Playing the Whore

Playing the Whore Plot Summary

Introduction

Sex work remains one of the most misunderstood, stigmatized, and criminalized forms of labor in modern society. The discourse around prostitution often oscillates between moral panic and voyeuristic fascination, rarely centered on the voices and experiences of those who actually perform sex work. This critical examination challenges conventional narratives by repositioning the conversation away from simplistic binaries of exploitation versus empowerment, instead focusing on sex work as labor within specific economic, social, and political contexts. Through rigorous analysis, the text dismantles the "prostitute imaginary" - the collection of fantasies, fears, and projections that shape public policy and social attitudes toward sex workers. By examining how policing practices, media representations, rescue industries, and even some feminist discourses contribute to the marginalization of sex workers, we gain insight into how society uses the figure of the prostitute to reinforce broader systems of control. The central argument emerges with clarity: the problems facing sex workers stem not inherently from the nature of their work but from criminalization, stigma, and the denial of labor rights and human dignity.

Chapter 1: The Criminalizing Gaze: Policing and the Construction of Prostitution

The criminalization of sex work represents far more than a simple legal prohibition - it constitutes an entire system of surveillance, control, and violence directed at people who sell sex. Police stings, often recorded and broadcast publicly, serve not merely as law enforcement tactics but as ritualistic displays of punishment. These videos, whether locked in evidence rooms or circulated online, function as ongoing forms of violence against sex workers' bodies and identities. The moment of arrest becomes a permanent spectacle, transforming a woman into a "prostitute" in the public imagination regardless of legal outcomes. The "prostitute imaginary" - the ways society conceptualizes and argues about prostitution - drives those seeking to control, abolish, or profit from sex work. This imaginary is fueled by both fantasies and fears about sex and human value. Police enforcement of anti-prostitution laws serves as a socially acceptable way to discipline women, particularly those already marginalized by race, class, and gender expression. Transgender women, women of color, and gender non-conforming youth are disproportionately profiled as sex workers and subjected to harassment, arrest, and violence. Police abuse against sex workers constitutes a persistent global reality. In New York City, studies found that 70 percent of street-based sex workers reported near-daily encounters with police, with 30 percent reporting threats of violence. When sex workers sought help from police after experiencing violence, they were often ignored or blamed. This violence extends beyond street-based workers - indoor workers also report significant rates of police violence and sexual coercion. Similar patterns emerge worldwide, from Greece to China, where police have subjected sex workers to public humiliation, forced HIV testing, and physical abuse. What becomes evident is that the violence sex workers face from law enforcement isn't an aberration but a feature of criminalization. Even "progressive" approaches that claim to target customers rather than sex workers continue to subject sex workers to arrest and surveillance. This carceral approach to prostitution - what sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein calls "carceral feminism" - relies on the punitive power of the state to enforce a particular vision of gender justice, one that ultimately fails to improve sex workers' lives or safety. The crucial question isn't why prostitution is illegal, but rather how much violence against "prostitutes" society has made acceptable. The stigma and violence faced by sex workers constitute far greater harms than sex work itself, yet this remains illegible to those who view prostitution only as inherently violent. The underlying logic appears to be that violence against sex workers is justified as deterrence - a necessary cost of protecting those deemed more deserving of protection.

