From Skins to sex work advocacy, Megan Prescott is done playing by anyone else’s rules. With her bold new podcast Really Good Exposure, the actor, director, and outspoken feminist is pulling back the curtain on what women’s work really looks like; from film sets to strip clubs. Raw, radically honest, and laced with sharp wit, Megan’s conversations dig deep into the politics of labour, value, and bodily autonomy. In this exclusive Q&A, she talks to us about reclaiming the sex work narrative, resisting resilience culture, and what it meant to reflect on her early fame in a podcast episode alongside Skins co-star Kaya Scodelario.
Your new podcast Really Good Exposure is raw, real, and timely. What was your biggest hope in creating it?
Thank you! My hope when creating the podcast was that people from all different walks of life could listen and relate to at least some parts of it. I think that people are much more similar than we think we are, we’re just so used to having to wear a mask that we don’t realise how much we have in common with each other. I’ve never been very good at pretending to be something I’m not, so I wanted to create a podcast where I could not only speak candidly and honestly about my experiences, but where my guests could too.
I hope people listening also realise that there are issues in the working world that affect all women. So often we attribute issues to individual industries, but there are overarching issues in how society undervalues women’s labour that I also wanted to shine a light on with the podcast.
Sex work is a subject that’s often misrepresented in pop culture. How are you reclaiming the narrative with this series?
The problem with the mainstream’s representation of sex work is exactly the problem with political debates about sex work. They don’t include enough (or any) sex workers. Everyone is so busy trying to talk over sex workers, that we don’t listen when they speak. What we end up with is harmful laws being introduced, such as the Nordic Model (which criminalises the purchase but not the sale of sex, and which has been proven to increase violence against sex workers). I wanted to be able to talk about my own experience of sex work, and have my guests talk about there’s, without being edited, or misquoted. To have our own say.
Sex work is so often either overly glamorised, or turned into trauma porn, that we forget that its literally just work. Everyone has elements of their work they don’t like, but for some reason when a sex worker complains about poor working conditions, our collective response is to blame the worker for being in the sex industry. This isn’t the case for any other industry. I wanted to talk to women on the podcast from all different industries to highlight how there’s problems in all forms of work but it’s society’s deep-rooted, internalised distaste for women who have bodily autonomy that seems to be the reason behind this unjust discrimination of sex workers.
Fashion, fame, and feminism – you’ve lived in the spotlight and behind the scenes. How has that shaped your understanding of what women’s work really looks like?
I have worked in so many industries; I’ve been a child actor, a writer, a director, a bartender, a waitress, a security guard, a nanny, and a marketing manager, just to name a few! And the overarching issue I found was that women’s labour is almost always undervalued – if it is valued at all. The unpaid care-work of women is quite literally the backbone of society, yet this labour is so often disregarded. Even when we are part of the traditionally accepted mainstream workforce, we’re still largely paid less than our male counterparts. I know such a huge range of hard-working, diverse and talented women that I wanted to put a spotlight on them and highlight just how valuable these women’s labour is, and just how much mainstream society is undervaluing it.
You highlight a diverse range of voices – not just sex workers, but artists, professionals, and creatives. What did you learn about resilience from them?
The people I speak to in my podcast are absolutely some of the most resilient people I know, but having worked in so many industries and spoken to so many people, I just can’t help but feel like women have been fed this idea that we must be resilient because if we are, it means we’re more likely to accept poor behaviour/working conditions. And if there’s one thing we collectively don’t like, it’s women demanding respect.
The first time I ever felt like challenging this resilience narrative was when I was working as a stripper. Before I decided to start stripping, I’d been working myself into the ground with poorly paid jobs and was mentally and physically burnt out. Sex work taught me that the goal in life should not be resilience against the litany of disservices done to women by society, but resistance to them. Sex work taught me self worth, self confidence and how to set boundaries. This is actually precisely what most other industries told me not to do. The truth is that so many women are incredibly resilient, but I would love to live in a world where we didn’t need to be fiercely resilient just to get by.
A lot of young people still feel uncomfortable talking openly about labour and value – especially when it comes to sex work. How do we start to shift that?
I think this discomfort stems from two converging social issues. We’ve been conditioned to think that it is inherently shameful for women to be sexual beings. We’ve also been taught for generations that, as a woman, it’s not ‘becoming’ to demand that your labour is valued. It’s no surprise then, that women who are not only sexual beings, but who are using that sexuality to earn a living feel like a slap in the face to a capitalist society that relies on the unpaid labour of women to survive. Sex work is the antithesis to patriarchy – it flips traditional power dynamics and allows women to monetise what so many institutions have historically tried to control for free: our bodies. It makes me so sad when I meet women who still think that they shouldn’t have the right to bodily autonomy. I think the way we shift this narrative is through education.
A lot of people who get uncomfortable talking about the decriminalisation of sex work, don’t know enough about the industry or the harmful legalisation surrounding it. I’ve spoken to so many well-meaning-feminists who say that sex work should be ‘legalised’, when what they mean is they think it should be decriminalised (legalisation is government-controlled sex work, but decriminalisation is the removal of all sex-work-specific laws – leaving all other laws, such as those against trafficking, intact). When they’re taught the difference, people who truly believe in women’s right to bodily autonomy always change their stance to supporting decrim. We need education around decriminalisation to address the discomfort we have with talking about sex and sex work. We all deserve to have the freedom to sexual expression, and the freedom to choose how we use our bodies to make a living.
Can you tell us about your conversation with Kaya Scodelario and how it felt to reflect on your shared experience as young women in TV?
Kaya and I have both been in the industry since we were teenagers (given, Kaya has been a lot more involved than me!) but we both experienced being in the spotlight at a young age. Our breakthrough shows were made well before the ‘Me Too’ movement; intimacy co-ordinators didn’t exist, and it was still the early noughties – body shaming, slut shaming, and diet culture were all still incredibly prevalent. We were teenagers plonked into an industry that expected us to be adults when we were very much still children.
Since our time working together as teenagers, Kaya and I have grown as people, as creatives and as feminists. There are things that I just wouldn’t accept now, that I would have in my teens, because it was a different world, and I was a different person. We were taught to accept things that were unacceptable. Reminiscing with Kaya about our early careers and how different things are now was amazing – I wish we could tell our 16-year-old selves that we would be having that conversation in a decade and a half’s time, and that we would be in a position where we were finally calling the shots. Kaya is also so much better at having cohesive, concise conversations than me on account of my ADHD, so Kaya’s episode of the podcast is also probably the one that makes the most sense!
Finally, if Really Good Exposure had a fashion mood board, what would be on it?
It does have a mood board! But its not so much fashion; it’s adorned with pictures of me and my fellow Skins cast mates, memes about the ever-thankless work of being a creative freelancer and being ‘paid in exposure’, real news headlines that came out after I spoke publicly about doing sex work, pictures of me when I was a children’s-princess-party-entertainer and a bodybuilder at the same time, and a picture of me when I was a security guard for Louis Theroux (long story).
If it were simply a fashion mood board it would have typical 90s/early 00s millennial-wear all over it – low rise jeans, crop tops and belly button piercings, butterfly decals, spice girl hair, platform trainer-boots, ‘Groovy Chic’ merch, and far FAR too much glitter.
Really Good Exposure is available now on all major podcast platforms, promising to be essential listening for anyone interested in feminism, the future of work, and the politics of autonomy.