Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work: Summary & Key Insights

So much of what we think we know about sex work is mediated through images—through television dramas, newspaper exposés, NGO campaigns. In these portrayals, the sex worker is rarely a subject. She is an object, an emblem, a body through which other people tell their stories about morality or depravity or redemption. When the media frame a story about prostitution, they often position the journalist as the one who unveils suffering, who brings light to a social ‘problem.’ But the problem they are really solving is their own: the discomfort of confronting the reality that sex work is work.

I argue that this representational politics perpetuates stigma not by accident but by design. It keeps sex workers visible as symbols and invisible as people. When activists, policymakers, or feminists 'speak for' sex workers, they effectively silence them. The right to representation—to speak and to be heard on one’s own terms—is a political right. To deny sex workers that autonomy is to deny them full citizenship. I show how journalists rely on stereotypes—the ‘happy hooker,’ the ‘fallen woman,’ the ‘trafficking victim’—each of which tells us more about the storyteller than about sex work itself.

The alternative I propose begins with trust and listening. It demands that we do not extract narratives of trauma to validate our righteous outrage, but instead support sex workers in defining their own experiences. When we center sex workers’ voices, the story changes—from rescue to resistance, from spectacle to solidarity.

One of the most painful and enduring divisions in feminist politics centers on prostitution. For decades, feminist movements have struggled over whether sex work can ever be compatible with gender equality. Abolitionists claim that prostitution reproduces patriarchal domination; sex worker–led feminists argue that denying women the right to choose their work—including sex work—reproduces the same paternalism feminism was meant to oppose.

In *Playing the Whore*, I do not deny the realities of exploitation or coercion that can exist within the sex industry. But I insist on distinguishing those conditions from the act of selling sexual services itself. The problem is not sex work; it is poverty, misogyny, racism, and border regimes. When feminists join state and corporate powers in policing women's sexuality, they become enforcers of control rather than agents of liberation.

I situate sex work within a larger feminist history of labor struggle: the demand for bodily autonomy, the right to refuse unwanted labor, and the right to be free from state interference in private choices. Feminism cannot claim to advocate for women’s freedom while demanding that some women’s work be criminalized. Solidarity requires complexity—it means standing with sex workers even when their choices make us uncomfortable, because true freedom is measured not by conformity but by agency.