Chapter 2: Reframing Agency: The Invention of Sex Work as Political Identity

The term "sex work" - now widely used in health, human rights, and labor contexts - was not merely a linguistic innovation but a political act of self-definition. Coined in 1978 by activist Carol Leigh at a feminist conference on pornography and media, the phrase emerged as a direct challenge to the objectifying language used by conference organizers who described prostitution as the "sex use industry." Leigh's intervention - suggesting "sex work industry" instead - marked a crucial shift from viewing people who sell sex as objects to recognizing them as workers and agents. This linguistic shift represents a profound conceptual transformation. The word "prostitute" itself is relatively young, entering English in the sixteenth century first as a verb - to prostitute, to set something up for sale. The older term "whore" dates back to the twelfth century BCE. What's significant is that prior to the nineteenth century, there was no exclusive word or concept signifying the sale of sexual services. The character of "the prostitute" emerged alongside other newly categorized identities like "the homosexual," transforming behaviors into fixed identities that could be more easily regulated, controlled, and criminalized. The invention of sex work as a concept in the late 1970s coincided with broader political movements for sexual freedom and against police repression. Organizations like Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE), founded in 1973 by Margo St. James, emerged to oppose the criminalization of prostitution. In 1975, more than one hundred prostitutes occupied a church in Lyon, France, to protest police harassment. These groups formed the foundation for what would become an international movement for sex workers' rights, one that gradually gained recognition from international bodies like the United Nations and World Health Organization. Yet even as sex workers have gained more visibility and articulated their own political demands, they continue to face demands to perform specific narratives about their lives. As Anne McClintock observed, "The more prostitutes are obliged to speak of their actions in public, the more they incriminate themselves." Sex workers are expected to share their stories for public consumption - in tabloids, on television specials, for researchers and social workers - often in ways that serve others' interests rather than their own. They are caught in a double bind: required to testify to prove their humanity yet disbelieved or pathologized when their stories don't match expected narratives. This political context explains why "sex work" remains primarily a political identity rather than a term most use with clients. It's a way of claiming legitimacy, labor rights, and agency in a society that still largely treats those who sell sex as either victims or criminals. The shift from "prostitute" to "sex worker" represents an ongoing struggle to transform how society views commercial sex - not as a moral failing or inherent victimization, but as economic activity performed by workers deserving of rights, respect, and self-determination.

Chapter 3: Labor Not Identity: Sex Work as Economic Activity in Context

Sex work constitutes a form of labor, not an identity or state of being. This crucial distinction challenges the persistent tendency to reduce sex workers to their work, as objects to control rather than as workers navigating economic realities. Sex workers negotiate the terms of their labor - pricing, boundaries, safety measures - just as workers do in other industries. The difference lies not in the nature of the exchange but in its criminalization and stigmatization, which create dangerous conditions and deny sex workers legal protections. The sex industry encompasses diverse forms of labor across varying environments: escorting, street-based work, pornography, webcam performance, dominatrix work, stripping, and more. Each involves distinct skills, working conditions, and degrees of formality and legality. Even in criminalized contexts, sex work environments maintain internal organization and conventions. Consider a commercial dungeon - not a den of captives but essentially a house on a residential block with schedules, shift meetings, commission splits, and standard business operations. Or an escort agency sharing advertising costs and a phone line, with workers training newcomers on safety protocols and business practices. Many sex workers move between different forms of sex work and between sex work and "straight" work. Studies of Nevada brothel workers found that three-quarters moved between conventional employment and sex work, with one-third coming directly from non-sexual service jobs. For many, sex work offers better compensation and more flexible hours than available alternatives in the service sector. As researcher Susan Dewey found in her study of strip club dancers, many had left for conventional service jobs only to return, recognizing they preferred the potential for better earnings in the topless bar over what they experienced as "exploitative, exclusionary, and without hope for social mobility or financial stability" in mainstream employment. Sex workers do not claim their work is "just like any other job" in the simplistic way opponents suggest. Rather, they recognize that the conditions under which sexual services are offered can be as unstable and undesirable as those in other forms of care and service labor. What distinguishes sex work is not the exchange itself but the stigma and criminalization surrounding it. This stigma extends beyond individual workers to shape public policy and even influence how some feminists approach the issue - treating sex workers as objects of rescue rather than subjects with agency. The insistence that "sex work is work" should not be confused with an uncritical celebration. Sex workers aren't expected to love their jobs any more than other workers are. As dancers at the unionized peep show the Lusty Lady noted when management tried to contractually define their job as "fun," such expectations actually undermine workers' rights. The demand that sex workers only deserve rights if they feel empowered by their work is precisely backward - it creates conditions that ensure they never will be empowered. This labor-focused analysis shifts attention from abstract moral debates to concrete material conditions. It recognizes that improving sex workers' lives requires addressing the economic, legal, and social contexts in which they work rather than attempting to eliminate the industry or "rescue" individual workers.

