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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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 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

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Thinking, People, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• It's a misnomer to say you can criminalize one part of the transaction and not criminalize the entire transaction. For example in Sweden, where the law was passed in 1999. Those laws didn't actually decriminalize people who sell sex; they introduced new criminal penalties for the people who buy sex. Nothing changed in the legal status for the sex workers themselves. It's impossible for them to operate a legal business. When you criminalize part of a transaction, you're creating collateral damage for all those engaged in it. You are now making them work in a criminalized context.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Impossible, Changed

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Powerful, Men, Decision

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Husband, Successful, House

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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?

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Believe, Thinking, Risk

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• One of the biggest things going on in London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York right now is gentrification. Every major city is dealing with gentrification, and it's always the sex workers they come for first. Cities feel they have to clean up their image and make themselves more attractive for tourism, more attractive to businesses. The Gezi Park struggle in Turkey a few years ago, for example, was a popular movement defending public space and land. What I found when I was digging into the goings on there was that the park was a place where transgender sex workers felt safe.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Struggle, Transgender, Attractive

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin