Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
Melissa Gira Grant
If you liked Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory, you must read Playing the Whore. Journalist Melissa Gira Grant’s entertaining, impassioned book calls for an overhaul in the way we think about sex work. Based on ten years of writing and reporting on the sex trade, and grounded in her experience as an organizer, advocate, and former sex worker, Playing the Whore dismantles pervasive myths about sex work, criticizes both conditions within the sex industry and its criminalization, and argues that separating sex work from the “legitimate” economy only harms those who perform sexual labor.
In Playing the Whore, sex workers’ demands, too long relegated to the margins, take center stage: sex work is work, and sex workers’ rights are human rights.
You may purchase this book directly from Verso.
About the Author
Melissa Gira Grant
Melissa Gira Grant is a writer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Glamour, The Guardian, The Nation, Wired, and the Atlantic. Her website is melissagiragrant.com.
"I recall my file of e-mails from reporters, academics, filmmakers, and activists who want me to introduce them to sex workers so that they can tell their stories, or organise them, without an understanding that they -we- are also reporters, academics, filmmakers, and activists, and are doing it ourselves."
-Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work