Melissa Gira Grant Quotes
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Kristin Gwynne has been writing some great stuff about the sexually violent element of "stop-and-frisk." This isn't just "turn out your pockets." This is young people being groped. That form of power - using sexuality for power and control - seems pretty straightforward to me. When are we going to just say that the cops are the enemy here?
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One person was basically saying that feminists aren't interested in criminalizing prostitutes, that they don't want to do that. I responded that whether or not they want to, that is what is happening on the ground.
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In the current situation with criminalization, we've created situations where sex workers have very little power and control over their lives. Increasing one group of women's power and control over their lives does not take anything away from other women. When a woman's value has been constructed as keeping a man and keeping him faithful, then when he's not we've been taught to internalize that there's something wrong with us.
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Anything that is going to be good for sex workers is going to be good for women across the board. Less women in jail is going to be good for all of us.
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In New Zealand, sex workers are regarded as workers, as people who are members of the community, people who have a stake in the community - not just in the workplace, but in the broader community. They aren't objects to be controlled and regulated. They are not collateral evidence of a crime. They are human beings.
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Women in the past thought all they had to do was see if he comes home late, or smells like cigarettes. But nothing's really changed, right? People still cheat. They're going to do what they're going to do. But now that sex work is more private, there's that chance to have a double life.
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The biggest difference in what's going on in New Zealand versus the rest of the world, aside from the decriminalization of sex work, is that sex workers were actually part of the decriminalization process. There was a provision in that legal change stating sex workers would be part of an evaluation committee, and in 2008, they were, they were a part of the committee determining whether or not decriminalization worked. They are continually regarded as stakeholders - in their communities, but also in the legal process. That's such a different way of operating.
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I wouldn't advocate for a feminism that's buttoned-up and divorced of the messiness of our real lives. Your feelings are your feelings, but you're not going to litigate your feelings about my body. The feminist ethics that I signed up for were respect for my bodily autonomy, that my experience is my experience, and that I'm an expert in my own life.
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Looking at the huge number of transgender women of color who have been murdered since the beginning of the year - that we know of - the number has reached seven or eight at this point, maybe even nine, since the start of 2015. The number of those women involved in sex work is not a piece that gets lifted up in news reports. Sometimes people want to bury that, because they don't want to say anything that might make it seem as though those women were asking for it. We're still living with the idea that sex work somehow marks people as acceptable targets for violence.
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I respect people who come forward and speak, but I'm not asking most of the sex workers I interview now about their work. I'm asking them about their lives in general or their political organizing. I take pains source things pointing back to intellectual work that sex workers have produced, because that's really absent.
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Almost everything I've learned about journalism has been from other friends who are journalists, taking advantage of the money I hope they don't think they threw away at j-school. I studied comparative literature, but the professional vagaries of journalism I've learned through other people's trial and error, and my own.
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I don't use "feelings" as a diminutive word. I'm trying to take feelings back. I think of everyone on the internet whose response to everything is: "#Feelings! This is important, this is real, this is significant!" That connects to power, too. Wanting to feel like you have power and control over your life.
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I have to do this all the time - choosing what to print based on how it might come back to harm people from whom I've earned trust.
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Once when I told sex workers about my own sex work, it ended up building inappropriate trust with some people. But there have been events now - like covering the protests against Backpage at the Village Voice - where I've talked to sex workers who don't necessarily know that I've done sex work.
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I hesitate talking about a program for change because we're in this moment where no one is listening to sex workers about how things should change. So I'm even speaking less as a former sex worker and more as a person trying to see the bigger picture that might be hard to see when you're doing sex work full-time, or running a social service organization, or doing all the things that a lot of sex worker activists are doing. It's hard work, and they don't necessarily get the time to step back and see the whole picture.
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The value we're all raised with, that women don't have the capacity to make moral decisions for themselves, particularly around their sexuality. That if they make the wrong decisions they are ruined for life. That someone more powerful, a man or even a more powerful woman, should be responsible for them. That's the value animating all of this. It's incredibly racialized as well.
