Melissa Gira Grant Quotes - Page 2

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• Our feelings alone don't change what happens with the police, what happens in jail, what happens when someone tries to go to the welfare office, the unemployment office, or any kind of state agency where a criminal record comes up for prostitution. How we feel about the commodification of sexuality and violence doesn't actually translate to those people's lives. A lot of the debate is really academic and a waste of time.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Feeling Alone, Office, Police

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Husband, Thinking, People

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Over You, Fantasy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I've always been a writer. I started getting paid for writing in college. Where it transitioned from commentary to journalism was in that shift - not wanting to write personal stories because people are hungry in not necessarily great ways for the sexy, sexy, sex work story. I was trying to shift the focus, and journalism was the tool I needed to write about people outside my own life and range of experience.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Sexy, Writing, College

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• It doesn't service anyone any to say, "This is a terrible violation in any circumstance always," because that robs us of our ability to write our own lives. I've had people cheat on me and it's been devastating, and I've had people cheat on me and felt that it showed their true colors.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Writing, People, Cheat

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  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

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Real, Thinking, Over You

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Feminist, Police

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Be Good

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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?

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Writing, People, Enemy

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Say Anything, Violence

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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