A sex-work-positive reading list, inspired by Anora .
Something’s happening with sex and work this season, culturally-speaking. On screen, Sean Baker’s Anora, a loving profile of an escort on the come-up, is gathering Oscar buzz. On the page, Sally Rooney’s latest, Intermezzo, features a character balancing an IRL love affair with a steady stream of photo-sharing employment. And in the realm of unprofessional but enthusiastic sex positivity, the novelist R.O. Kwon—among others—has made waves this year for beautifully depicting a consuming desire in her latest novel, Exhibit.
It’s alway nice to see our basically puritanical culture praise odes to the messy, miraculous, and sometimes commercially-complicated gamut that is human sexuality. Inspired by the wind in the air, here are a few new and recent(ish) books that explore, de-stigmatize, celebrate, contextualize, or just plain chronicle the work of sex.
Charlotte Shane, An Honest Woman
As Becca Rothfeld wrote in The Washington Post, An Honest Woman is “a corrective to incurious narratives in which sex work is assumed to be nothing but an unrelenting debasement.” In its pages, Shane traces her interest in desire from early teenage thrall to mid-20s confidence. The prose from this seasoned essayist is assured and probing, and this memoir contains multitudes. Rothfeld called it “part autobiography, part anthropological investigation and part feminist tract.”
Brittany Newell, Soft Core
This new novel, recommended by my colleague Molly Odintz, is still on the horizon. (You can preorder it, though. Or find it in bookstores next February!) A madcap fever dream tracing a night club dancer’s search for her MIA boyfriend through the streets of San Francisco, this novel—from the writer, performer, and professional dominatrix Brittany Newell—swings for the fences. Our hero is Baby Blue, a stripper turned “seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike.”
Trusted brain Kristin Arnett called this book “a slippery, captivating pleasure,” and noted its tender engagement with the “underground.”
Emily Witt, Future Sex
Okay, okay. This book is sorta a cheat addition, in that it doesn’t directly engage sex work. But Witt’s writing about unruly lust has been on my mind in light of her just released follow-up memoir, Health and Safety. In Future Sex, The New Yorker writer chronicles a headfirst quest into an adventurous, radical sex life. She documents enthusiastic forays into BDSM, orgasmic meditation, web-cam connecting, and porn with a journalist’s clarity, and in so doing, dignifies desire for its own sake.
Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling
Here’s another California novel that bothers to depict a sex worker’s interiority with frankness, compassion, and minimal sentimentality. Following Kiara Johnson, a 17 year old Oakland girl, as she experiences “a downward spiral of last resorts” that leave her in the center of a sex-trafficking ring, this book is unflinching. (The events that befall Johnson are inspired by a true story.) But Mottley manages to convey a gritty circumstance without sanctimony.
Care warning: this one does include scenes of fairly graphic abuse.
Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes
For a primer on the political landscape that sex workers face, please do thyself a favor and pick up this readable dialectic. In this book, Molly Smith and Juno Mac make thoughtful, sound arguments for the rights of sex workers, and lay out how the current laws are so harmful. Mac is a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Open University (SWOU), a sex worker-led, UK-based collective.
Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
In this wide-ranging, beautifully written book, the British academic Katherine Angel “spans science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism” to explode cultural assumptions about women’s desire. This is a chewy, rewarding examination that finely balances theory with personal reflection.
For a good introduction, listen to this brilliant conversation betwixt Angel and fan/fellow author, Olivia Laing.
Susie Bright, Big Sex Little Death
Susie Bright—the sex educator, radical, and co-founder and editor of the queer feminist magazine On Our Backs—has lived a life. This bright and canny memoir from an architect of the sex-positive movement is a funny, erotic reflection of just that, tracing the author’s coming-into-body.
On this memoir’s release, The Los Angeles Review of Books praised the way Bright “treats sexual freedom and sexual speech as neither degradation nor liberation, but as litmus tests for a liberal society.”
Amia Sriniasan, The Right to Sex
Finally, and for fear of veering too far afield of the prompt and into Theory Corridor, Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is a book I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. This muscular, nuanced collection—built around the viral, titular essay—engages questions of power and consent in a way that doesn’t foreclose or diminish real human desire. Srinivasan is sharp on the limits and potentialities of a certain kind of feminist analysis, and she accounts for how modern life is shaping the way we think about sex.