Chapter 4: False Debates: How Discourse Sidelines Sex Workers' Voices

The so-called "sex work debate" functions primarily as spectacle rather than substantive dialogue. It attracts audiences with the promise of crisis and moral outrage while rarely centering the experiences and perspectives of sex workers themselves. The standard questions that frame these debates - Is prostitution violence against women? Are prostitutes exploited or empowered? How can we help women "escape" prostitution? - presuppose answers that leave little room for sex workers' own analyses of their lives and needs. These debates systematically exclude sex workers' voices while claiming to speak on their behalf. When feminist prostitute and COYOTE founder Margo St. James sought to debate anti-prostitution activist Kathleen Barry in 1983, she was told it would be "inappropriate to discuss sexual slavery with prostitute women." This pattern continues today, with sex workers who participate in policy forums dismissed as "not representative" or accused of being part of a "sex industry lobby." The Swedish model of prostitution law, often described as a feminist victory for criminalizing men who buy sex, was developed without meaningful consultation with women who sell sex, while New Zealand's decriminalization model was advanced by sex workers and has been evaluated with their participation. The narrative driving these debates relies on moral panic: sex work is portrayed as an ever-growing threat, a contagion spreading throughout society. Anti-prostitution campaigns focus on "demand" for commercial sex, framing male desire as a problem to be solved through punitive measures. This approach conveniently shifts attention away from more complex systemic issues like poverty, racial inequality, and economic injustice - problems that sex workers' rights advocates consistently identify as more urgent than suppressing commercial sex. Commercial sex adapts to its social and economic surroundings, moving from street corners to business-class hotels, from red-light districts to private spaces arranged online. This shift doesn't indicate the growth of the sex industry so much as its changing character in response to broader socioeconomic trends. As sexually oriented businesses become more formalized and private, the conventional ways of distinguishing "prostitutes" from "respectable women" become less functional, perhaps stoking fears of social disorder. Sex workers should not be expected to defend the existence of sex work to have the right to do it free from harm. Like all workers, sex workers' attitudes toward their work change over the course of their working lives and even over the course of a day. Their complaints about working conditions shouldn't be construed as evidence of a desire to exit the industry any more than other workers' complaints suggest they want their industries abolished. As labor journalist Sarah Jaffe observed of her struggles as a waitress, "No one ever wanted to save me from the restaurant industry." The debate needs redrawing: either sex workers are in the conversation or they are not. They are tired of being invited to publicly investigate the politics of their own lives only if they're willing to serve as props for someone else's agenda. The real question isn't "What do we do about prostitution?" but rather "How do we ensure that sex workers lead any public debates about their own lives?"

