Book No. 34 of 2025
As someone who knows very little about sex work outside of a few Secret Diary of a Call Girl episodes, several courtesan-centric novels, and a few years in the aughts of reading a dancer’s Livejournal, I found this book to be incredibly insightful about the actual dynamics of the sex industry—which, as the author points out, encompasses a huge number of professions, contains a lot of gray areas, and in some cases is not that much different from work in the service industry.
A lot of the discourse around sex work doesn’t center the actual needs or experiences of sex workers (and Grant goes into why this is the case) so it was really helpful to read something that centers the people—largely women, queer folks, and trans/non-binary folks—who carry out sex work. It was especially illuminating to read about the ways that feminist movements intersect with sex work, and how sex work and labor activism are intertwined.