Melissa Gira Grant: 'I got into sex work to afford to be a writer'

Melissa Gira Grant, writer and former sex worker, photographed in New York for the Observer New Review by Mike McGregor.


American journalist Melissa Gira Grant wants to change the way we think about prostitution and sex work. Rather than dwelling on the "sex" part, Grant suggests we focus on "work". By doing so, she argues, sex workers become neither corrupters, nor victims who need rescuing, but workers who need access to healthcare, a safe work environment and protection from abuse and exploitation.

A former sex worker herself (she was one of the first "webcam girls"), Gira Grant, 36, believes it's possible to be anti-sex work but pro-sex workers' rights. She has written extensively about sex, politics, labour and technology for the Guardian, Glamour, Wired, Jezebel and the Washington Post, and published Take This Book, an ebook on the Occupy Wall Street People's Library, and Coming and Crying, an anthology of true stories about sex.

And now, just as prostitution is at the forefront of the news again with the proposed introduction to the UK of the Nordic model of criminalising clients and pimps instead of prostitutes, she is publishing her new book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.

Born in Boston, she studied comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts and is a graduate of the National Sexual Resource Centre's Institute on Sexuality, Health, and Inequality at San Francisco State University. Today she lives and blogs in Brooklyn.
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