Call Girls: Private Sex Workers in Australia by Roberta Perkins and Frances Lovejoy UWA Press, HK$258 In any serious consideration of Call Girls: Private Sex Workers in Australia, it's important to note that Roberta Perkins is a transsexual. How a man who has had an ornamental approximation of a vagina constructed from mutilated penile tissue can in any way purport to understand what it is to be a woman is not only a monumental insult to women, but farcical. And at no point in this book does Perkins sound like anything other than what he is: a dangerously disturbed man. 'Far removed from the moralising 'victim' stereotypes,' reads the back cover, 'Call Girls ... will surprise and change the preconceived notions of many readers.' Other than the fact that notions are, by definition, preconceived, the only people who could possibly be surprised by this book are: (a) those who believe the fundamental dissociation, reductionism and exploitation implicit in prostitution cannot, in any way, be rightly classified as legitimate work; and (b) those who believe sex acts between adults and children under 12 are uniformly 'negative' experiences. 'From a modern feminist perspective the term 'prostitute' then reflects a positive attribute,' Perkins and Frances Lovejoy write, 'referring as it does to those women who chose independence over being controlled by men ... Politically inclined sex workers have recently reappropriated the words 'prostitute' and 'whore' as a means of empowerment.' What the authors fail to mention is that the word 'prostitute' doesn't mean empowerment in any language. The definition? According to the Oxford English Dictionary: To 'sell (one's honour etc) unworthily, put (abilities etc) to wrong use, debase'. Its synonyms? Abuse, cheapen, corrupt, demean, devalue, misapply, misemploy, misuse, vitiate and whore. Like blacks who refer to themselves as 'niggaz', women who interpret the word 'prostitute' as positive have not only normalised unacceptable abuse, but continue to perpetrate it. 'A persistent popular perception of prostitutes is that they are drug addicts ...' the authors persevere. 'Society's attitudes towards prostitution, and the way in which these attitudes are mirrored in prostitution laws, reflect a historical prejudice towards what is no more than a work-based occupation.' Yet these statements appear to directly contradict sentiments expressed by Perkins in The Drag Queen Scene (Allen & Unwin, 1983): 'Working the streets was a dangerous occupation and nearly every girl [transgender] had a story to tell of physical assault, including knife attacks, vicious beatings and pack rapes ... Why, you might ask, would anyone want to work under such conditions? Well, some girls had uncontrollable drug habits and prostitution was the most lucrative means of acquiring the kind of cash needed ... The human tragedy ... is that the only work available to most transgender people is that which is unhealthy, dangerous, illegal and, for many, degrading.' Given this, can prostitution be assumed to be 'unhealthy, dangerous, illegal and ... degrading' only for transgender people? And how is it that the squalor and brutality is attractively reframed as the 'hot, raw sex of the streets' and 'a service industry similar to hairdressing' when applied to the female prostitutes of Call Girls? As US feminist and scholar Catharine Mackinnon points out, those who say women are in it by choice should explain why it is that the women with the fewest choices are in it most. Perkins and his sidekick offer conclusive evidence of their toxic idiocy on page 138: 'Only a few [of the study's women raped under the age of 12] described the experience as rape, which is definitely negative. With respect to 14 per cent of the women in both samples who claimed to have had their first penetrative sex with their relatives or a family friend, this is not necessarily a negative experience ... many ... come through a paedophiliac relationship quite unscathed, and in some cases even benefit.' Conveniently ignoring the 1,500 per cent rise in child porn crimes since 1988 and the fact that a child under 12 is not only physically immature but also psychologically friable and vulnerable not just to adult persuasion but parental authority, Perkins, a father of two, warmly suggests these 'young 'victims'' - his use of quotation marks is to be noted - can 'actually consent' to coitus with, say, their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers. In effect, Perkins is proposing that a five-year-old child - at that age, the brain is not even fully developed - is capable of making an informed decision about an act for which its body and psyche are not only unprepared, but which amounts to spiritual murder. Critically, how the University of Western Australia can in any way further the opinions expressed in this book calls for the accountability of publishers to be examined.