Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women


Alexa Albert - 2001
    Having worked with homeless prostitutes in Times Square, Albert was intimate with human devastation cause by the sex trade, and curious to see if Nevada’s brothels offered a less harmful model for a business that will always be with us. The Mustang Ranch has never before given an outsider such access, but fear of AIDS was hurting the business, and the Ranch was eager to get publicity for its rigorous standards of sexual hygiene. Albert was drawn into the lives of the women of the Mustang Ranch, and what began as a public-health project evolved into something more intimate and ambitious, a six-year study of the brothel ecosystem, its lessons and significance. The women of the Mustang Ranch poured their stories out to Albert: how they came to be there, their surprisingly deep sense of craft and vocation, how they reconciled their profession with life on the outside. Dr. Albert went as far into this world as it is possible to go — some will say too far — including sitting in on sessions with customers, and the result is a book that puts an unforgettable face on America’s maligned and caricatured subculture.From the Hardcover edition.

Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality


Gail Dines - 2010
    She attends industry conferences, interviews producers and performers, and speaks to hundreds of men and women each year about their experience with porn. Students and educators describe her work as "life changing."In Pornland—the culmination of her life's work—Dines takes an unflinching look at porn and its affect on our lives. Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it's no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. But, as Dines shows, today's porn is strikingly different from yesterday's Playboy. As porn culture has become absorbed into pop culture, a new wave of entrepreneurs are creating porn that is even more hard-core, violent, sexist, and racist. To differentiate their products in a glutted market, producers have created profitable niche products—like teen sex, torture porn, and gonzo—in order to entice a generation of desensitized users.Going from the backstreets to Wall Street, Dines traces the extensive money trail behind this multibillion-dollar industry—one that reaps more profits than the film and music industries combined. Like Big Tobacco—with its powerful lobbying groups and sophisticated business practices—porn companies don't simply sell products. Rather they influence legislators, partner with mainstream media, and develop new technologies like streaming video for cell phones. Proving that this assembly line of content is actually limiting our sexual freedom, Dines argues that porn's omnipresence has become a public health concern we can no longer ignore.Going from the backstreets to Wall Street, Dines reveals how porn is affecting our lives and why its omnipresence is detrimental to our sexual freedom.

Spent


Antonia Crane - 2014
    She gets drugged, does enema shows, and unionizes the club. When she tries to quit and go to graduate school, her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Broke and broken, she returns to sex work, which leads to her arrest and a new resilience. Spent is a memoir about a woman’s journey through the sex industry, but it’s also a story of family, community, and our constant struggle against loneliness.

Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry


Frederique Delacoste - 1987
    Features the original stories of women in the life, including writings by Sapphire, Nina Hartley, and Joan Nestle.Updated for the Second Edition: * Sex Workers' response to AIDS * Latest information on the legal status of sex work in the United States, Europe, and Asia * Growth of the international prostitutes' rights movement * Bibliography, revised to reflect a decades’ worth of writing and publishing on sex work * Resources, including activist organizations and publications—many just a Web click away

$pread: The Best of the Magazine that Illuminated the Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution


Rachel Aimee - 2015
    This collection features enduring essays about sex work around the world, first-person stories that range from deeply traumatic to totally hilarious, analysis of media and culture, and fantastic illustrations and photos produced just for the magazine. The book also features the previously untold story of $pread and how it has built a wider audience in its posthumous years. What started as a community tool and trade magazine for the sex industry quickly emerged as the essential guide for people curious about sex work, for independent magazine enthusiasts, and for labor and civil rights activists.

Courtesans: Money, Sex and Fame in the Nineteenth Century


Katie Hickman - 2003
    In doing so they took control of their lives -- and those of other people -- and made the world do their will.Extremely accomplished, well-educated, and unusually literate, courtesans exerted an incredible influence as leaders of society. They were not received at court, but inhabited their own parallel world -- the demimonde -- complete with its own hierarchies, etiquette, and protocol. They were queens of fashion, linguists, musicians, accomplished at political intrigue, and, of course, possessors of great erotic gifts. Even to be seen in public with one of the great courtesans was a much-envied achievement.

Pimp State: Sex, Money, and the Future of Equality


Kat Banyard - 2016
    How society should respond to the rise of the sex trade is shaping up to be one of the Twenty-First Century's big questions. Should it be legal to pay for sex? Isn't it a woman's choice whether she strips for money? Could online porn warping the attitudes of a generation of boys? An increasingly popular set of answers maintains that prostitution is just work, porn is fantasy, demand is inevitable; so fully legalise the sex trade and it can be made safe. Kat Banyard contends that these are profoundly dangerous myths. Sexual consent is not a commodity, objectification and abuse are inherent to prostitution, and the sex trade poses a grave threat to the struggle for women's equality.Skilfully weaving together first-hand investigation, interviews and the latest research, Pimp State powerfully argues that sex trade myth-makers will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping


Elisabeth Eaves - 2002
    It continued with the realization that women’s bodies often gave them a strange power over men. As an adult, it became a fascination with professional sex workers, leading to a plunge into their world. Bare follows the author and her fellow dancers through Seattle strip clubs and bachelor parties, exploring in riveting detail Eaves’s own motivations and behavior, as well as those of her coworkers, as they make their way through the sometimes exhilarating, often disturbing world of stripping. This compelling, revealing memoir exposes the reader to that world behind the flashing lights and offers illuminating insights into the reasons women take up this work—and how it affects their identities and lives off the job.In its unstinting honesty, Bare demands that we take a closer look at the way sexuality is viewed in our culture; what, if anything, constitutes "normal" desire; the ethics of swapping money—or anything else—for sex; and how women and men navigate the perilous contradictions and double standards that make up today’s socio-sexual conversation.

