Our feelings about womanhood and masculinity and money and power all coalesce when you talk about the prostitute. And the prostitute woman comes to symbolize the harms inflicted on all women under patriarchy, but almost paradoxically, that doesn't lead to solidarity with prostitutes, it leads to other feminist women arguing for criminalization of the sex industry, because they want to push it out of sight, because it symbolizes for them women's subjugation - and that's true - but policing doesn't solve that, policing makes it worse.

Writer and sex worker Molly Smith explores the politics of sex work - from the realities of a job on the precarious edges of capitalism, misogyny and the carceral state, to sex work's contested place within both feminism and social movements at large - and explains why sex workers, like all workers, need solidarity and liberation, not cops and punishment.

Molly is co-author of the new book Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights from Verso.