The emotional labour of sex work in the gig economy: a cross-cultural analysis

This article examines how emotional labour is carried out and managed by digital sex workers across four contrasting legal-cultural settings: the United States, Brazil, Germany, and Japan. Drawing on comparative analysis of existing research, it identifies shared pressures across platform-mediated sexual labour, including constant emotional availability, demands for authenticity, boundary-setting within parasocial interactions, unstable platform governance, payment-processor restrictions, and persistent stigma. The analysis also highlights cross-national differences. In the United States, criminalisation and racialised stereotypes heighten burnout and shape entrepreneurial self-branding. In Brazil, expressive sexual cultures intersect with structural inequality, producing strong peer support networks alongside intensified emotional demands. In Germany, legalisation offers formal protections while introducing new pressures linked to registration, privacy, and bureaucratic oversight. In Japan, cultural of modest, soothing intimacy (iyashi) generate an emotional style centred on care, restraint, and anonymity. Across contexts, workers use bounded authenticity, persona work, emotional distancing, and selective disclosure to manage these conditions. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that platform-mediated intimacy does not merely intensify emotional labour in digital sex work; it re-routes it into distinct configurations of vigilance, bureaucratic legibility, and aestheticised care depending on local law and culturally specific expectations about intimacy, care, and emotional self-presentation.