"[C]onversations that people not engaged in sex work have about it tend to involve a stew of unspoken anxieties about not just sex but migration, disease, race, class, and the roles of women."

"The living, human sex worker gets blotted out by the cultural figure that journalist Melissa Gira Grant has dubbed the 'prostitute imaginary.' This mythological creature is both corruptrix and release valve for male corruption. She is the temptress locked away to toil in the Magdalene Laundries, the disease spreader, the frivolous blonde with her Louboutin shoe collection, the soul broken by too much sex. And for many feminists, she is the ultimate example of female victimhood—in activist Dorchen Leidholdt’s words, a 'de-individualized, de-humanized' proxy for 'generic woman…. She stands in for all of us, and she takes the abuse that we are beginning to resist.' Once a sex worker becomes a metaphor, her material conditions cease to matter. She is an object for study, ministration, and control.... Perhaps no prostitute archetype raises so much lucrative concern as the trafficked girls.... Crusaders against trafficking can blur easily into persecutors of immigrants...."

A small snippet of "It’s Not About Sex" from the New York Review of Books.