Melissa Gira Grant

This is not the world's best written book but it's a very important one that should be a must-read for all people.
While the writing could be more fluent, the messages, thoughts, personal stories, statistics, and social analyses and quotes it provides are extremely necessary for everyone to know and understand. Even if you’ve read a few articles or listened to some podcasts on the matter, Playing the Whore provides many new aspects and touches on a variety of subjects that have to do with the vastness that is the industry.

Selected quotes:
Chapter 4: The Debate
“Sex workers should not be expected to defend the existence of sex work in order to have the right to do it free from harm.”

“Is this the real fear then: not that more people are becoming prostitutes but that the conventional ways we’d distinguish prostitute from a nonprostitute woman are no longer functional? Antiprostitution laws are primarily about exclusion and banishment; how, now, will we know who is to be banished and excluded?”

Chapter 5: The Industry
“As feminist anarchist Emma Goldman noted in 1910, the prostitution panic “will help to create a few more fat political jobs-parasites who stalk about the world as inspectors, investigators, detectives, and so forth.” The loss of sex workers’ income was their gain.”

Chapter 7: The Stigma
“Naming whore stigma offers us a way through it: to value difference, to develop solidarity between women in and out of the sex trade. […]There’s an echo of this in the popularization of whore stigma in a milder form as outrage at “slut shaming.” What is lost, however, in moving from whore stigma to slut shaming is the centrality of the people most harmed by this form of discrimination.”

Chapter 8: The Other Women
“Prostitutes, in their imagination, have actually become the mute objects men have reduced them to. They are apparently unlike all other women, who face objectification but can retain their ability to speak and move in the world independently. […] When anti-sex work activists claim that all sex work is rape, they don’t just ignore the labor; they excuse the actual rape of sex workers. If men can do whatever they want when they buy sex, the rape of sex workers, of those who are thought to have no consent to give anyway, isn’t understood by opponents as an aberration but as somehow intrinsic and inevitable.”

“When massive chains like Pret A Manger or Starbucks require their workers to serve up coffee with a smile or else, we don’t believe we can remedy this demand for forced niceties by telling attention-desperate customers to get their emotional needs met elsewhere.”

Chapter 10: The Movement
“Because so long as there are women to be called whores, there will be women who are trained to believe it is next to death to be one or be mistaken for one. And so long as that is, men will feel they can leave whores for dead with impunity. The fear of the whore, or of being the whore, is the engine that drives the whole thing. That could be called “misogyny,” but even that word misses something: the cheapness of the whore, how easily she might be discarded not only due to her gender but to her race, her class. Whore is maybe the original intersectional insult.”… (altro)

This book was mostly very well done. I think it was it was a great exploration of this topic and takedown of many of the arguments in this issue. Even more so, it called out a variety of problems feminism promotes when dealing with this issue including transexclusion, the perfect victim, and forgetting/ignoring that race/sexuality/everything besides white, middle-class, straight, and cis exists.

Even though it was pretty accessible in writing, I wouldn't say it was an entry-level book. There were some places where you had to have known the theory behind it to understand what she was explaining. However, overall very well done and I enjoyed it immensely and will be checking out other works referenced within it.… (altro)