I love collections that are like 'here's a bunch of people telling their own stories'. I find it especially useful with marginalised voices (like Bernstein's collection ' why are f____s so afraid of f____s' [periphrasis because it's not a word people want to be seeing casually].

Speaking of things that people don't want to see casually - this book is complex. It's necessary but one of the abiding themes is the difficulty of arriving at a voice as a sex worker - their marginalisation constantly turned back on them, the distrust of mainstream feminism to listen to and trust their voices. Sex is still not talked about well and, by extension, sex work even less so.

This isn't a book that's *positive* about sex work. It's not negative either - rather it's a clear exposition of how people get into it, how they negotiate it. Clichedly, the good, bad, and ugly. Overwhelmingly (for me at least) it screams that the primary source of danger is sex work being clandestine. And the police. And the struggles not faced in other lines of work - the difficulty of keeping tabs on dangerous Johns, the adjacent criminal elements, the inability to unionise (in a broad sense) or share information. Possibly the bit that struck me is how many of these women are doing a shitty job with kids, but a job that is, to them, less shitty than the other options.

I'm not an expert on sex work but there's a fair spread of what I know of - dommes, porn stars, strippers, camgirls, prostitutes etc - and a great range of tones. Some of them are academic in tone, some of them conversational but all compelling.

I went in wanting a book that was sex workers in their own voice and that's exactly what this is. Very much comes with trigger warnings all over it but it feels like it's worth getting through the horror to hear these women's voices.

If you've any interest in sex work, read this.