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Forty-four years ago today, more than one hundred sex workers occupied the Saint-Nizier church in Lyon, France, for eight days in order to protest fines and police reprisals that were forcing them into increasingly unsafe working conditions.
June 2 has been celebrated as International Whores’ Day ever since, with activists calling attention to the exploitative conditions that sex workers endure. Unfortunately, these conditions haven’t changed much since 1975: in 2018, President Trump signed into law a controversial set of bills that criminalize online solicitation and effectively force sex workers back onto unsafe streets.
To recognize International Whores’ Day, we have gone into our archive to select pieces that put sex workers—and sex—front and center. Starting off are excerpts from Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights and Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice, and then a host of essays that explore sex education, the sex offender registry, and cyborg (as well as alien) sex.
Debate over Title IX affirmative consent standards has assumed that consent is the best basis for a feminist sexual politics. But what if it isn’t?
Fiction
“Agent Probii’s first days as undercover agent were particularly disconcerting because within the city each resident spoke a different language.”
How sex with robots became safer—and better—than sex with actual men.
Under capitalism, you don’t have to love your job to want to keep it.
Moralistic efforts to guard against online predation do more harm than good.
Sex work may be a profession, but that doesn't make it a source of empowerment.
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Philosopher William MacAskill contends that humanity’s long-term survival matters more than preventing short-term suffering and death. His arguments are shaky.
In her new book, Danish poet Olga Ravn writes with open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations.
Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.
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