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Another sex worker and writer I respect put it this way: she said that as a writer, you're not about pleasing people, and as a sex worker it's all about pleasing people. It's all about creating this fantasy. I still feel like as a writer you actually do have put on a show. You can't just hand over your notes. And there is a degree to which you are appealing to the reader's vanity, whether you tell yourself you're doing that or not.
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Sex workers are the last women police stand in to protect. Sex workers are the last people that room is made for in many ways. You get a different kind of feminism if you put people at the margins at the center. It's a recently resonant lesson, but black feminists have been saying this for decades. Now when I talk to people engaged in sex workers' rights advocacy and people who identify as intersectional feminists, this is the air they breathe. We can't just make feminism about improving the lives of all women. Because there is no such thing as all women and universal female experience.
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Look at how successful the domestic workers movement has been. But it's different when it's your husband hiring someone. Domestic workers quite literally say, "You need to get your house in order. You can't join this movement unless you look at yourself." And they're very forgiving, amnesty for everyone. "You haven't been paying into your nanny's unemployment insurance? That's cool, we'll teach you how to get right and go from there." What would the parallel be around sex workers? I don't know if there can be one.
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It makes me so angry when people say, "We never hear from people who are happy doing sex work." Well, that's because they're working. The activism privileges people who hated doing sex work, are no longer doing it, and have a job at a social service organization, for example, that trains them on how to speak to the media. We are hearing from those people quite a bit.
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I remember being in high school in the '90s, and even then somehow hearing about the the Canadian Supreme Court's Butler decision which was meant to keep "obscene" material from entering Canada. The stuff being stopped at the border was almost all lesbian.
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When I interviewed the evangelical Christian youth group who were protesting the Village Voice, I wanted them to feel they could freely tell me things like, "Did you know that 90 percent of prostitutes don't want to be doing it?" Is that unfair? That's sort of an invisible privilege for me.
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It's actually not much of a risk to say, "I don't think we should put sex workers in jail." That's a decent, normal thing you should believe. But then what are you going to do about it?
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I've moved away from writing about and describing actual experiences of sex work, whether mine or anybody else's, because the culture is obsessed with the behavior of sex workers. They want to figure out why they do what they do and who they are. What I'm trying to do is to shift the focus onto the producers of the anti-sex work discourse: the cops, the feminists, the anti-prostitution people. Those are the people whose behavior needs to change.
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Everyone's politics are born of self-interest, particularly around sexuality. We just have to own up to that.
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Even at legal brothels, sex workers have very little power and control over their workplace. They might have power with their customers on a case-by-case basis in terms of what they want to do and not do, but they don't necessarily have a lot of power in how that business operates. There's this presumption that sex workers are broken people, so how could they engage in something like workplace democracy? How could they even have demands?
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I think the anti-prostitution feminists need to do some consciousness-raising amongst themselves about their feelings. But that's a different political activity. Asking ourselves, how do we feel about the fact that our boyfriends, our husbands, our male partners might hire sex workers? They should have that conversation, but they shouldn't attach it to policy conversations that affect people.
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I went to college in Amherst and lived in Northampton for many years and we had our quaint little feminist sex toy shop that somehow made it in town and wasn't scandalous. But you still got the vibe once in awhile that this didn't used to be okay. That twenty years ago women would have come in saying, "You can't sell realistic-looking sex toys. You have to only sell things that look like dolphins or something."
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Most people aren't encouraged to think of their labor as very valuable. We usually think of it as the necessary thing we engage in in order to survive. We live in a world where our ability to survive is connected to our ability to draw a paycheck. But there are other ways of organizing labor and culture. For example, people who are pushing for fixed universal base income, or a welfare system that separates wage labor from the compensation required to survive. It was only when I thought of those alternatives that I was able to really understand what we mean when we say sex work is work.
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Most of the time, people are not actually concerned with prostitution and sex work. They're concerned about seeing people who they think are prostitutes and sex workers in their community. Sometimes this just comes down to profiling, the feeling of "I don't want someone who looks like that in my neighborhood." We need communities and neighbors to regard sex workers as part of the community and fellow neighbors. But that's really difficult. There's certainly nothing supporting that.
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