by KATRINA FORRESTER
Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant (Verso, 136 pp, £8.99, March, ISBN 978 1 78168 323 1)
You’re at work. You’re good at your job and work long hours – your boss has little to complain about. You get on with your colleagues and have them over for dinner now and again, but your boss doesn’t like you seeing them outside work. He doesn’t like that you’re a member of a union either, and that you’ve told your colleagues about it. He starts harassing you. It begins with a sexually inappropriate comment here and there, and comments about your weight. It turns out he’s pressuring some of your colleagues to have sex with him. One day, after a night shift, your lift doesn’t turn up, so your boss drives you home. He threatens you: he’s watching you, he says, and if you don’t look out, something might happen; you’ve spent too long in your ‘comfort zone’ and someone needs to take you out of it. The harassment continues, until you quit. You want to file a complaint. It seems like a solid case. You’d win, right?
Not if you’re a sex worker. Unless, that is, you live in New Zealand, where sex work has been decriminalised. In February its Human Rights Tribunal published a landmark decision siding with a sex worker against her employer and brothel-owner. Advocacy and activist groups believe that such a victory would be impossible in the United States, France, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, the United Kingdom or the many other places where sex work is illegal or aspects of it are criminalised. Criminals can’t win harassment cases.
London Review of Books for more