As an year-old, prostitution was a secret, frightening, part of my life. It glossed over the fact that I felt too mental and was taking too many drugs to do any other job. It would be many years before I allowed myself to unpick that teenage bravado. I was doing sex work again, better paid, less chaotically.
Now, I had community. Through the sex worker activists who became my friends, the possibility of new analysis opened up. In other writing, she talks about this in an explicitly political framework, but the messy, relatable Tea in Rent Girl is equally illuminating. The second edition is out this month. By the time Revolting Prostitutes arrived, the sex worker rights movement was highly visible. In the UK, opinions on sex work now represent one of the fiercest dividing lines in both feminism and leftist politics.
Alliances between those fighting for labour rights, immigration reform or the reversal of austerity fall apart when faced with the constant erasure or misrepresentation of sex workers.
Revolting Prostitutes takes you through the main legal models for sex work: partial criminalisation, legalisation, full criminalisation and decriminalisation. In countries where prostitution is fully criminalisedβsuch as the US, South Africa and Kenyaβenforcement is racist, transphobic and brutal. Your revolt, as you read the chapter on this legal model, is directed toward arrests which overwhelmingly target women of colour and trans people, toward police forces for whom violence, humiliation and rape are normalised, and for legislators whose bigotry overrides evidence.
In France, more than twelve sex workers have been killed since the Nordic Model was implimented three years ago. Revolting Prostitutes captures and fleshes out a key argument in current sex worker rights discourse: that police violence cannot be separated from other forms of violence sex workers face. The book is an entreaty to end our reliance on police and prisons as a means of creating a better world. A key struggle that sex workers face in feminist spaces is trying to move people past their sense of what prostitution symbolises, to grapple with what the criminalisation of prostitution materially does to people who sell sex.
