Helpful, concise definition from SW2 at Yes, Roxanne, Put On The Red Light in response to a reader who asked "I was just wondering if you could explain what exactly a 'sex worker' is? (She ends by explaining why she and her fellow authors started their blog.)

Good question!!

A sex worker is paid to do sexy things, basically. If a person is paid to turn someone else on and/or get someone else off, they are a sex worker. This includes up-close and in-person sex workers like happy ending masseuses and masseurs, strippers, professional dominants, and prostitutes. It also includes sex workers who work at a bit of a remove or on the mental aspects of arousal such as peep show and web cam performers and phone sex operators. Because we all basically sell sex in one form or another, and we must all deal with our work being stigmatized and devalued, if not outright criminalized, we made this blog to share, commiserate, laugh, bitch, tell stories, and keep each other company.

Source: Yes, Roxanne, Put On The Red Light.

Their blog has an interesting format -- generally a series of red ("sex worker problems") or purple ("sex worker perks") decorated boxes with Twitter-length single words, phrases, or sentences. The authors are all current or former sex workers. According to their intro, one of them hates sex work, the other two love it. At least so far it's been quite active. They encourage contributions from other sex workers. I've added it to the blogroll.

Audacia Ray says

Embarrassing Sex Worker Activism:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: Decriminalize the practice/occupation of engaging in sexual activity between consenting adults in exchange for payment.

Dear sex worker activists: the Obama administration cannot make this happen. The criminal code is codified at a state level.

If you want to “decriminalize” aka chip away at the legal system that does harm in our lives, start researching the laws in place in your state and city that do this harm. There are lots of local laws that discriminate against sex workers and people profiled as sex workers. Like the fact that condoms can be used as evidence of prostitution, or that until it was defeated this summer, people profiled as sex workers (esp trans women of color) in Louisiana were being put on the sex offender registry.

Source: Waking Vixen

If you follow Dacia's link to the petition at WhiteHouse.gov you'll see the details of the petition are nice but vague, and that while the stated goal is "Signatures needed by Oct. 27, 2011 to reach goal of 5000," the "Total signatures on this petition," at least at the moment, are... 45.

Actually I expect the petitioners were hoping for the President to direct agencies under the control of the executive branch to back off, say, cooperation with multi-state law-enforcement "sweeps" or something.  Which wouldn't hurt.  But even then, since even then the initiatives arise from state and local levels and federal agencies such as the FBI really do mostly just cooperate, she's right that the place to go to work on this stuff is the state and local levels.

Which, since very often what's needed are human faces at human scale, local jurisdictions are probably the right place to make your cases.  And also very often it's the petty outrages like condom carrying as evidence, or sex work as sex offense* that cause the biggest law-related headaches.  And it's also often the merely venal outrages like cops shaking down sex workers for free "dates" as part of the "cost of doing business" that local activism is more likely to have some influence over.

I'd add that it probably really is state and local level activism that'll help incubate "best practices" decriminalization in the long run.  Because as we can tell from Sweden to Nevada to Holland to Australia to Vancouver(!) there are a lot of ways to do it wrong too.

Also, groundswell!  5,000,000 marchers on the D.C. Mall rarely have much impact, even with the backing of FOX news, so 5,000 petition signatures isn't going to cut it either.  If you're going to make a difference I'm... pretty sure it's going to have to be from the bottom up.

* Though, of course, never, oh never, is a customer put on the offender registry.  Even when the sex worker they select is working under duress.  Even when the sex worker they select is working under *age!*http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2011/09/big-dick-goes-to-canadian-pedophile.html

While looking for other information pertaining to the "sexual revolution" in the Victorian era (actually I was just looking for information about what people were wearing during that period) I stumbled across the following in a paragraph about sex work of all things in Wikipedia (emphasis mine.)

When the United Kingdom Census 1851 publicly revealed a 4% demographic imbalance in favour of women (i.e., 4% more women than men), the problem of prostitution began to shift from a moral/religious cause to a socio-economic one. The 1851 census showed that the population of Great Britain was roughly 18 million; this meant that roughly 750,000 women would remain unmarried simply because there were not enough men. These women came to be referred to as "superfluous women" or "redundant women", and many essays were published discussing what, precisely, ought to be done with them. "Why are Women Redundant" William Rathbone Greg, N. Trubner & Co. 1869]

Source: Wikipedia: Victorian Era

Wading as far as I could through Greg and Trubner's Victorian prose is difficult (here's a link to the Google Books version) it looks like they don't believe it's a problem that some women through virtue, commitment or genius preferred not to marry at all, nor is it the incredibly large number who worked as domestic servants. Instead it's because

We will be plain, because we wish both to be brief and to be true. So many women are single because so many men are profligate. Probably, among all the sources of the social anomaly in question, this, if fully analyzed, would be found to be the most fertile, and to lie the deepest. The case lies in a nut-shell. Few men -- incalculably few -- are truly celibate by nature or by choice. There are few who would not purchase love, or the indulgences which are its coarse equivalents, by the surrender or the curtailment of nearly all other luxuries and fancies, if they could obtain them on no cheaper terms. In a word, few -- comparatively very few -- would not marry as soon as they could maintain a wife in anything like decency or comfort, if only through marriage they could satisfy their craving and gratify their passions.