Dark Cromwell Billionaire Brothers: A Dark Billionaire Romance Series


Zoey Grey - 2020
    All have an HEA and have never been released before.

Ordeal


Linda Lovelace - 1980
    Obedient Wife. Porn Slave. Deep Throat Was Only The Beginning… Linda Boreman was just twenty-one when she met Chuck Traynor, the man who would change her life. Less than two years later, the girl who wouldn't let her high school dates get past first base was catapulted to fame she could never have imagined in her wildest dreams--or worst nightmares. Linda Boreman of Yonkers, New York, had become Linda Lovelace, international adult film superstar. The unprecedented success of Deep Throat made porn popular with the mainstream and made Lovelace a household name. But nobody, from the A-list celebrities who touted the movie to the audiences that lined up to see it, knew the truth about what went on behind the scenes. Enslaved by the man who would eventually force her into marriage so that he could control her completely, Linda was beaten savagely with regularity, hypnotized, and raped. She was threatened with disfigurement and death. She was terrorized into prostitution at gun and knifepoint. She was forced to perform unspeakable perversions on film. She made Deep Throat under unimaginable duress. Years later, Linda would come out of hiding to relate her side of the story--a modern horror tale of humiliation, betrayal, and violence that would rock the porn industry and put its teller in fear for her life... Ordeal Linda Lovelace became a household name in 1972, when Deep Throat became the first pornographic movie ever to cross over into the mainstream. Due to the success of Deep Throat, she appeared in Playboy, Bachelor, and even Esquire between 1973 and 1974. Soon after, Lovelace joined in with anti-pornography feminists led by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and she testified before Attorney General Meese's Commission on Pornography in 1986. She died in Denver on April 22, 2002, due to severe injuries in a car accident.

The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure


Tristan Taormino - 2012
    This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world's most lucrative and growing industries. With original contributions by Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Buck Angel, and more, The Feminist Porn Book updates the debates of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women's movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and other minorities produce power and pleasure.Tristan Taormino is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, sex educator, and feminist pornographer. She is the author of seven books including The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and Opening Up. She runs the adult film production company Smart Ass Productions and is an exclusive director for Vivid Entertainment.Celine Parreñas Shimizu is an associate professor of film and performance studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founding editor of Camera Obscura. She is the author of Straitjacket Sexualities and the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Award winning, The Hypersexuality of Race.Mireille Miller-Young is assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography (Duke University Press) examines African American women’s sex work in the porn industry.

Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk


Melinda Chateauvert - 2014
    Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers—not as helpless victims in need of rescue.   Even before transgender sex worker Sylvia Rivera threw a brick and sparked the Stonewall Riot in 1969, these trailblazing activists and allies challenged criminal sex laws and “whorephobia,” and were active in struggles for gay liberation, women’s rights, reproductive justice, union organizing, and prison abolition.   Although the multibillion-dollar international sex industry thrives, the United States remains one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution, and these discriminatory laws put workers at risk. In response, sex workers have organized to improve their working conditions and to challenge police and structural violence. Through individual confrontations and collective campaigns, they have pushed the boundaries of conventional organizing, called for decriminalization, and have reframed sex workers’ rights as human rights.  Telling stories of sex workers, from the frontlines of the 1970s sex wars to the modern-day streets of SlutWalk, Chateauvert illuminates an underrepresented movement, introducing skilled activists who have organized a global campaign for self-determination and sexual freedom that is as multifaceted as the sex industry and as diverse as human sexuality.

Black Queer Hoe


Britteney Black Rose Kapri - 2018
    In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS


Elizabeth Pisani - 2008
    With swashbuckling wit and fierce honesty, she dishes on herself and her colleagues as they try to prod reluctant governments to fund HIV prevention for the people who need it most—drug injectors, gay men, sex workers, and johns.Pisani chats with flamboyant Indonesian transsexuals about their boob jobs and watches Chinese streetwalkers turn away clients because their SUVs aren't nice enough. With verve and clarity, she shows the general reader how her profession really works; how easy it is to draw wrong conclusions from "objective" data; and, shockingly, how much money is spent so very badly. "Exhibit A": the 45 billion taxpayer dollars the Bush administration is committing to international AIDS programs.

Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire


Merri Lisa Johnson - 2002
    In these essays, headed up by editor Merri Lisa Johnson’s “Generation X Does the Sex Wars,” the writers confess their seemingly antifeminist longings and question what role feminist ideals should play in women’s sexuality. In “Spanking and the Single Girl,” Chris Daley wonders whether it’s acceptable to play the submissive role in an S/M exchange. In “Vulvodynia — How Porn Made Me a Woman,” Katinka Hooijer reveals her affection for porn and the inner conflict her predilection inspires. Sex toy store owner Sarah Smith declares a “dildo revolution” — for women and men, gay and straight — in her essay of the same name. Whatever the angle, the authors all champion a sex-positive feminism.