Podcast Special: Sex work and the city

I sat down this week with the journalist and author Melissa Gira Grant and Kate D’Adamo of the Sex Workers Project for a frank conversation about the politics of commercial sex.

There’s a prevailing narrative in the public discourse that conflates sex work and human trafficking, to the detriment of both. As a result, it becomes impossible to address one without the other, even though they’re separate issues. The conversation is further polarized into a choice between opposing images of the empowered, high-end escort, or the heartbreaking 9-year-old sex slave, ignoring the broad reality of people within the sex trades. Somehow everyone in the middle gets lost, and I wanted to explore why. 

We also discussed the popular “end demand” model of criminalizing the buying, as opposed to the sale, of sex, and why it doesn’t work. In the end, there are no simple solutions, but that doesn’t mean we need to simplify the way we talk about such a complex issue. 

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