Charlotte Rose: Dominatrix, Sex-Work Advocacy, and Street Protest

Charlotte Rose is an English sex worker, dominatrix, sexual trainer, and political candidate from Nottingham who lives in London. She was married and is the mother of two children, an older son and a younger daughter. She worked as a teacher. After she and her partner separated, she moved to Exeter, Devon, in 2003. She earned a hospitality degree from the University of Plymouth, worked in hospitality, then taught the subject to further-education students at Exeter College before deciding to escort. She said she wanted to become Britain’s number-one public voice on sex. She took professional SM and escort work onto Channel 4 and BBC politics shows, and she used parliamentary evidence and street protest to argue about porn regulation and brothel law. She is a public-facing English dominatrix.

Television, awards, and the radio show

In 2013 she won Sex Worker of the Year at the Sexual Freedom Awards and later became a resident judge of that award. The same year she also won the British Erotic Award for Sex Worker of the Year. In 2014 she appeared on Channel 4’s Love for Sale, presented by Rupert Everett. After the broadcast she described a hate campaign aimed at her work. Her landlord used it to evict her, and she moved to London. She said she harmed no one, made no noise, and lived an ordinary life. From there she was on mainstream media often, including a 2015 appearance on BBC Two’s The Daily Politics arguing for decriminalisation of brothels in Britain, and a BBC Three online sketch, Things Sex Workers are Tired of Hearing. She performed in The Sex Workers’ Opera at London’s Pleasance Theatre, a mix of opera, hip hop, and poetry. The show toured the UK in 2017. She also hosts Rose Talks Sex, a long-running radio talk show on sex and sexual culture.

By-elections

In 2014 she stood as an independent on a sexual-freedom platform. The Sexual Freedom Coalition listed her as standing for the Sexual Freedom Party. The vote totals were small. The point was to make sex workers and sexual-freedom politics visible inside by-elections fought by the main parties. On 9 October 2014, in the Clacton by-election, she finished last of eight candidates with 56 votes, 0.16 percent. In Rochester and Strood she finished eleventh of thirteen with 43 votes, 0.11 percent.

Kink as a public protest

Rose used public space to put BDSM acts in front of a political argument. On 12 December 2014 she organized a protest against the 2014 amendment, under the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations, to the Communications Act 2003. One banned practice was facesitting, so part of the action was a mass facesitting by adults, with people singing Monty Python’s “Sit on My Face.” On 1 March 2015 she organized a public spanking at Sackville Gardens in Manchester. The participants were adults. Those actions moved private kink outdoors and made it a claim about speech and sexual freedom, rather than leaving it as a private session. In 2016 she gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee’s inquiry into how the law treats sex work. The committee backed changes to brothel-keeping rules and full decriminalisation. No legislation followed those recommendations. Twitter and Facebook kept the campaign visible after the television spots ended.

After escort work

In 2019 her partner died in a motorcycle accident, and Rose stopped escort work. She bought a motorhome and set out to break a Guinness World Record by visiting 150 pubs across England, Scotland, and Wales in twelve months. COVID-19 cut the full plan short. She kept going on a smaller scale, visiting and reviewing pubs for her blog, and she kept hosting the radio show.