This is one of the only anthologies I've read where I didn't have to skip half the chapters. The vast majority of it is really great and illuminating and while I'm not a sex worker I am a queer traumatized slut and a lot of these chapters felt really empowering.

I do take issue with what I felt was tokenization of transfem sex workers while not including many of them and iirc only having one masc writer. There are a ton of nonbinary writers which I really appreciated but the vast majority of them were fem(me) and not transfem.

Overall I would really recommend this book and I genuinely loved it. I learned so much and it's a new favorite. It's just somewhat limited in its scope.

 

“I have been harmed in sex work and I have been helped in sex work and I should not have to explain either of those experiences in order to talk about my work as work. “ 

It’s important to go into this anthology with the understanding that this was not written for a casual reader. It is not catering to the newly curious or the “debate me bro”-types. This a book for the community. The “we.” Most of us are not a part of that, nor should we pretend to be. Instead, our role is to witness and absorb the stories and experiences of these workers and just generally try to reduce the size of our own egos. 

Sex work is not one thing. It is a thousand different things, and those forms of labor mean different things to different workers.  This collection covered everything from more mainstream porn work, to leather-culture, to socially-distant sex work in the time of COVID. 

Some of the essays made me happy and some made me sad. Some made me breathlessly uncomfortable, while others made me grab my laptop to do more in-depth research of my own. I would recommend that everyone eventually read this.  Eventually being key – this is not a primer on sex work, and it is not interested in holding your hand and walking you through terminology, customary practices, or toning down the more intense shades of how some workers choose to earn their income. 

 

Pairs well with: 

-       ‘The Roommate’ 

-       John Oliver’s recent LWT ‘Sex Work’ segment 

-       Anarchism