I was very excited to contribute to the recently published, highly awesome book Sexual Deviance and Society, published by Routledge and written by my colleague and friend Meredith G. F. Worthen.

I wrote a bit about the book here. Go take a look if you’d like more info about the volume.

As promised, I’m sharing the full text I wrote for the book in a series of posts. Here’s the abstract for Chapter 11 “Sex Work” — Enjoy!

(You can also read “What is Webcam?” right here and “What is a Sexpert?” right here)

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Chapter 11: Sex Work

Sex means many different things to many different people – physical satisfaction, spiritual actualization, community connection, and intense preoccupation (debilitating or otherwise) are only a few. And for some people, sex is work. Not “work” as in a chore, but “work” as in a job. For sex workers, sex and sex-related intimate behaviours are a component of their sex work occupations.

In this chapter, we will discuss what constitutes sex work and consider some sex work occupations, including various forms of prostitution and pornography production and performance, in detail. We will also explore sex work as it operates in wider cultures today, considering variable attributions of deviance and allocation of the sex worker dividend. Overall, this chapter considers a series of occupations that, in spite of their conventionally normalizing characteristics, are still considered one of the most universally deviant behaviours in contemporary society.

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