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Sex Work in Popular Culture
Sex Work in Popular Culture delves into provocative movies, TV shows, and documentaries about sex work produced in the last decade – a period of debate and change around the meaning of sex work in North American society. From Oscar-winning films to viral YouTube videos, and from indie documentaries to hit series – many of which are made by women – the book reveals how sex work is being recognized as real work and an issue of human rights. Lauren Kirshner shares how popular culture has responded by producing the dynamic new figure of a sex worker who challenges tropes and promotes understanding of the key issues shaping sex work. The book draws on labour and feminist theory, film history, current news, and popular culture, all within the context of neoliberal capitalism and the rise of transactional intimate labour. Kirshner takes us from erotic dance clubs to porn sets, illuminating the professional lives of erotic dancers, massage parlour workers, webcam models, call girls, sex surrogates, and porn performers. Probing how progressive popular culture challenges stereotypes, Sex Work in Popular Culture tells the story of sex work as labour and how the screen can show us the world’s oldest profession in a new light.
- GenresNonfiction
400 pages, Paperback
Published July 12, 2024
About the author
Lauren Kirshner
4 books20 followersNamed "Toronto's Best Emerging Author" by NOW Magazine, Lauren Kirshner's debut novel Where We Have to Go was a finalist for the 2010 City of Toronto Book Award and called "a very strong original debut" by The Globe and Mail. The story of an exceptional girl's coming-of-age in 1990s Toronto, Where We Have to Go was published in translation in The Netherlands and Germany, and is forthcoming in the US in 2012.
Lauren’s other writing, including features, arts reviews, and poems have appeared in newspapers and literary journals across Canada including ELLE, Chatelaine,Now, The Hart House Review, and Exile. Her creative non-fiction chapter “Twenty Poems for Claudia” appeared in the paper documentary I Live Here, published by Pantheon in 2008, and was called "beautifully composed" by rabble.ca. You can read more about Lauren's writing at www.lauren-kirshner.com.
Lauren is a graduate of The University of Toronto’s Masters of English in the Field of Creative Writing, where she was mentored by Margaret Atwood.
Lauren was born in Toronto, where she continues to live and write. She is currently at work on her second novel.
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September 11, 2025“Indeed, within media studies the intersection of work, class, and sex continues to be a neglected area, and scholarship as it relates to sex work has been largely concentrated in ethnographies of call girls, erotic dancers, webcam models, and sex surrogates. Ethnographies illuminate the realities of sexual labour, but an examination of how popular culture represents this work is needed.” <———
(if you’ve read Molly Smith and Juno Mac’s Revolting Prostitutes, a lot of this will be familiar wrt sex work being a labor issue and also promoting decrim, so def check out that book, too!)
Kirshner examines how sex work is portrayed in popular film, television, and documentaries theorizing people learn about sex work *from* popular culture - which can often be insensitive to the lives and labor of sex workers. Kirshner also shares quotes from sex workers she’s spoken with about these cultural perceptions and how they’ve changed over the years. I do take some issue with how "male gaze" was used incorrectly throughout - strange considering this book is about film!
(recommended by Beth - thank you Beth!)
(if you’ve read Molly Smith and Juno Mac’s Revolting Prostitutes, a lot of this will be familiar wrt sex work being a labor issue and also promoting decrim, so def check out that book, too!)
Kirshner examines how sex work is portrayed in popular film, television, and documentaries theorizing people learn about sex work *from* popular culture - which can often be insensitive to the lives and labor of sex workers. Kirshner also shares quotes from sex workers she’s spoken with about these cultural perceptions and how they’ve changed over the years. I do take some issue with how "male gaze" was used incorrectly throughout - strange considering this book is about film!
(recommended by Beth - thank you Beth!)
December 19, 2025
I read this book not long after reading Russell Campbell’s Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema, so I couldn’t help but compare the two of them. One of the questions I had in the back of my mind while reading Campbell’s book was how the portrayal of prostitutes compared with other professions in the sex industry. The title of this book, written nearly twenty years after Campbell’s, promised to address this and more.
Alas, it both does and does not. The majority of the book is focused on non-prostitute sex workers, and therefore does reveal the differences and similarities with how they are approached in media, although most of the comparisons have to be done by the reader, as Kirshner is more concerned with the bigger picture. However, popular culture is limited almost entirely to American-based screen media (and its discussion of the reality of sex work is also heavily American-centric, despite Kirshner not even being American) like movies, T.V shows, and documentaries (though I was tickled by the paragraph at the end about HunieCam Studios) that the author feels portrays sex work in a way that lends support to the decriminalization stance. There is also almost no discussion of male sex workers. As such, it is very selective as a book about “sex work in popular culture”. It also feels a tad dishonest– Campbell’s ultimate views on prostitution may be that of a system based on male supremacy, but his study did not only discuss films that agreed with him. Additionally, since the chapters discuss only a limited amount of media, with some using only one movie/show/documentary as a representative, the selectiveness feels even more incomplete.
