Journalism may have been the career Bension Siebert fought to build, but sex work unexpectedly became the path that allowed him to keep pursuing the stories he believed mattered.
Not every career story follows a neat line from A to B. Sometimes the road to finding your purpose takes a detour so unexpected that you would never have planned it yourself.
When Journalism Suddenly Disappeared
Siebert spent six years working at InDaily in Adelaide, where he won Best Young Journalist three times at the SA Media Awards. He later worked for ABC before becoming an investigative journalist on The Briefing.
Then came a round of job cuts.
Siebert was told his work was “excellent.” The problem was that his position was being made redundant.
Like countless journalists navigating an increasingly precarious media industry, he tried the conventional route. But finding another job wasn’t exactly straightforward.
So he tried something radically different.
Sex work.
In an essay published by Cheek Media Co., Siebert described uploading nude photos to an escorting website before travelling to a client’s apartment for his first booking.
Afterward, he wrote, he found himself washing his hands and face repeatedly in a café bathroom, processing the fact that he had actually done it.
Then came the surprising realization: “And I kind-of liked it. And I could do it again.”
He later wrote that becoming a sex worker “was not my back-up plan – or, not yet,” describing the decision as a rebellion against the respectable professional identity he had maintained throughout his media career.
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His “Cheat Code to Capitalism”
As his redundancy money dwindled, Siebert returned to escorting and began seeing clients regularly.
The financial difference was startling.
“I discovered I could earn as much in five hours of sex work as I earned in my best-paid week as a journalist,” he wrote, adding that some clients occasionally paid thousands of dollars for a single booking.
He called it his “cheat code to capitalism.”
But money wasn’t the only thing that kept him doing it.
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Finding Meaning in Unexpected Places
Siebert wrote about clients who sought something beyond sex, including a neurodiverse man in his forties who wanted to experience anal sex for the first time. Siebert described helping him feel comfortable and prepared, and said the client later told him the experience had been profoundly important to his life.
Another client was a gay man in his seventies who had grown up when homosexuality was illegal and deeply stigmatized. Siebert described providing the trust and acceptance the man had struggled to find elsewhere.
“It was meaningful, purposeful work,” he wrote.
That perspective also changed how Siebert viewed employment itself. He described having greater control over his schedule, income and working conditions, along with more time for friends, hobbies, and relationships.
Coming Out Twice
There was, however, a darker side. One client threatened to expose Siebert’s sex work after he couldn’t accommodate a booking, making him confront the permanent digital trail connecting his escort identity with his journalism career.
Rather than waiting for someone else to expose him, Siebert chose to tell his own story.
He connected the experience to being closeted as a bisexual teenager, writing that secrecy had once filled him with shame. Keeping his sex work hidden, he realized, felt like returning to that closet.
His conclusion is perhaps the most revealing part of the entire journey: he would rather risk losing the respectable professional image he once had than continue living behind it.
For Siebert, the unexpected road wasn’t necessarily a departure from journalism.
It helped him find his way back to it on his own terms