Revolting Prostitutes is an eye-opening and necessary read for feminists. Written by UK sex workers, Molly Smith and Juno Mac, the book gives a global view of the industry from angles as diverse as the circumstances that lead women there. It champions sex workers’ demand for labour rights, while connecting their struggle to that of all workers under capitalism. Smith and Mac write not as third-party spectators, who usually exclude their subject from the conversation, but from the grassroots organising spaces of sex workers.
The book poses a question that cuts to the heart of the debate: Do you have to think prostitution is good in order to support sex workers’ rights? The authors’ answer is a resounding No. They reject the tired narratives dominating mainstream discussions – the “happy hooker” myth or “victim who must be rescued.” They refuse to accept the terms of debate set by liberal or carceral feminists and rebuff the loaded ethical judgements about whether sex work is liberatory.
It centres instead on sex work as work. And when its authors say “sex work is work,” they are not claiming it is good work. As they argue, all work under capitalism is exploitative. The book draws on the Wages for Housework tradition, recognising that all survival labour is devalued under capitalism. Sex work isn’t a separate category; it sits on a continuum with domestic work, care work, and other forms of reproductive labour that capitalism devalues.
By calling sex work what it is, they make clear that, right now, what sex workers need most is labour rights. The authors ask: what conditions make sex workers safer? What gives them some power in negotiations? What happens when criminal law is used to control their lives? That sex workers have been denied access to the labour movement and systematically denied their rights as workers is the central issue. Denying this is denying rights to people who need them most. The book makes explicit that people enter sex work when capitalism offers them no other options.
Smith and Mac insist that this struggle is inseparable from all struggles within the capitalist system: labour exploitation, misogyny, border regimes, ableism and white supremacy. The book demonstrates across multiple fronts that the fight for sex workers’ rights is a fight for the rights of all workers and all the oppressed.
The book demonstrates that Black women are arrested at disproportionately high rates. Black sex workers face the worst police violence and state neglect. In Norway they explain, “When you are Black, they take the Black women and leave the white man.” Criminalising sex work is a tool of racist state violence.
Interconnecting sex work and migration, Mac and Smith write, “There is no migrant solidarity without prostitute solidarity. Borders were invented to guard against her.” Migrant sex workers are doubly targeted for their line of work and their immigration status. They are subjected not only to exploitation and violence, but also deportation. Borders exist to control labour; defending migrant sex workers means defending all migrant workers. When we fight alongside her, we challenge the logic of borders themselves.
Driving home these intersecting oppressions, Smith and Mac state, “For as long as people continue to navigate the margins by selling sex, all the social issues affecting them are sex workers’ rights issues.”
Revolting Prostitutes details examples of these intersections. Medieval brothel workers formed guilds, and sex workers marched in San Francisco in 1917. They organised alongside and within the gay liberation movement in the 1970s.
Yet liberal feminism repeatedly fails sex workers by treating them as objects of rescue rather than as subjects of their own liberation. The authors argue that this reflects the class interests of a movement led by women who have more in common with their high-placed male counterparts than with working-class women.
The book examines various legal approaches pushed by mainstream feminists, and the harms that result. With no input from sex workers themselves, these models are guided by paternalism or outright disdain for those whom these laws are supposedly meant to protect. These models are:
• Full criminalisation, as practised in the United States, South Africa and Russia, targets sex workers, clients, and third parties. Workers cannot report violence. Police become the primary abusers.
• The Nordic model criminalises clients but not sellers. In practice, sex workers are still arrested, evicted, fined and deported. Instead of protecting sex workers, as claimed, the law punishes them. It makes life harder, which is the point.
• Legalisation, as in Germany and the Netherlands, creates a two-tier system. Some workers are regulated, while others are pushed deeper underground. The blog Tits and Sass wrote, “Legalisation serves the man.” It serves the state and the industry, not the worker. It creates the appearance of protection, while maintaining the structures of control and exploitation.
The authors call for full decriminalisation. This means no special criminal laws for sex work. It allows workers to organise for safety without being charged for brothel keeping. Street workers can work in visible areas with others instead of hiding. Employment law applies, so abuse can be reported without losing one’s job. Clients do not have to hide from police, which makes everyone safer.
This book exemplifies the nuanced analysis of socialist feminism. It argues for workers organising collectively at the grass roots against the carceral state, which punishes the poor. It does so without glorifying this labour as uniquely empowering. Socialist feminism stands with the most abused and criminalised, fighting for their safety now, while building a world where their labour is valued. The writers take on both carceral feminism and liberal sex-positive feminism, offering an alternative: Solidarity with sex workers in the fight for better working conditions. And solidarity in the broader struggle to overhaul social relations by changing the economic system through revolution. No longer commodified and with sexist, racist oppression gone, sex would be by choice and enjoyable. Revolting Prostitutes ends with this: “When prostitutes win, all women win.”
Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Worker’s Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac is published by Verso Press. It is available for $28 from the bookstore at Solidarity Salon, 113 Spring Street, Reservoir.