If their sole choice lay between entire chastity -- a celibacy as strict and absolute as that of women* -- or obedience to the natural dictates of the senses and the heart in only legitimate mode the decision of nine out of ten of those who now remain bachelors during the whole or a great portion of their lives would, there can be no doubt, be in favour of marriage.

Source: Why Women are Redundant, pg. 27

In other words, if there hadn't so many sex workers in the Victorian era there wouldn't have been a "surplus" of women. Because, you know, men who wanted to "quench their passions" would have to resort to... gasp... wives!

This from an era that allegedly revered women's purity above all else.

What.

Ever.

* Note the implication both of women as the "no-sex" class and men as the obligatory "sex class?"

Via Em & Lo Jennifer Hafer, a PhD candidate at the University of Arkansas Walton School of Business working under the supervision of Prof. Amy Farmer, has done a non-gonzo, non-freakonomics analysis of women's entry into prostitution.

Contrary to assumptions that women enter the prostitution market only because they are desperate – that they need money to pay bills or buy drugs – the study indicates that many women, especially educated, affluent women, are making a rational decision to enter certain segments of the prostitution market. However, the research confirmed that women do not explicitly choose to enter the streetwalking segment of the prostitution market.

“Our model demonstrated that the prostitution market may be pulling educated women – these so-called ‘high-opportunity-cost’ women – out of the conventional labor market and the marriage market, in many cases,” said Jennifer Hafer, a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Arkansas. “The findings suggest that these women are not forced into the prostitution market but rather choose to enter it for many of the same reasons that people enter the conventional job market – money, stability, autonomy and even job satisfaction.”

Source: University of Arkansas Newswire

(Quick note: Obviously not all prostitutes are women, but since women are the subset Hafer chose to study that's what I'm going to talk about here.)

What I like about Hafer's work is that it just is what it is, an academic analysis of a poorly-understood category of work, minus all the eye-rolling, breathlessness, nervous chuckling, heart-of-golding, or you-go-girling that goes with too much other reporting on prostitution.

Another thing I like about her work is her entirely non-controversial division of prostitution into categories that conform to one traditional side's version of the story -- subsistence/street prostitution which people with other options would generally avoid, and the other traditional side's version -- work that is undertaken with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasms but that is also undertaken voluntarily and optionally.

The problem with most conventional debates being that if you can't agree on your definitions then you can't have an argument.  And one of the problems with definition is that in most people's minds "prostitution" equals "street/subsistence prostitution."  That's significant because a) street/subsistence prostitutes are the most visible to passers by, b) they're the most-often depicted in pop-culture references, and c) as Hafer says, it's most often a job for people who'd rather be doing anything else (possibly but not necessarily including other, non-street prostitution.)

It's problematic because despite its visibility, and despite the fact that mainstream opponents frame that category of prostitution accounts for only about 15% of all prostitution.

The article ends with (gasp!) Hafer's discussion of intelligent policy implications.  (In my experience policy recommendations are fairly rare in research papers.  Intelligent ones even less so.)  There's something in it for everyone... or possibly something for everyone to object to depending on their prior assumptions:

Hafer discussed the findings’ potential impact on policy. Due to negative externalities, streetwalking should remain illegal with continued enforcement, she said. Based purely on the outcomes of the model, brothel prostitution should be legalized and regulated in expanded locations. Her policy attention to escort and Internet prostitution focused on regulation, such as licensing, health testing and possibly taxation, as a means to ensure safety and security for both the prostitute and the consumer. For the escort and Internet markets to be regulated, they must be legalized.

“The major question concerning policy is what is the overall goal?” Hafer said. “Is it better for society to make prostitution illegal in all circumstances? Legalize prostitution subject to regulation? If the demand for prostitution is present, there will always be supply.”

I think that's about right.  Street/subsistence prostitution is extraordinarily risky, and subject to incredible violence from pimps, traffickers, police, customers, passers by, and of course serial predators.  Whether it becomes legal or remains illegal it should still be vigorously policed and, to the extent possible, community organized.  I'm actually extremely wary of brothels.  I agree they should be legal but also think they should be heavily regulated in order to make sure first that they're not employing coerced or financially abused workers but also to make sure they're not the owner-friendly slut-shamed-employee hell holes they are in Nevada or Australia.  And middle and professional class prostitutes probably don't need to be regulated any more than any other sole-proprietor business or independent contractors are.

Finally, Hafer's final line seems like the key to a lot of the prostitution controversy.  As long as the demand is present supply will be present.  Since prostitution is by-definition transactional sex, and since transactional sex remains the dominant paradigm for all heterosexual sex, policing either prostitutes or customers only serves to increase the transaction cost... but leaves the transactional model completely intact.  It's my strong feeling that overturning the dominant paradigm would not only benefit all of heterosexuality in general, it would also reduce the role of prostitution, and the demand, to roughly the level of Arthur Murray dance instructors.