Heather Berg. Porn Work. Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism

The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. — 255 p.Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes listeners behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it.
Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and anti-work theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.
Dr. Heather Berg began research for Porn Work in 2013 and spent the next 7 years putting together a book that said something important about the condition of labor. Dr. Berg’s study focused on the adult industry but was written in such a way that the situations discussed are present in our society writ large. Through her own style of creating a narrative around researched facts and first-hand interviews, Dr. Berg translated the often misunderstood notion of late capitalism into a story which is easily versed into everyday conversation.
The book need not be relegated to the adult section. Although there are adult topics discussed, Dr. Berg goes to great lengths in comparing the struggles faced among those entrepreneurs who work in adult, as well as “straight jobs”. In fact, despite the title, there is only coincidental concentration on the actual sex that is a part of the adult industry. Then, Dr. Berg’s research goes a step further, insisting that the rights of any worker should not, and cannot, be dependent upon his or her chosen profession. Indeed, when speaking of workers’ struggle for rights and recognition, each worker must have access to those basic tenets regardless of their profession, race, creed, or gender identification. Indeed, this is a universal study for any who wish to better understand the world, and then– how to make that world better.