The authors spend the first couple of chapters making it clear what they're not going to be doing. This won't be a book about what sex workers symbolise, we're told, and nor will it amplify empowerment narratives or stories in which women in sex work have betrayed their gender.

While this seems like a lot up front, what it makes space for is more than worth the effort. Taking sex work not as an aberration but as part of a series of nested systems, Mac and Smith focus their attentions on the material reality of sex work around the world. Workers rights, the violence of of "the war on drugs", social security, the prison industrial complex, the brutality of borders - Revolting Prostitutes makes the case that we cannot meaningfully consider sex work without addressing all of this and more. That it takes such a rounded, intersectional approach while never avoiding the overwhelmingly gendered nature of sex work is particularly commendable.

The chapters on different legal approaches to prostitution (full criminalisation, the Nordic model, legalisation, decriminalisation) are comprehensive, and while the whole book is an argument in favour of decriminalisation the concluding sections don't pretend that this will make all the troubles experienced by sex workers magically disappear. If anything, the climactic call for solidarity is all the more convincing because of the many layers of difficulty identified in earlier chapters.

If you care about what happens to sex workers, listening to them seems like the only decent place to start. As the authors themselves put it:

"We aren't asking you to love the sex industry. We certainly don't. We are asking that your disgust with the sex industry and with the men - the punters - doesn't overtake your ability to empathise with people who sell sex."