Sex Work
What do we mean when we call sex “work”? For sex worker activist Carol Leigh, who is credited with coining the term in the late 1970s, and for the activists and scholars who soon took it up, sex work was a destigmatizing term to describe the range of ways people exchange sexual services for money—full-service sex work / prostitution, professional BDSM, porn performance, erotic dance/stripping, and phone sex. New forms of sex work have emerged since, and today, “sex work” includes digital sexual labors such as webcam performance and paid app-based sexting. Leigh wanted a term that would bridge internal hierarchies and bring these workers together in the struggle against criminalization, violence, and social stigma. From the porn set to the street corner, workers could find common cause. Leigh wanted to avoid both euphemistic terms (such as escort and call girl) and the shaming ones weaponized by cops, scolds, criminologists, and doctors who treated sex workers as pathological curiosities. “Sex work,” Leigh says, “acknowledges the work we do rather than defines us by our status” (1997, 203). Leigh is not the first person to frame sex work as work. Sex workers, using many names for themselves and called many things...