Nancy Chan is a postfeminist icon of sorts. The ultimate lady entrepreneur, Chan--the title character of the popular serial Nancy Chan: Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, catalogued on Salon.com--has an enviable collection of Prada bags, a pricey pad on the Upper East Side and a little black book full of Wall Street power brokers. Nancy's creator, Tracy Quan, is a former working girl herself, who describes her past life as a whirlwind of lucrative dates: "Here I was," she writes breathlessly, "a New York call girl, routinely bedding CEOs, foreign nobles, and entertainment moguls in the city's five-star hotels."

What would antipornography activists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who electrified a generation of women's studies majors, think of Quan and her resourceful, business-minded creation? Addressing an audience at the University of Michigan law school in 1992, Dworkin admonished that society might want us to "feel a kinky little thrill every time you think of something being stuck in a woman. I want you to feel the delicate tissues in her body that are being misused." All prostitution, she maintains, "whether the event took place in the Plaza Hotel or somewhere more inelegant," is a violation of women's bodies and their civil rights.

What's missing from both sides of the theoretical divide is the "work" half of the sex worker's job description ("sex worker" is a term preferred by many in the industry to the old-fashioned "prostitute" or the derogatory "hooker"). For women who make their living in strip clubs, brothels, massage parlors or in front of the pornographer's camera, sex is part of the job description, and the work is often as dull and unstimulating as telemarketing or stitching sleeves in a garment factory.

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