Basic Trope: Sex work is portrayed as enjoyable and safe.
- Straight: Alice works as a prostitute. She gets to take time off without hassle, can say no to any clients she wants, lives in a setting where STIs are few and far between (and those that do exist are easily cured) and has access to reliable birth control. She is also treated with respect and dignity by her clients, law enforcement, and society at large.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice actually gets benefits, like one would get at most jobs.
- Alice has a more stable job than anyone else in the series.
- Alice's job is not only respected but prestigious, more so than a CEO. She's treated like a queen, has no real trouble in life, and is admired by people for her career.
- Alice is living in a time or place where sexual mores are quite a bit more conservative than they are in modern, Western society; in a realistic setting, she would be killed, either by her family or by the state, just for becoming the victim of a rumor that she was engaging in prostitution or other "illicit" sex, let alone actually doing it.
- Downplayed:
- Alice's job is great because she's a well-educated High-Class Call Girl in a society where that's an acceptable job for a woman of her status and connections, but it's clear that prostitutes without her connections don't have such an easy life.
- Alice's job is legal and regulated, but it's a job like any other; some days she has sex with handsome men who are just down on their luck, some days she puts up with creeps with one finger on the silent alarm.
- The realistic and common problems with prostitution exist, but for one reason or another she personally thinks getting paid for sex is worth said problems.
- Justified:
- In this setting, Sex Is Good, and no one is scorned or viewed as immoral for having it or enjoying it.
- Alice lives (and works) in an area where prostitution is legal and regulated.
- Alice is a priestess who engages in sacred ritual prostitution in the name of a Love Goddess, and is held in high esteem because of her status as priestess.
- Alice either doesn't have to answer to a pimp or a madam, or she works for one that treats her (and any of their other "employees") well.
- Alice is a camwhore or phone sex worker, and thus never has any actual contact with her clients.
- Alice is a High-Class Call Girl.
- Alice enjoys the flexible hours and the pay.
- Alice engages in Platonic Prostitution, or is more of an escort; she does not provide sexual services.
- Inverted: Alice works as a prostitute. She catches hell from her pimp if she takes time off, or refuses a client, for any reason, and gets to keep only a small amount of her earnings. Some of her clients are belligerent and cruel, she's shamed by her society, and she's always worried about being caught by the police. She does not have access to reliable birth control, and has been infected with several different STDs. She didn't get into The Oldest Profession of her own volition: she was deceived and trafficked into it at the age of 14.
- Subverted:
- Alice tells her johns she enjoys her job, but she's lying so her customers don't feel guilty; she actually started prostituting herself to escape Perpetual Poverty, or to support her child(ren), and would rather be doing something else.
- Alice enjoys her job at first, but then finds herself in a Career Versus Man dilemma: she can't get a boyfriend to stick around because they're put off by her (current or past) prostitution.
- Alice enjoys the job at first, but later finds that she can't get a "real" job because businesses are concerned about what hiring a former prostitute (even though it was legal work) would do to their image.
- Alice gets infected with gonorrhea from one of her clients.
- Alice speaks positively about her job, and it sounds like she's a prostitute, but she's actually a camwhore, stripper, porn actress, phone sex operator, geisha, escort, et cetera.
- In the setting of the story, no one is ever directly forced into the profession and poor people are offered plenty of other options, so officially, everyone in the sex industry is there because they want to. However, it later turns out that, as a result of rigid cultural norms (e.g. the idea that Sex Is Good leading to people with any kind of personal sexual taboos being ridiculed as prudes, or followers of a religion where ritual prostitution is viewed as a particularly powerful expression of faith falling under suspicion of not being "real" believers if they won't engage in it), many prostitutes have taken up the profession not because they really wanted to, but because they felt peer-pressured into it, which makes the strictly voluntary basis of the job look more like Questionable Consent.
- Alice contracts an STI from one of her clients.
- Alice becomes pregnant by one of her clients.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice is lying about enjoying the job at first, but after leaving her unpleasant pimp for a madame who treats her workers right, she finds it's actually pretty decent.
- Alice finds that while many men are turned off by her career choices, the ones who aren't are the sorts she's truly interested in anyways.
- Alice struggles to get out of the sex industry until she figures out how to put a spin on it and get hired that way, or is able to start her own business.
- Alice gets infected on the job... but her employer has prepared for this sort of thing and has the appropriate antibiotics.
- Alice is not officially a prostitute, just a stripper, escort, whatever... but while sex isn't officially part of the deal, she's happy to sleep with her customers if they catch her interest and/or if it gets her a nice bonus under the table.
- It's "only" chlamydia, and easily cleared up with antibiotics.
- She is easily able to get an abortion
- Or, if she chooses to keep the baby, she can afford to take care of a baby, she gets time off to recover from the birth, and she is able to get decent childcare while she's working.
- Parodied:
- Alice has G-Rated Sex with her clients, and the bedroom is prepared by Disney Creatures of the Farce.
- Alice sometimes offers to pay people for small services with sex even when off work. While they occasionally refuse because they're not in the mood, nobody calls her out on it.
- Zig Zagged: Some sex workers have good working conditions and experiences, others not so much. Even for those in good conditions, attitudes vary by temperament, the shy college student trying to make ends meet will feel ashamed, while the ridiculously lazy girl with few sexual taboos figures it's good money for a job that doesn't require much talent or effort and has shorter hours than a desk job in some cubicle.
- Averted:
- There is no prostitution in this setting.
- Prostitution is portrayed as dangerous, immoral, etc.
- Alice works at a Soul-Crushing Desk Job.
- Enforced:
- Sex Is Good
- My Girl Is a Slut
- "We don't want to portray something as nuanced as the lived experiences of sex workers as a monolith; all of them are not victims of violence or exploitation, or immoral, or people with "Daddy Issues," and it would be insensitive to suggest that all of them are."
- Eternal Sexual Freedom or a Free-Love Future
- One Hour Workweek
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked:
- Alice begins working for a pimp or madam who genuinely cares about the well-being of his/her employees, in a place where prostitution is legal and regulated.
- Alice becomes a priestess in the name of a Love Goddess, and part of her job is sacred prostitution and/or other ritual sex acts in the shrine or temple. Because of her status as a priestess (maybe even a High Priestess), she is held in extremely high esteem by her society.
- Exploited: Bob engages in Sex Tourism in places where this trope is in full effect, because he believes that happy hookers = better sex.
- Defied:
- Alice is offered to become a prostitute with hefty benefits, but she refuses due to considering sex something special. Nobody forces her to accept the offer.
- The government refuses to make prostitutionwork legal on the grounds that only "degenerates" would engage in it, which ironically makes the working conditions for the decent people forced into prostitution much harder.
- Discussed:Alice's friend: "Alice, do you really have no problems with whoring yourself out?"Alice: "It's called offering my body for a price! ... And yes, my clientele is good enough for me."
- Conversed: "Alice prostituting herself and enjoying it feels like a middle finger aimed at my parents specifically... I love it."
- Implied:
- Alice's job is never outright stated, but the series shows Alice accepting men (and some women) to her office - whose contents are obscured by camera angles et.c. - every day. Some of her friends discuss if she should switch jobs before she grows too old to keep it, and she simply responds that she wants to keep it as long as she is fit enough.
- Alice considers working as a prosititute for fun, and nobody in the series finds that strange.
Go back to Unproblematic Prostitution if you want a lovely time, darling.