Despite approaching sex work through a labor lens, there are several labor-related topics that Kirshner does not explore, either at all or in depth. Are there, for instance, unfortunate implications in a vision of labor rights that aligns with the interests of the industry (as opposed to the worker) and allows third parties to legally benefit from the labor of others? How should the labor of sexual services be assessed in comparison to non-sexual service work, like being a cashier, that unlike sexual services are actually related to something that is necessary to live (i.e food)? How can one talk of “teen sex workers”, as Kirshner refers to the protagonists of one of the films she discusses, when teenagers cannot legally consent to sex? This betrays, to me at least, a lack of curiosity about sex work as labor beyond the fact that pole dancing is hard and don’t we all do things to survive?
Although Kirshner argues that the “new sex worker” largely came about because of the economic and social transformations of the 2000s, I feel she overstates the case for the novelty of the sex-work-as-labor approach: precedents for this can be seen in the characters archetypes Campbell calls “Comrade” and “Businesswoman”, and high-profile movies like Trading Places employed it. On the subject of not knowing enough about the past, Kirshner’s statement that “before the invention of the spinning wheel in the thirteenth century, women had three options for survival: become a wife, a nun, or a sex worker” is more reflective of Internet memes than the reality of women’s labor throughout history, no matter which time period (Kirshner is not clear which one she’s talking about). Even more baffling is the claim in the chapter about sex surrogates that not only promotes both the very much contested concept of sacred prostitution and the widely debunked prehistoric matriarchy theory, but says that reverence of sex workers’ alleged healing powers were thwarted by “religion”, by which she seems to mean Christianity, even though she begins the paragraph by situating this utopia in “the Stone Age, (where) women were seen as the incarnations of goddesses and took on roles as priestesses”, and speaks positively of hetairai in ancient Greece, a religious society; Kirshner also ignores how many “sex workers” in ancient Greece were slaves.
Kirshner’s dogmatic stance on what a good portrayal of sex workers looks like leads her to misrepresent her opponents. The broadly defined liberal feminists, who seem to be the whipping girls of every other sect of feminism, are presented as viewing sex work as purely good, when many of them adopt a neutral stance and support decriminalization, both views that Kirshner seems to think are unique to her view. The so-called “prohibitionist feminists” (they call themselves abolitionists), however, get hit with this the worst, despite the fact that some of Kirshner’s own points are quite similar to those women’s views. Although most of the abolitionists' writings discuss only prostitution, Kirshner keeps bringing up their allegedly inaccurate views when talking about, for instance, webcam models. Somebody unfamiliar with feminist debates on the sex industry would get the impression from Kirshner’s summary that the abolitionist movement is composed entirely of privileged women who know nothing about sex work, erasing the activism and experiences of former sex workers turned abolitionists like Huschke Mau and Rachel Moran, the former of whom even worked in a full decriminalization country; it was kind of funny how Kirshner criticized movies for not showing sex worker anger, when women like Mau and Moran are quite angry indeed. I was particularly annoyed by how Kirshner kept using Andrea Dworkin as a boogeyman, when she actually was a prostitute for a time and her writings, while overwrought, are informed by her experience; if we are meant to, as Kirshner believes, “centre sex worker voices as ‘legitimate sources of knowledge about their work’”, we should thus give Dworkin’s voice more credence than that of the university professor denigrating her. While she claims many times to hate neoliberalism, Kirshner’s complaints that radical feminist condemnations of the sex industry victimize sex workers and is the successor of Victorian views of women as either good or bad is rhetorically very similar to the neoliberal worldview that considers it inappropriate to call somebody a victim of anything other than a crime or natural disaster, since this is apparently an insult to that person’s “agency” and “humanity”.
Overall, while I did get some of the new insights I wanted, this is an unsatisfying and sometimes frustrating book that I cannot recommend as anything other than a decriminalization pamphlet.
