In The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital Leopoldina Fortunati argues that it is precisely the exchange of the value-form with labor power that obscures the necessary labor of housework, carework and sex work contributing to the daily and generational reproduction of the commodity labor power. In our talk we will reframe Fortunati’s discussion of the relationship of housework to prostitution in order to consider the paid reproduction of sex workers as unpaid reproductive workers themselves, arguing that the “social necessity” of sex work is not premised on the desire or nature of male demand but rather as providing a necessary link for proletarian women to the market in a highly informalized economy through technological means, under the exacerbated conditions of a global crisis in care during the COVID-19 pandemic.