Playing the whore - Melissa Gira Grant

The sex industry is an endless source of prurient drama for the
mainstream media. Recent years have seen a panic over "online red-light
districts," which supposedly seduce vulnerable young women into a life
of degradation, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's live tweeting of a Cambodian brothel raid. The
current trend for writing about and describing actual experiences of
sex work fuels a culture obsessed with the behaviour of sex workers.
Rarely do these fearful dispatches come from sex workers themselves, and
they never seem to deviate from the position that sex workers must be
rescued from their condition, and the industry simply abolished-a position common among feminists and conservatives alike.

In Playing the Whore,
journalist Melissa Gira Grant turns these pieties on their head,
arguing for an overhaul in the way we think about sex work. Based on ten
years of writing and reporting on the sex trade, and grounded in her
experience as an organizer, advocate, and former sex worker, Playing the Whore
dismantles pervasive myths about sex work, criticizes both conditions
within the sex industry and its criminalization, and argues that
separating sex work from the "legitimate" economy only harms those who
perform sexual labor.

In Playing the Whore, sex
workers' demands, too long relegated to the margins, take center stage:
sex work is work, and sex workers' rights are human rights.