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Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work

di Melissa Gira Grant

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24614108,038 (3.52)7
Sex work and conditions within the sex industry are frequent topics of discussion in mainstream culture and media, but rarely do these discussions include sex workers themselves, and rarely do they deviate from the position that sex workers must be saved from their evil industry's position that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeatedly advocates. This work turns this position on its head, arguing that sex work is fundamentally a form of work, and as in other industries, it is not the labor of sex work that is illegitimate, but rather the working conditions within the sex sector that are abominable. Based on ten years of writing and reporting on the sex trade, and grounded in the author's personal experience as a sex worker, community organizer and health educator, 'Playing the Whore' dismantles pervasive myths of prostitution, criticizes conditions within the sex industry, and argues that separating sex work from the "legitimate" economy only harms those who perform sexual labor.… (altro)
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» Vedi le 7 citazioni

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.” ( )
  Silenostar | Dec 7, 2022 |
covers feminist sex work positive views in contrast to anti-trafficking, anti-prostitution views ( )
  kevix | Dec 28, 2020 |
This is the first in-depth reading I've done on sex work and sex workers and I found it fascinating and eye opening. I especially enjoyed the author positing that instead of sex work being oppressive or empowering--as different sides in the feminist argument over it insist--that it is value neutral and that it's okay to be that way.

I think I'll be returning to this book again as I continue my research in this area.

(Provided by publisher) ( )
  tldegray | Sep 21, 2018 |
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. ( )
  mmaestiho | Sep 20, 2018 |
“Sex work can indeed be empowering. But that is not the point. Money is the fucking point.”
- Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore

Growing up I had three basic images of sex work (although I didn’t call it that then): the Julia Roberts / Pretty Woman version; the desperate, drug addicted woman; and the ‘sex slave’ in another country who was ‘rescued’ regularly on Dateline and 48 Hours. I didn’t spend time thinking about sex workers, but I did wonder why sex work was illegal in most places.

Recently I’ve become more interested in labor rights; specifically how society views certain types of labor as worthy (of money or legality) and others as deserving of criminalization or at least disdain. I live in Seattle, where the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour was met with such charming arguments from non-shift workers as ‘what did a McDonald’s worker do to deserve that? I barely make that!’ as though people in the fast food industry aren’t working just as hard as people sitting in air conditioned offices, able to take coffee and bathroom breaks whenever they want.

This interest led me to Ms. Grant’s book. She takes a perspective that is missing in coverage of sex work and workers – one that does not start by asking ‘should people do sex work’ but instead asks what can we do to improve the lives of the people who work in that industry. The book is well-written and educated me on the topic, but when asked to describe it in a few sentences I have a hard time. Each chapter feels like a separate essay in a broader collection, and initially I was not sure of the main purpose of the book, as it covers a broad area. It is not a linear history of sex work, nor is it an argument (primarily) for the decriminalization or legalization of sex work. It is more than that.

Going back through my notes and rereading the portions I highlighted does bring more clarity to me. That is a function not of Ms. Grant’s writing, but of my need to re-read the book to better take in all of the information she shares. Her purpose seems to be to point out all of the ways in which people who seek to help sex workers fail, and in doing so Ms. Grant draws the reader’s attention to the need for the reader to take actions in solidarity with these workers, and support those who can change the conditions of their lives for the better, not pull them out of sex work or make it more dangerous for them to perform the work they do.

Ms. Grant illustrates this in many ways, including critiquing the fight against online posting of sex worker ads and the large anti-sex work organizations that purport to rescue sex workers from horrible conditions. Ms. Grant points out that so many of the ‘rescued’ end up in worse situations, with less agency than they had when doing sex work, and concludes that this stems from the inability of so many to see these women and men as people doing a job and not as one-dimensional ‘whores.’

“The goal, these antiprostitute advocates say, of eradicating men’s desire for paid sex isn’t ‘antisex’ but to restore the personhood of prostitutes, that is, of people who are already people except to those who claim to want to fix them.”

That’s the point, really. Sex workers are people first, people who make their money in the sex work industry. The problems these workers face doesn’t stem from the morality of sex work – they originate with the rest of society, which is invested in making sex work dangerous. The question the reader is left with – that I am left with – is what am I going to do to benefit these workers? ( )
  ASKelmore | Jul 9, 2017 |
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Sex work and conditions within the sex industry are frequent topics of discussion in mainstream culture and media, but rarely do these discussions include sex workers themselves, and rarely do they deviate from the position that sex workers must be saved from their evil industry's position that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeatedly advocates. This work turns this position on its head, arguing that sex work is fundamentally a form of work, and as in other industries, it is not the labor of sex work that is illegitimate, but rather the working conditions within the sex sector that are abominable. Based on ten years of writing and reporting on the sex trade, and grounded in the author's personal experience as a sex worker, community organizer and health educator, 'Playing the Whore' dismantles pervasive myths of prostitution, criticizes conditions within the sex industry, and argues that separating sex work from the "legitimate" economy only harms those who perform sexual labor.

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