When Sex is Work

When Sex is Work: Hookers, Models, and Strippers in Popular Culture offers a non-academic survey of crucial questions around the idea of sex as work. In well researched but simple terms, this book discusses some of the many ways income may be earned through human sexuality. Because striptease is commonplace and readers might have some familiarity with it, the book is strongly focused on these events. Thus, sample chapters include "Exotic Dance, Show Clubs, and Striptease," "The Roots of Erotic Dance," "How Stripper Fashion Took Over The World," and "Stripper Fashion," which points out some ways the dancers test and break borders.

Although exotic dance is far from the only form of sex work on sale, examining the changes in such performances informs how we tend to see other professionals, such as models working in the pornography industry or in fashion and quid-pro-quo prostitutes. It's not clear if today's stripping, as a performance, is the result of earlier so-called "hooch coochi" dancers or a natural progression of Go-Go dancing, which emanated from the rock clubs of the 1960s and changed incrementally into contemporary adult dance. Meanwhile, a timeline provided in When Sex is Work: Hookers, Models, and Strippers in Popular Culture clearly suggests that the invention, proliferation, and eventual distribution of economical computing power on a mass scale destroyed the exotic and taboo nature of sexual matter. In addition, such emerging technology has provided the means for sex professionals to wrest control of the means of production from a pre-existing power elite, which was often defined by exploitative behavior, and reposition it into the hands of mass consumers and providers.