Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

Every industry on earth has been affected in some way by the coronavirus pandemic.

And that includes the sex trade, which by some

estimates is worth as much as $200 billion globally. In fact, there are few businesses that depend

so much on intimate contact between supplier and client.

This week I spoke with Nadia Guo, a Toronto-based lawyer and sex worker whom some listeners

may remember from her acclaimed December 2019 Colette article entitled,

Ivory Tower Sex Work Activists have lost touch with the needs of actual sex workers.

Ms. Guo told me about the state of the industry, the effect of coronavirus, and her thoughts on the long-term fallout on the sex trade.

Here are excerpts from our conversation, which unfortunately does contain a few glitches from when our Skype connection faded.

Here in Canada we're still all engaged in social distancing and so doing this interview

in person would have been impossible. Before we start talking specifically about coronavirus,

let me just ask you about the baseline expectation that sex trade workers might have

about how their health is considered by clients.

...