What I'm Reading: Melissa Grant, "Playing the Whore"

[CW for discussion of rape, murder, and police violence - no graphic details]

I read this book for the first time years ago and only now revisited it with fresh eyes. Before reading it the first time I had, to my shame, assumed that nobody would willingly enter sex work - in fact I hadn’t really thought about sex workers at all, just their labour - and I had heard big promises about the so-called ‘Nordic Model’ of decriminalising the selling of sex but criminalising the buying of it, more or less assuming those promises were true. This was the book that opened my mind and it was a delight to return to. 

Grant’s stellar text is an accessible and powerful centring of the voices of sex workers themselves on “the issue” of sex work, which is to say, their actual lives. She demonstrates that through a combination of sometimes well-meaning and sometimes decidedly ill-meaning practices sex workers have been spoken over, ignored, shunned, accused, endlessly stereotyped, had their wages stolen by police, and even been murdered with impunity; subjected to shocking rates of police violence (including murder and rape); used as pawns in sickeningly paternalistic US foreign policy decisions; and to cap it all off largely ignored by feminist movements until relatively recently. Sex workers find themselves at the crossroads of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, imperialism, xenophobia (especially for migrant sex workers), preventable poverty, the drudgeries of the gig economy, and police violence; as Grant herself says, “’Whore’ is perhaps the original intersectional insult.” As such, the freedom of sex workers not only to run their own lives but to participate in and control the discourse about their lives is a pretty good litmus test for the freedom of oppressed peoples generally.

The discussions and personal stories are interspersed with excellent philosophical analyses: Grant argues that the category “whore” or “prostitute” serves the function of practically dividing women into those who “deserve” to have violence done to them, and those who do not, which prevents a greater class solidarity from forming between women of all stripes. (Though not all sex workers are women of course.) There are also some great extended discussions about the reduction of sex workers to the labour they perform and allowing them to control it - all this on a par with thinkers like Cacho, Foucault, Agustin, and even Marx.

I’ve recommended Agustin’s book Sex At The Margins before, and Grant cites it here - if the moral and political dimensions of sex work interest you I would read this one first and then dive into Agustin, just because this one is shorter and easier as an introduction. Agustin talks more about the category of “trafficked” people and migrant sex workers specifically, so a good grounding in Grant will stand you in good stead there.

IMO, this is an essential feminist text; you can pick it up here.