Chapter 5: Stigma as Control: The Social Mechanisms of Whore Stigma

"Whore stigma" extends far beyond those who sell sex, affecting all women who defy conventional norms of femininity and sexuality. As sex worker activist Gail Pheterson theorized, this stigma attaches not just to femaleness but to "illegitimate or illicit femaleness" - to those who break with "compulsory virtue." Women who appear too sexual, too independent, too visible, or otherwise transgressive face potential labeling as whores regardless of whether they engage in commercial sex. This stigma functions as a powerful mechanism of social control. It divides women into categories of pure and impure, respectable and disreputable, creating a hierarchy that keeps all women in check. As sex worker feminists have argued, "While only some women may be sex workers, all of us negotiate whore stigma." This insight informed solidarity actions like the 1982 occupation of a London church by the English Collective of Prostitutes, where both sex workers and their supporters wore masks to prevent distinction between them, demonstrating that the line between "whore" and "respectable woman" is artificially imposed. The severe consequences of whore stigma became tragically evident in the case of the Green River Killer, Gary Leon Ridgway, who confessed to killing at least 48 women in the Pacific Northwest. Ridgway specifically targeted sex workers because "they were easy to pick up without being noticed" and "would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing." He told police, "I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing prostitutes." This horrific statement reveals how stigma renders sex workers disposable in the public imagination and how this dehumanization enables violence. Whore stigma manifests in numerous ways: in media portrayals that reduce sex workers to stereotypes; in the legal system that treats violence against sex workers as inevitable rather than criminal; in health research that frames sex workers as "vectors of disease" rather than people deserving care; and in the loss of jobs, housing, and child custody that many face when their sex work becomes known. Former teacher Melissa Petro, who was fired after writing an essay mentioning her past escort work, discovered that even anti-prostitution women's groups wouldn't defend her right to employment. For sex workers, navigating this stigma means carefully managing disclosure. They may compartmentalize different aspects of their lives not out of shame but as protection against discrimination and violence. This necessary discretion should not be misinterpreted as deception. As author and former call girl Tracy Quan noted, the value of privacy has only increased in the information age, complicating earlier political strategies of "coming out" as sex workers. The insidious nature of whore stigma is that it positions sex workers as perpetually working, perpetually available, and perpetually sexualized - even when they're not on the job. This denies them full personhood and citizenship. Breaking free from this stigma requires not just legislative change but a fundamental shift in how society values women's sexuality, labor, and bodily autonomy. It demands recognizing that the stigma and violence faced by sex workers, not sex work itself, constitute the primary harms that require addressing.

Chapter 6: The Rescue Industry: How Saviors Perpetuate Harm

A powerful "rescue industry" has emerged around sex work, comprised of governments, NGOs, journalists, and self-styled heroes who claim to save sex workers from exploitation. This industry derives value from producing "awareness" about trafficking and prostitution, generating funding, media attention, and careers for those positioned as rescuers. Despite humanitarian rhetoric, these interventions often result in arrests, detention, and abuse of the very people they claim to help. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof exemplifies this approach, live-tweeting brothel raids in Cambodia and positioning himself as a savior while exposing women to public scrutiny without their consent. This follows a colonial tradition dating back to figures like William T. Stead, whose sensationalist reporting on the "white slave trade" in 1880s London sparked moral panic despite scant evidence. Then as now, such exposés lead to harsher laws and increased policing rather than improved conditions for sex workers. The damage caused by rescue operations is well-documented. In Cambodia, following pressure from the US government to crack down on prostitution as a condition for foreign aid, police conducted brutal raids on brothels. Sex workers were illegally detained in "rehabilitation centers," where human rights organizations documented severe abuses: beatings, sexual assault, denial of medical care, and at least three deaths in custody. As the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers reported, "If the sex workers standing in doorways in Phnom Penh's red-light district looked out on the street with fear, it could be just as likely from the prospect of rescue as due to any customer." The rescue narrative relies on simplistic assumptions that no woman would willingly sell sex and that sex workers lack education and skills for "decent" work. This ignores economic realities - many Cambodian sex workers had previously worked in garment factories but left due to low wages. The APNSW logo, a sewing machine with a red circle and slash through it, highlights this criticism of "rehabilitation" programs that offer factory work as the only alternative. Sex workers' own demands for rights and improved working conditions are dismissed in favor of forced "rehabilitation." The rescue industry thrives on producing and controlling the image of the suffering prostitute. Anti-trafficking campaigns feature sexualized images of women in chains or positioned as merchandise, ironically reproducing the same objectification they claim to oppose. These representations focus on individual victims rather than structural factors that create vulnerability, allowing rescuers to position themselves as heroes without addressing systemic issues of poverty, migration restrictions, and labor exploitation. Most perniciously, rescue rhetoric frames all sex work as trafficking, erasing the distinction between forced labor and consensual adult work. The US government's anti-prostitution pledge, which requires foreign aid recipients to oppose prostitution, has had devastating consequences globally. It has diverted resources from evidence-based HIV prevention programs, empowered police to target vulnerable communities, and silenced sex workers' organizations advocating for rights-based approaches. The fundamental problem with the rescue industry is not its stated goal of helping victims of exploitation, but its refusal to listen to and respect the agency, experiences, and demands of sex workers themselves.

