opening newspapers and websites to read articles about sex workers that framed us as victims, criminals, or as nothing more than bit players in the background of stories about shonky neighbourhood brothels or the apparent horror of the sex trade.

So I'd like to say a huge thank you to everyone at news.com.au for giving me the opportunity and the platform to do whatever I could to help dilute that narrative.

Saying yes to the chance to write about sex work on one of Australia's most-read digital news platforms was a no-brainer. But finding that the team was just as interested as I was in sharing stories about the sometimes-unseen parts of sex work was a delight and a wonderful surprise.

Thank you too to everyone who has written realistically and respectfully about sex work on other platforms; whose words made me feel less alone while writing and whose hard work means that sex work gets to be seen for the complex and multi-issue topic that it is, rather than just something scandalous, silly, or salacious.

I'm also forever grateful to the other workers and industry professionals who let me interview them for this column, who shared thoughts and experiences with me that were hilarious, fascinating, heartbreaking, and sometimes, things they had never shared with anyone else before.

While I occasionally struggled to hit my word limit when talking about myself, each and every time I spoke to someone else I found myself writing paragraphs — if not pages — more than I could realistically fit in a short column. Thank you for trusting me with your stories.

Lastly, I want to say thank you to everyone who read my column — even those who constantly responded to my thoughts on penis photos or sex robots with, "Why is this news?".

Writers regularly remind each other never to read the comments, and although that's often said with just cause, I read each and every comment that I could see and was really touched by how many of them were written in support of sex work.

I guess it's proof that things really have changed from when I was younger. I truly do think people are more supportive of sex work now and more open-minded about the people who do it, and although I certainly can't claim to be responsible for that, I'm so glad that I've had the opportunity to see it happen.

Whether you've only read one of my columns or you kept up with every one from the beginning, I'm so grateful and appreciative to everyone who took time out of their night to read something I've written. Thank you very, very much.