Molly Crabapple
The Fight For Sex Worker’s Rights
Protesters at a rally for the decriminalization of sex work, New York City, February 2019; drawing by Molly Crabapple
Molly’s latest book review for “Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights” by Juno Mac and Molly Smith is out now in the New York Review of Books. The book is an in depth look at the discussion around sex workers rights, trafficking, and feminism from a global perspective. It is available now from Verso Books.
“Mac and Smith delineate the problems of sex workers in all their prosaic complexity. “A sex worker may describe a bad experience as a labour-rights violation, sexual abuse, or simply a shitty day at work,” they write. Against the stereotypical Happy Hooker, they talk about the “unhappy hooker,” forced, like so many other workers, to do work she loathes in order to earn enough money to survive, and “who reminds us that capitalism cannot be magicked away” by a jail cell or a self-help book for aspiring Girlbosses—and that capitalism reigns most brutally in criminalized markets. Precisely because the safety net is weakest for marginalized people, they are more likely to become sex workers”
Take a look at Molly’s review, “Its Not About Sex”
Molly Smith and Juno Mac