Chapter 7: Building Solidarity: Sex Worker Movements and Intersectional Resistance

Sex worker movements have evolved from their origins in the 1970s into complex, intersectional networks of resistance. The early organizations - COYOTE in the United States, founded in 1973, and the occupation of Saint-Nizier Church in Lyon, France in 1975 - emerged alongside other liberation movements of their era. These pioneers recognized connections between sex workers' struggles and broader feminist issues, with early slogans like "When prostitutes win, all women win" highlighting their shared stakes in combating gender-based discrimination and violence. These movements have never been monolithic. Sex workers organize across multiple identities and issues - in LGBTQ movements, racial justice organizing, harm reduction work, prison abolition, migrants' rights, and labor unions. Transgender activists like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, key figures in gay liberation history, founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970 to support transgender sex workers facing police harassment and economic marginalization. Today's movements continue this intersectional approach, recognizing that criminalization disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable: transgender women, people of color, migrants, and youth. Sex worker organizing has consistently prioritized concrete material needs over abstract moral debates. When the International AIDS Conference returned to the United States in 2012, sex workers protested the travel ban that prevented them from attending, highlighting how anti-prostitution policies undermine public health. In New York, trans Latina women testified at community meetings about police profiling through stop-and-frisk practices that targeted them as presumed sex workers whether they were working or not. Projects like PERSIST Health provide critical services while building community power. Central to contemporary sex worker activism is the insistence that violence against sex workers comes not from sex work itself but from criminalization, stigma, and social exclusion. As sex worker Kitty Carr explains: "When people scream about how empowering sex work is, they are reacting directly to whorephobia... Sex work can indeed be empowering. But that is not the point. Money is the fucking point." This clarity refocuses attention from debates about whether sex work is inherently good or bad to concrete demands for rights, safety, and economic justice. True solidarity with sex workers means directing support toward challenging the institutions that harm them rather than attempting to rescue or reform individual workers. It means recognizing that sex workers' consent matters in policy discussions just as much as in their work. It means understanding that the stigma that marks sex workers as disposable is connected to broader systems that devalue certain lives based on gender, race, class, and sexuality. The movement's core insight remains revolutionary: sex workers are experts on their own lives, capable of defining their needs and fighting for their rights. When sex workers demand decriminalization, they're not asking for special treatment but for the removal of exceptional laws that target them. Their vision extends beyond legalization to a fundamental transformation in how society values bodily autonomy, labor rights, and human dignity. As the sex worker rights slogan affirms: "Rights, not rescue."

Summary

This penetrating examination reveals how the figure of the prostitute serves as a powerful site of social control, where anxieties about gender, sexuality, race, and economic order converge. The central insight emerges with clarity: the primary harms sex workers face come not from their work itself but from criminalization, stigma, and the denial of labor rights. By analyzing how policing practices, rescue industries, and even some feminist discourses contribute to these harms, we see how the "prostitute imaginary" functions to maintain boundaries between respectable and disreputable women, reinforcing broader systems of social control. The most profound contribution lies in shifting our gaze from sex workers themselves to the social, legal, and economic structures that shape their lives. Rather than asking whether sex work is inherently exploitative or empowering, we are challenged to examine how criminalization produces vulnerability, how stigma enables violence, and how rescue narratives deny agency. This reframing offers a path forward through solidarity rather than saviorism - recognizing sex workers as experts on their own lives, capable of articulating their needs and fighting for their rights. For readers concerned with justice, human rights, and the complexities of gender politics, this analysis provides essential tools for moving beyond simplistic debates to meaningful engagement with the material realities of sex workers' lives.

About Author

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Melissa Gira Grant

I’m a writer and freelance journalist covering sex, tech, and politics, in the streets and everywhere else.My latest book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso, 2014) challenges the myths about selling sex and those who make them.My reporting and commentary appears in The Nation, Wired, The Atlantic, Glamour, The Guardian, In These Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, The American Prospect, Reason, Slate, Jezebel, and Valleywag, among other publications, and I’m a contributing editor at Jacobin.

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