sex worker

this term for a woman or a man who works in the sex industry was apparently coined by sex worker-activist Carol Leigh in 1978 (Margo St. James, in Bitch, 2013). "A sex worker might work on a pay-telephone fantasy line, dance topless, strip, perform in simulated or real sex shows, sell sexual services to individuals, be a sexual surrogate, or work as an explicit sex demonstrator" (Sallie Tisdale, Talk Dirty to Me) or in "massage, exotic dance, out-call, Lesbian videos, hard-core magazines" (Sue Grafton, "K" Is for Killer). Gloria Steinem (in The Humanist 2012) says, "If someone wants to be called a sex worker, I call them a sex worker. But there is a problem with that term, because while it was adopted in goodwill, traffickers have taken it and essentially said, 'Okay, if it's work like any other, somebody has to do it.' In Nevada, there was a time when you couldn't get unemployment unless you tried sex work first. The same was true in Germany. So the state became a procurer because of the argument that sex is work like any other. This is not a good thing. We have to be clear that you have the right to sell your own body but nobody has the right to sell anybody else's body. No one has that right." Since its first appearance, "sex worker" has been debated: does it confer dignity on people who do in fact work hard to make a living or is it a euphemism disguising the egregious nature and effects of such work? In Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers, Bernadette Barton uses the metaphor of the Möbius strip—a length of paper twisted and then fastened at the ends so the inside is continuous with the outside—to describe the relationship between empowerment and exploitation in sex work. See also prostitute, human trafficking.