Sex Work

Sex work is an exchange of sexual services, performances, or products for material compensation, including direct and indirect sexual stimulation. It includes types of prostitution, exotic dancing, phone sex, and performing in adult films, as well as other potentially lesser-known forms of sex work. Sex work is often confused with human/sex trafficking. While they are similar, there are differences--the main one is that sex work is voluntary, while trafficking is not.

Most Read This Week Tagged "Sex Work"

A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten: A Memoir

Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction

Sex Work Books

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry

Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex

Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry

Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About a Changing Industry

The Kiss Quotient (The Kiss Quotient, #1)

Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper

Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)

Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk

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Lists

Vampire Strippers

2 books — 2 voters

Paulyanna International Rent-boy by Paul Douglas Lovell

Sex Worker Memoirs

198 books — 111 voters

Staff picks: Feminist books for International Women’s Day

42 books — 47 voters

Sex Work in YA

9 books — 4 voters

To Live Freely in This World by Chi Adanna Mgbako

Prejudice, Racism, and Tribalism by Anthony M. D'Agostino

Books at The Sex Workers' Pop-Up

33 books — 3 voters

In the Care of Magic by Robin Jo Margaret

One (or more) MC is a Sex Worker

33 books — 4 voters

Related Genres

Sexuality
Prostitution
Strippers

Featured News & Interviews

New Nonfiction to Read This Women's History Month

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Quotes Tagged “Sex Work”

“ Prostitution arrests are racist. They have always been racist. In 1866, San Francisco police arrested 137 women, 'virtually all Chinese'; the police boasted that they had 'expelled three hundred Chinese women.' In the 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union found that black women were seven times more likely to be arrested for prostitution-related offenses than white women. This disparity is no relic of the past: between 2012 and 2015, 85 percent of people charged with 'loitering for the purpo ...more ”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith

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“ Herein lies the material basis of trans femininity: a cis woman might be a sex worker and both proletarian and bourgeois standards for female respectability have long been defined in contrast to the figure of the sex worker, but trans femininity has been positioned by police and cultural producers in a categorical relation to sex work since the late nineteenth century. This is a feminist theoretical conclusion that trans feminine lives reveal and trans women politicize. ”
― Emma Heaney, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Volume 27)

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