Revolting Prostitutes
How the law harms sex workers - and what they want instead Do you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justice? In Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith bring a fresh perspective to questions that have long been contentious. Speaking from a growing global sex worker rights movement, and situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy, they make it clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
2mentions
2people
2021–2023years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Sure I never said "all sex workers are desperate", I said "in many cases". There was a great book I read a while back "Revolting Prostitutes" which talks about this distinction between types of sex workers. There are many, many sex workers who are perfectly happy doing their work, and I believe that these are the people you know (the book gives this group the tongue-in-cheek name "happy hookers"). However on the whole these people tend to be affluent and well-connected (which could also be extrapolated from knowing an HN poster), and as such get over-represented in our current sex-work discourse IMO. Responses like this, which use these "happy" sex workers to push back on the negative aspects of sex work experienced by people who are acting out of desperation obscures a lot of important nuance at play. No doubt that the moralizing "all sex workers are abused and need saving" is equally if not more harmful, but I think it's really important that we acknowledge that for many people sex work is often just that: work (which is also the take of "Revolting Prostitutes"). Understanding it as a form of labor, subject to all the usual abuses of labor plus the extras unique to sex work is IMO a really important framing for thinking about sex work as a crime. This is where I'm coming from when I describe "many" sex workers as "desperate"; they are people who really need income doing the best work they can find (either best pay, most flexible hours, etc). Not trying to condemn anyone for their choice of career or side-hustle, but ignoring the reality that many sex workers are exploited by their employers and clients is IMO far more rude than my previous comment
- I think many people could benefit by reading “Revolting Prostitutes” by Juno Mac and Molly Smith. I covers how sex worker’s rights are related to worker’s rights in general.
> I believe I have enough experience to tell if a girl is enjoying her time with me
Do consider that it is in the service provider’s interest to make you think this. When you are paying money for experience, you can’t use how the experience makes you feel to evaluate how the employees feel about it.
> If a girl gives signs that she doesn't enjoy [it, I] never visit her again.
Can’t you see how in this situation it would be in the sex worker’s interest to give signs she enjoys your thing? If she does not, she looses a customer.
I’m not saying that prostitution is wrong or that some sex workers don’t enjoy they job. It just might be the only realistic option for someone.
Some things that a country could do so that people have the option to not be a prostitute:
* food and housing for people who need it
* equal pay and career opportunity for men and women
* drug treatment programs that don’t put people in jail for addiction
See “Revolting Prostitutes” for more details
