So this is a book I read off the back of @inherentlee’s reccomendation and also I think Hannah Witton recc’d it and used it as a source for one of her videos.
It’s a very good book. It ticks all my boxes: it’s short, it’s well-written, it made me think a bunch. It’s very grounded in the day-to-day lives and experiences of sex workers, and takes the view that sex work is, above all else, work, and many of the debates surrounding what it means actually minimise the lives and desires of sex workers themselves.
Grant advocates for a worker-oriented, bottom-up sort of organising and reform, decriminalisation, not legalisation &c.. It’s meshes pretty well with anarchist theory and radical socialism, which is cool. She also makes the argument very well that the way we treat/talk about sex workers as a society is reflective of the way we treat all minoritised women, and the way it intersects with other struggles for justice.
The final (two?) chapters were more theoretical, and I read them twice because I wanted to make sure I had it down right. She argues that rather than sex work become more mainstream, the sex industry and service industry have converged on the same place. She gives examples like starbucks not just requiring you make a coffee, but serve it with a smile. The rise of “personal” and “tailored” [insert rant about how all clothes used to be tailored yadda yadda]. “Convergence”. I should remember this.
I particularly very much enjoyed the section about red light districts and how they used to be, the sketches of life in them, and the olden-days of sex-worker internet before it became what it is now :(.
Very good book, do reccomend!