Carol Leigh

Carol Leigh

Carol Leigh, a.k.a. The Scarlot Harlot, born 1951 in New York City, is an artist, author, film maker, and sex workers' rights activist. She coined the term "sex worker" at a Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media conference in the late 1970s. The terminology used at the conference for the sex industry was the “Sex Use Industry”. The phrasing bothered her because it objectified sex workers and trivialized the agency they had when organizing their labor. She suggested that the panel be renamed “Sex Work Industry” and began to use the term in her one-woman plays before the first published use of “sex worker” appeared in a 1984 Associated Press newswire.She explains in a later essay named “Inventing Sex Work” that “I invented sex work. Not the activity, of course. The term. This invention was motivated by my desire to reconcile my feminist goals with the reality of my life and the lives of the women I knew. I wanted to create an atmosphere of tolerance within and outside the women's movement for women working in the sex industry.” She currently chairs the Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival and is the director of BAYSWAN, the Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network. She lives in San Francisco. She is bisexual.

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