the emojis are @maomi 's idea and i love it so much, it's soo funny 😭

me after finishing this book: honestly not the worst monster smut i've read but it definitely had a LOT of issues. I would have been way more understanding if this was a debut, but it wasn't. The author has published at least 3 books before this one...... I think @maomi did a really good review on this, so pls read it! She explains more eloquently than I do here :) My biggest issue was definitely the dialogue/language of the characters. This is something I struggle a lot in books in general, I really hate cringe interactions, and awkward writing. (I do think this is a bit of a generational thing. Slang and casual language changes so much between each generation, that what I find normal when talking, can definitely be seen as cringe to millenniums and vice-versa.) I also didn't really understand the context of the book, was it in a dystopian present/future, in a historical setting, idk.... (UPDATE: I made a forum post about this and @ohsunnyaa explained the context SO well! i definitely encourage people who were confused like me to check that out :) also, this was WAYYY too long, 500+ pages is craaazy. There was also a lot of things that contradicted themselves or didn't make sense, and it made the story unpleasant to me.

ps.: i just said also four times in a row......i swear i usually write better than this! [insert rant on me putting the blame on the book for my own lazy writing]

So so so so good! Layered, nuanced, and adds an imperative perspective to any intersectional feminist's framework.

Revolting Prostitutes is especially powerful in the way it refuses every simple binary. So often, feminist theorists talk about sex work as if it exists in a special position separate from everyday issues that affect them. Because of this, sex work can become a sort of political symbol, something that gets theorized about while the real sex workers get silenced, dismissed, and forgotten.

Instead of wasting time debating the false binary that sex work often gets reduced to (sex work is empowering and therefore a feminist act vs. sex work is degrading and therefore anti-feminist), the authors recontextualize sex work as an industry, a form of capital labor like any other, and rehumanize the sex workers who are harmed by misguided and oftentimes intentionally oppressive policy makers and activists.

This book majorly helped me see the limits of a feminism organized around harm. Obviously, feminism has to take harm seriously. But when harm becomes the center of the politics, rather than the starting point for imagining liberation, the movement can become obsessed with identifying victims and perpetrators instead of changing material conditions.

Since victims and perpetrators are defined by the state, the complexity of harm and survival under coercive systems is lost and flattened to "innocent vs. guilty". This inevitably turns the conversation back to carceral thinking focused on policing, incarceration, and punishment that disproportionately harms the most marginalized sex workers.

Smith and Mac assert: policing can never be the answer to patriarchal violence, because policing is an extension of the patriarchy. Giving more power to one patriarchal institution to fight another does not liberate anyone, and anti-prostitution law can never be progressive as long as it depends on state-sanctioned violence as the only solution.

Additionally, Smith and Mac pull apart this carceral thinking as the cause for the performative empathy that so clearly defines liberal feminist frameworks. People prove they care and prove that they are a feminist by displaying horror at harm and centering progress on condemnation of the perpetrator, rather than improving the lives of those most harmed, which becomes another form of mindless consumption that stalls progress.

Without deconstruction from carceral thinking, white and liberal feminists position themselves as "saviors", but never address what liberation means for those who don't fit into their victim/perpetrator binary.

Through careful argumentation and constant refusal of black-and-white thinking, Smith and Mac challenge the reader to think beyond the binary of good and bad, and assert that a liberatory feminism cannot stop at witnessing and punishing harm. It must also imagine and build the conditions that make liberation possible. To do so, it must include the most marginalized sex workers without moralization or insistence on respectability.

Beyond more abstract theory about the limits of mainstream feminism, Revolting Prostitutes offers a detailed breakdown of the differences between legalization and decriminalization. The difference seems simple on the surface, but in reality, it is politically massive. Especially interesting was the deep-dive into the way decriminalization and legalization are intentionally conflated to obfuscate the power sex workers are actually seeking.

As well, Smith and Mac discuss the differences between sex work and trafficking, and how weaponizing trafficking as an anti-prostitution gotcha disproportionately harms migrants and undocumented people. This nuanced separation of arguments firmly roots the book back into the material and exposes the latent white supremacy and carceral thinking in the most common anti-prostitution talking points.

This book is not just relevant to sex work or feminism. In its simplest terms, it is about how society manages people it considers "wrong". The title is a perfect example of the sentiment the authors are trying to exemplify with their line of thinking.

Revolting prostitutes will not be silent enough to be perfect victims, degraded enough to justify pity, or deferent enough to accept punishment disguised as saviorism or empowerment by neoliberal institutions. Due to their refusal of respectability, revolting prostitutes are treated as revolting; objectified, stigmatized, and dehumanized.

Revolting Prostitutes is materialist in the clearest sense of the word. The authors are not interested in whether or not sex work sends the "correct" feminist message, or in molding sex workers to fit the "correct" feminist image. Instead, it proves unquestionably that a feminist politic cannot be intersectional without centering the voices of those most affected, those who do not fit the mainstream feminist's image of "victim".

Smith and Mac prove that sex work exists uniquely at the intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, ableism, transphobia, and borders, so a feminism that wants to help sex workers without abolishing those systems of oppression and the institutions that uphold them can never truly succeed.

Once feminism has built a politics that can protect sex workers, including poor, migrant, racialized, trans, disabled, unhoused, drug-using, and criminalized sex workers, then it has built a politics capable of protecting people without requiring innocence or respectability first, and that is the kind of feminism worth fighting for. When prostitutes win, all women win.