The Wisdom of … Epidemiologists?

The epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani’s recent book, The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, is choc-a-bloc full of policy and statistics, but perhaps not as much of a whore’s-eye view as the title at first led me to believe.

While certainly a well-written and eminently useful insider’s guide to international HIV/AIDS policy, I fail to see the appropriateness of the title, The Wisdom of Whores. In fact, Pisani’s Whores actively calls into question the very “Sacred Cows” of sex worker rights and HIV/AIDS activism: the rejection of compulsory testing as inhumane, the prioritization of antiretroviral treatment and, finally, activists’s full-on endorsement of peer education among high-risk groups: commercial sex workers, injecting drug users (IDUs) and men who have sex with men (MSM).

With this titular technicality out of the way, let me be clear that I’m not sure I entirely disagree with Pisani’s take on the matter. The strength of this book, in my view, is its ability to shake up the “treatment” and “prevention” debate among sex workers themselves. Perhaps it’s time the golden “Cows” of sex workers rights were recast, as Pisani suggests. Then again, perhaps not.

Read the rest of this article at Sex! Work?