Bøker av Melissa Gira Grant

Recent years have seen a panic over ';online red-lightdistricts,' which supposedly seduce vulnerable youngwomen into a life of degradation, and New YorkTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof's live tweeting of aCambodian brothel raid. But rarely do these fearful,salacious dispatches come from sex workers themselves,and rarely do they deviate from the positionthat sex workers must be rescued from their condition,and the industry simply abolished a positioncommon among feminists and conservatives alike. In Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grantturns these pieties on their head, arguing for anoverhaul in the way we think about sex work. Basedon ten years of writing and reporting on the sextrade, and grounded in her experience as an organizer,advocate, and former sex worker, Playing theWhore dismantles pervasive myths about sex work,criticizes both conditions within the sex industryand its criminalization, and argues that separatingsex work from the ';legitimate' economy only harmsthose who perform sexual labor.In Playing the Whore, sex workers' demands, too longrelegated to the margins, take center stage: sex work iswork, and sex workers' rights are human rights.