Staff Pick
This is an absolutely extraordinary crash course on how general disgust, pity, and fear about the existence of sex workers from both the right and left is precisely what most contributes most to exploitation and violence against them. Melissa Gira Grant demonstrates a ruthless brilliance as she lays out how the biggest enemies of sex workers are the systems that claim to "save" them while also systematically ignoring their actual voices: law enforcement officials who brutalize and rape them, sex-worker-exclusionary feminists who frame them as helpless and brainwashed, and conservatives who see them as a threat to Western morality itself. Grant shows how the demonization and criminalization of sex work will always harm the most vulnerable who perform it — trans and queer folks, people of color, disabled people, and anyone else who lives on the margins — who often turn to it for the economic mobility and freedom that other available options cannot provide. Even more importantly, she makes clear that sex workers have always had voices of their own — strong, incredible voices — and it's time for all of us to link arms with them and listen. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Melissa Gira Grant is a writer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Glamour, the Guardian, the Nation, Wired, and the Atlantic. She is also a Contributing Editor to Jacobin.
Her website is melissagiragrant.com.
Synopsis
Recent years have seen a panic over online red-lightdistricts, which supposedly seduce vulnerable youngwomen into a life of degradation, and New YorkTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof s live tweeting of aCambodian brothel raid. But rarely do these fearful, salacious dispatches come from sex workers themselves, and rarely do they deviate from the positionthat sex workers must be rescued from their condition, and the industry simply abolished a positioncommon among feminists and conservatives alike.
In Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grantturns these pieties on their head, arguing for anoverhaul in the way we think about sex work. Basedon ten years of writing and reporting on the sextrade, and grounded in her experience as an organizer, advocate, and former sex worker, Playing theWhore dismantles pervasive myths about sex work, criticizes both conditions within the sex industryand its criminalization, and argues that separatingsex work from the legitimate economy only harmsthose who perform sexual labor.In Playing the Whore, sex workers demands, too longrelegated to the margins, take center stage: sex work iswork, and sex workers rights are human rights."