Playing The Whore: The Work Of Sex Work
by Melissa Gira Grant
(Verso, £8.99)

WHEN you read or hear the word “prostitute,” what image flashes before you? A tearful victim of trafficking? A whey-faced drug addict? Or a well-heeled “escort” in designer make-up?

All these constructions of sex workers, along with endless fictional figures from plucky Nancy in Oliver Twist to the Whore of Babylon to Belle de Jour’s Severine, form a great melting pot that Melissa Gira Grant dubs “the prostitute imaginary,” a vast repository of stock images

employed by everyone from rightwingers to anti sex-work feminists, to negate the personhood of prostitutes.

Sex workers, Gira Grant argues, suffer uniquely because they are seen not through the prism of their wider lives, or even their work in its fullest sense. They exist in the public consciousness only in the precise instant of the sexual acts they perform.

And even those self-appointed activists, feminists and helpers who wish to “rescue” prostitutes unwittingly turn a dehumanising gaze on them, casting them alternately as victims of men and betrayers of women. Thus, “sex workers’ bodies are rarely presented or understood as much

more than interchangeable symbols — for urban decay, for misogyny, for exploitation.”

So much is missing from this picture, as Gira Grant illustrates when she details the day-to-day mundanities of sex-dungeon life — shift meetings, schedules and utility bills — for its workers.

She deftly situates much modern sex work within the twin forces of gentrification and a surge towards the service economy.

The labour sex workers conduct includes not just the physical act but the experience and mood they

create for the client — the “added value.” In much the same way the Starbucks barista must serve up a welcoming smile along with each coffee.

Seen in its full context, sex work has as much right to the label “work” as any other paid task, subject as it is to cultural trends, economic forces and the skills and labour of the individual worker and Gira Grant makes a coolly argued and sophisticated case for sex workers, like other

workers, to be permitted a class consciousness and the right to organise and unionise their labour legally and openly.

They must be enabled to free themselves from the violence and misogyny of police raids, the proselytising of “advocates” and a sexualisation panic which makes sex workers responsible for male behaviour.

Solidarity among all women is, she says, ultimately what is needed to remove the millennia-old “whore stigma” and finally kill off the prostitute imaginary of other people’s fantasies. As such the book is a refreshing take on an old subject, combining idealism with lucid arguments. One can only hope Grant’s voice and message aren’t drowned out by the cacophony of opinionated “rescuers.”

Faye Lipson