Sex Work Quotes

• I would never want to take away the option of sex work from someone, but I would want to create more options so that everyone can make the decision whether they want to do sex work or they don't want to do sex work, and that people who do sex work can do it safely.

  Emily Symons

  Sex, People, Decision

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• Where do people get off telling people what to do? It's their bodies. If you legalized sex work and legally protected the sex workers, you wouldn't see anything like human trafficking. All of that would be obliterated.

  Margaret Cho

  Sex, People, Would Be

  "The righteous rage of Margaret Cho". Interview with Alli Malone, nytlive.nytimes.com. November 10, 2015.

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• I don't really think myself that sex work is necessarily more demeaning than other kinds of demeaning work.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Sex, Thinking, Kind

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• I don't like people telling other people what to do. Sex work for a lot of women is really important, especially in countries where women don't have a lot of power. Here we can have at least some form ... of making money.

  Margaret Cho

  Country, Sex, People

  "The righteous rage of Margaret Cho". Interview with Alli Malone, nytlive.nytimes.com. November 10, 2015.

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• Sex work may be an illegal thing, but it's far from being a bad thing. Quite a few of us on the male-to-female side of the coin have done sex work. I've done it myself for a couple of years. It's a place we can make a living and have some fun doing it. It's a place we seem to fit in.

  Kate Bornstein

  Sex, Couple, Fun

  "Interview with Kate". TV Series "P.O.V." ("Georgie Girl"), www.pbs.org. June 20, 2003.

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• In literature only trouble is interesting. It takes trouble to turn the great themes of life into a story: birth, love, sex, work, and death.

  Janet Burroway

  Sex, Writing, Interesting

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• Look, nearly everything in the culture says we're freaks. Doing sex work, we're desired; we can get rewarded for being what we've always wanted to be. What's so bad about that? My own notion is I wish sex work would be decriminalized (not legalized, please note the distinction) so that more trannies could get into the field if they wanted to and not get into trouble for it.

  Kate Bornstein

  Sex, Wish, Would Be

  "Interview with Kate". TV Series "P.O.V." ("Georgie Girl"), www.pbs.org. June 20, 2003.

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• It occurs to me that there's been a relatively recent tendency in the media to see prostitutes as victims and johns as exploiters. I don't think most prostitutes see themselves as victims or see their clients as exploiters, but that way of seeing prostitutes and johns is pretty common now outside of sex-work circles, and it's more shameful to be the exploiter than the exploited.

  Chester Brown

  Sex, Thinking, Media

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Frankly, sex work and stripping is very good if you have radical politics. You can go to meetings all night long.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Sex, Night, Long

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I don't know why it's anyone's business! People do what they need to do. I did it, and it was nowhere near as traumatic as being raped. I was so numb for so long that sex work for me was not a big deal.

  Margaret Cho

  Sex, Long, People

  "The righteous rage of Margaret Cho". Interview with Alli Malone, nytlive.nytimes.com. November 10, 2015.

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• Besides the money aspect, I guess I was curious about sex work. In the way that most people are, but also because ever since I was a teen I had read feminist writers like Dworkin and Mackinnon and the way they wrote about sex work had an enormous impact on me. Was it really as horrible as they said?

  Marie Calloway

  Sex, Impact, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The things that I want to see happen get no play in mainstream American politics. My primary interests are the legalization of sex work and prison abolition.

  Grace Dunham

  Sex, Play, Want

  "The Lenny Interview: Rachel Maddow". Interview with Grace Dunham, www.yahoo.com. April 21, 2016.

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• At a glance, addiction, sex work, mad passion, and all forms of extreme behavior might look like pushing or trying to obliterate boundaries when, more honestly, they are a search for them. I want to find the endpoint, the place where my own powers end, so I can yield to something that I'm certain is bigger than me.

  Melissa Febos

  Sex, Passion, Yield

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I write about how I was attracted to stripping because I didn't feel comfortable with my body, for instance, but there could be plenty of not-so-good reasons why I chose to go into journalism, too. Maybe someone had a trauma in childhood and it led them to become a nurse, or a lawyer, but because people stigmatize sex work they try to find a traumatic moment in your past and say, "There!"

  Craig Seymour

  Sex, Writing, Past

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Different types of sex work are differently supportive. If I were working in a strip club, I would be competing with my colleagues, and while there would be support, there would be financial motivation not to offer too much support.

  Molly Crabapple

  Sex, Motivation, Support

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Here's how men think. Sex, work - and those are reversible, depending on age - sex, work, food, sports and lastly, begrudgingly, relationships. And here's how women think. Relationships, relationships, relationships, work, sex, shopping, weight, food.

  Carrie Fisher

  Sports, Sex, Men

  Surrender the Pink (1990)

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• I think in certain ways sex work has been romanticized. I can only speak from my experience, but what surprised me about escorting was how boring it mostly is. it seemed like an assembly line process of cleaning my apartment, dressing up, making awkward small talk, having mundane mechanical sex, making more awkward small talk, and then closing the door after them. There's also a lot of frustration and annoyance with it that I feel isn't discussed (a lot of flaky potential clients for instance.)

  Marie Calloway

  Sex, Thinking, Frustration

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Early in my career as a domme, I both admired and feared becoming one of those career dommes. I saw, in myself, and in some other women in that industry, the way that sex work could eclipse the other parts of your personality, the way that I started to feel as if I wasn't qualified to do anything else. I had always known that I wanted to be a writer, and I stopped writing for a time while I was domming; the experience subsumed my other interests, and it scared me. Now, however, I have nothing but admiration for them.

  Melissa Febos

  Sex, Writing, Becoming One

  Interview With Rebecca Keith, therumpus.net. April 2, 2010.

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