Melissa Gira Grant Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Mean, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Pain, People, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Thinking, Literature, Journalism

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Everyone's politics are born of self-interest, particularly around sexuality. We just have to own up to that.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Sexuality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Community, Different, World

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Print

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Work doesn't have to be great in order to dignify it as work. Work just is. It's quite value-neutral. The issue is about what kinds of power and control you have at work as a human being. That's the commonality. It's not necessarily what the task is.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Kind, Commonality

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Community, Workplace

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Home, Past, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Men, Faithful, Situation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• What shocked me was three different anti-prostitution feminists asking me to justify that I had been a sex worker, to prove it. That either I hadn't done enough sex work by their standards, or I hadn't done the right kind in order to have the right to speak about it. I couldn't understand them. I'm not speaking for you. I'm not speaking "for" anyone. I'm trying to put together this picture of the different forces that are producing a result in the lives of sex workers. You can't contest the fact that tons of people are going to jail and experiencing violence.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Feminist, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Real, Feminist, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think sex work gets over-mystified and overcomplicated because it's about sexuality, and women's sexuality in general. What strikes me when I look at sex worker organizations and sex worker movements, in the US especially, is that they're so in alignment with other longstanding progressive causes. If anything, sex workers have been at the forefront of some of these causes. There have always been sex workers at the forefront of social movements.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Thinking, Progressive, Sexuality

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Say you're a sex worker and your partner knows you're a sex worker, but you're not out to your family. That could be very dangerous, particularly in an unhealthy relationship, where it could be a recipe for conflict, for something potentially violent that could lead to someone going to jail. There's so much pressure because of the criminalization and stigma. If we lifted that, it's only going to benefit more women.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Conflict, Violent, Dangerous

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• A lot of the political change that could happen is going to be super boring.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Political, Boring

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Speak, Activism

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• We hear from sex workers who have through their own volition become media figures, or have despite their own wishes become media figures. Like Ashley Dupré, who has a sex advice column in the New York Post. You get outed and then people expect you to write a memoir because they think, what else are you going to do with your life?

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• We're missing a lot of the real-life stories of what people's work looks like. Those are the people that I want sitting on the zoning board meetings, on the zoning commissions. Those are the people I want participating in business improvement in their own industry. The gentrification processes that often happen in cities so often manifest in street sweeps of sex workers. How do you get sex workers on neighborhood associations, regarded as members of the neighborhood?

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Missing, Improvement

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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."

  Melissa Gira Grant

  College, Feminist, Okay

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  School, Decision, Remember

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Christian, Youth, Invisible

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Done, Inappropriate

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• We aren't defined by our work. People think if you over-identify with your work, then that must mean you're giving over too much of yourself to it, that there's something wrong with that. We're trained to believe in things like work-life balance. So much work is tending towards service. It's very much about creating experiences rather than products, and it makes those boundaries between life and work very slippery.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Believe, Mean, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Running, Hard Work, Listening

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• This is the hardest thing to articulate: I think that there is a legitimate space for sexual commerce. And like every other industry, particularly the service industry, the workers are getting the short end of the stick. Are there some industries that just shouldn't exist? Yes. But I don't think the sex industry is one of them. As it currently operates it's not damaging, necessarily, but it might itself be damaged. It's busted.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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