In America, it is perhaps the highest sign of respect to argue that prostitutes should have the same rights as corporations: to labor free of government regulation or interference and to mine their bodies for every ounce of profit the flesh can yield. A prostitute’s humanity belongs in the same breath as her commercial value; she deserves protection not because she is a person or even a citizen but because of her economic contribution to society. Activists lobbying for the decriminalization of prostitution laud governments for moving past the antique notion of “morality” in favor of regarding sex work as plain old work. It’s a compelling and at times appealing argument, and Irish journalist Rachel Moran is having none of it.

Moran became a prostitute at the age of 15. (She prefers, and uses, the term “prostituted woman,” because “a woman can only be a prostitute when she has been prostituted by somebody else.”) Her book, Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution, is new to American readers but already well-known in Ireland, where it became a best-seller upon its publication in 2013. More recently, Moran played a pivotal role in legislation that Northern Ireland passed this June to criminalize the act of paying for sex—to penalize not the prostituted, but the prostitutors. Moran urges her readers to return to the question of morality and remain there no matter how uncomfortable it may become. It’s an argument that demands the reader see decency, not autonomy, as a society’s cardinal virtue, and that assumes the average woman will turn to prostitution not because she chooses to do so, but because she is utterly desperate and lacks any other viable choices.

Within an already brave book, this is a particularly brave argument. Moran is not just going against the libertarian arguments that have become relatively commonplace, but offering an implicit indictment of liberals’ unwillingness to discuss morality—their fear of acquiring a whiff of the “think of the children” mentality of the far right, which aligns God against everything that its constituents find upsetting (gay marriage, trans rights, feminism, sometimes even racial equality). By focusing her argument not on a nebulous discussion of economic freedom, but on her own moral convictions, Moran risks being dismissed as an embarrassing throwback, like the temperance advocates of the early twentieth century, who opposed alcohol because, they claimed, it was just plain wrong.

Dworkin seems an unlikely philosophical mentor amid the current, fun-loving feminist atmosphere.

If Moran has a model for this posture and the particular strain of feminism that it represents, it is the second-wave radical feminist Andrea Dworkin. Like Moran, Dworkin supported herself as a prostitute when she was a young woman (and also preferred the term “prostituted woman”). Dworkin seems an unlikely philosophical mentor amid the current, fun-loving feminist atmosphere. She functions now as a kind of ghost at the feast: serious, prophetic, furious, and seemingly both unwilling and unable to separate public policy from personal pain—the kind of figure that today’s sex-positive, feminism-is-for-everyone contingent has tried, at times desperately, to ignore. “When most people think of Andrea Dworkin,” Ariel Levy wrote in a New York magazine profile shortly after Dworkin’s death in 2005, “they think of two things: overalls and the idea that all sex is rape.” If Gloria Steinem offered American women reassurance that they could be feminists and live enviable lives—complete with relationships, sex, career success, and a pair of kicky aviators—then Dworkin could make the mere act of being born female seem like a death sentence. For women who look to feminism for a sense not just of purpose but of empowerment, Dworkin remains an alienating figure.

But Moran makes a powerful case that Dworkin was on to something. At the center of Dworkin’s strident and at times hyperbolic discourse, there was a core of profound idealism. If one woman was in pain, Dworkin’s arguments went, then all women were. If one woman was being abused, then it was the world’s duty to save her. Decades after Dworkin, Moran was in pain; Moran was being abused. And she had no one to save her but herself. Perhaps we should have taken Dworkin more seriously from the beginning.