Edited Excerpt

(you only need to read this short excerpt for homework, but if you want to read the whole article, it's available here)

Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
Melissa Gira Grant
Verso/Jacobin, $14.95 (paper)

According to a well-worn saw, prostitution is a profession like any other, apart from being the oldest. But in her new book Playing the Whore, journalist, activist, and former sex worker Melissa Gira Grant argues that sex work is not a profession at all, according to widespread perception. Instead, most of us—in the United States and abroad, women and men, feminists and otherwise—are attached to what Grant calls “fantasies of prostitution” in which sex workers are reduced to what they do when they are working: they are “essentially sexual.” Rather than play the whore only when they are on the clock, sex workers are whores through and through.

Hint: notice that in the last sentence of this first paragraph the author adopts the voice of the people Grant critiques. The author does not believe sex workers are "whores through and though,"

This fantasy motivates intrepid heroes such as the columnistNicholas Kristof, who live tweets his raid of a Cambodian brothel and, in the pages of The New York Times, trumpets his purchase of several women’s freedom. In his narrative, prostitutes are victims—of their pimps, their johns, or their own false consciousness. Kristof is one face of a “rescue industry” that campaigns against international sex trafficking and seeks to abolish prostitution altogether. The rescue industry is unable to imagine that the sale of sex could ever be consensual and non-exploitative.

Another fantasy envisions the prostitute not as a victim but as a vector of contagion, threatening to spread disease and immorality. The prostitute must be kept under control. This imperative drives the policing of sex workers and those who are profiled as sex workers, even when they are not selling sex, and legitimates police abuse of sex workers and suspected sex workers, who are constantly vulnerable to surveillance, harassment, sexual violation, and incarceration.

A third fantasy assumes that workers involved in prostitution, stripping, and porn are passive, sexualized objects. When a sex scandal breaks, the media seek sex workers who will play to type as the glamorous, sexy call girl who reproduces titillating stories of her degraded past for a voyeuristic public. Grant relates with disgust how she and a colleague were approached by ABC to help “produce a ‘classy,’ ‘educated’ (read: white, conventionally attractive) escort” to tell “‘true tales’ of prostitution” for a special program on Deborah Jeane Palfrey, known as the D.C. Madam. And anti-prostitution activists stage debates about sex work, but without sex workers. Anti-trafficking activist Kathleen Barry once refused to debate a sex worker because “it would be ‘inappropriate to discuss sexual slavery with prostitute women.’” In debates over sex work, the workers themselves are usually treated as “mute icon or service instrument,” spoken about but unable to speak for themselves. In Sweden, for instance, anti-prostitution activists pushed for a law criminalizing the men who purchase sex—as opposed to the women they buy it from—“without any meaningful consultation with women who sell sex.” Despite more than forty years of sex worker activism across the United States and the globe, mainstream debates about sex work still take place largely without the input of those who perform it.

But sex workers are not simply figures in another’s drama. They make up their own narratives. As Grant notes, sex workers who have spoken out in defense of their work often have resisted the role of the victim by instead going to the opposite extreme and presenting themselves as empowered. A recent example is Belle Knox, the Duke University freshman who was outed on campus as a porn star and subsequently claimed, “Shooting pornography brings me unimaginable joy. . . . I can say definitively that I have never felt more empowered or happy doing anything else. In a world where women are so often robbed of their choice, I am completely in control of my sexuality.”

To Grant, the empowered sex worker is just as fantastic as the victimized whore. She argues that we need to dispel fantasies of prostitution altogether, to resist seeing sex workers as either wholly exploited or wholly empowered by the work they do. Sex workers, as workers in any field, like certain things about their jobs and dislike other things. Sex workers should have, with everyone else, the ability to voice a complicated and ambivalent relationship to their labors. “There must,” Grant writes, “be room for them to identify, publicly and collectively, what they wish to change about how they are treated as workers without being told that the only solution is for them to exit the industry.” They must be able to talk about their working conditions honestly and openly, without having to fit their experiences into someone else’s fantasy of prostitution, and without fearing police surveillance and incarceration in response.