Alas, it both does and does not. The majority of the book is focused on non-prostitute sex workers, and therefore does reveal the differences and similarities with how they are approached in media, although most of the comparisons have to be done by the reader, as Kirshner is more concerned with the bigger picture. However, popular culture is limited almost entirely to American-based screen media (and its discussion of the reality of sex work is also heavily American-centric, despite Kirshner not even being American) like movies, T.V shows, and documentaries (though I was tickled by the paragraph at the end about HunieCam Studios) that the author feels portrays sex work in a way that lends support to the decriminalization stance. There is also almost no discussion of male sex workers. As such, it is very selective as a book about “sex work in popular culture”. It also feels a tad dishonest– Campbell’s ultimate views on prostitution may be that of a system based on male supremacy, but his study did not only discuss films that agreed with him. Additionally, since the chapters discuss only a limited amount of media, with some using only one movie/show/documentary as a representative, the selectiveness feels even more incomplete.
Despite approaching sex work through a labor lens, there are several labor-related topics that Kirshner does not explore, either at all or in depth. Are there, for instance, unfortunate implications in a vision of labor rights that aligns with the interests of the industry (as opposed to the worker) and allows third parties to legally benefit from the labor of others? How should the labor of sexual services be assessed in comparison to non-sexual service work, like being a cashier, that unlike sexual services are actually related to something that is necessary to live (i.e food)? How can one talk of “teen sex workers”, as Kirshner refers to the protagonists of one of the films she discusses, when teenagers cannot legally consent to sex? This betrays, to me at least, a lack of curiosity about sex work as labor beyond the fact that pole dancing is hard and don’t we all do things to survive?
Although Kirshner argues that the “new sex worker” largely came about because of the economic and social transformations of the 2000s, I feel she overstates the case for the novelty of the sex-work-as-labor approach: precedents for this can be seen in the characters archetypes Campbell calls “Comrade” and “Businesswoman”, and high-profile movies like Trading Places employed it. On the subject of not knowing enough about the past, Kirshner’s statement that “before the invention of the spinning wheel in the thirteenth century, women had three options for survival: become a wife, a nun, or a sex worker” is more reflective of Internet memes than the reality of women’s labor throughout history, no matter which time period (Kirshner is not clear which one she’s talking about). Even more baffling is the claim in the chapter about sex surrogates that not only promotes both the very much contested concept of sacred prostitution and the widely debunked prehistoric matriarchy theory, but says that reverence of sex workers’ alleged healing powers were thwarted by “religion”, by which she seems to mean Christianity, even though she begins the paragraph by situating this utopia in “the Stone Age, (where) women were seen as the incarnations of goddesses and took on roles as priestesses”, and speaks positively of hetairai in ancient Greece, a religious society; Kirshner also ignores how many “sex workers” in ancient Greece were slaves.
Kirshner’s dogmatic stance on what a good portrayal of sex workers looks like leads her to misrepresent her opponents. The broadly defined liberal feminists, who seem to be the whipping girls of every other sect of feminism, are presented as viewing sex work as purely good, when many of them adopt a neutral stance and support decriminalization, both views that Kirshner seems to think are unique to her view. The so-called “prohibitionist feminists” (they call themselves abolitionists), however, get hit with this the worst, despite the fact that some of Kirshner’s own points are quite similar to those women’s views. Although most of the abolitionists' writings discuss only prostitution, Kirshner keeps bringing up their allegedly inaccurate views when talking about, for instance, webcam models. Somebody unfamiliar with feminist debates on the sex industry would get the impression from Kirshner’s summary that the abolitionist movement is composed entirely of privileged women who know nothing about sex work, erasing the activism and experiences of former sex workers turned abolitionists like Huschke Mau and Rachel Moran, the former of whom even worked in a full decriminalization country; it was kind of funny how Kirshner criticized movies for not showing sex worker anger, when women like Mau and Moran are quite angry indeed. I was particularly annoyed by how Kirshner kept using Andrea Dworkin as a boogeyman, when she actually was a prostitute for a time and her writings, while overwrought, are informed by her experience; if we are meant to, as Kirshner believes, “centre sex worker voices as ‘legitimate sources of knowledge about their work’”, we should thus give Dworkin’s voice more credence than that of the university professor denigrating her. While she claims many times to hate neoliberalism, Kirshner’s complaints that radical feminist condemnations of the sex industry victimize sex workers and is the successor of Victorian views of women as either good or bad is rhetorically very similar to the neoliberal worldview that considers it inappropriate to call somebody a victim of anything other than a crime or natural disaster, since this is apparently an insult to that person’s “agency” and “humanity”.
Overall, while I did get some of the new insights I wanted, this is an unsatisfying and sometimes frustrating book that I cannot recommend as anything other than a decriminalization pamphlet.
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