Quotes About Sex workers

Despite what you might have learned from the TV or the tabloids, sex workers really are not all desperate drug addicts, debased victims, or predatory gold diggers. Many healthy and happy people work in the sex industry, doing essential and positive work healing the wounds inflicted by our sex-negative culture. We know them as friends, lovers, colleagues, writers, therapists, and educators, as

A bride had been violated on that most sacred of nights. But what about ordinary women on ordinary nights? Or indecent women, perhaps, like sex workers? Or hijras? What happened when less-than-ordinary souls got violated? Why not create a furor then? Why let their pain slide away like rainwater into a gutter?

When the police cracked down, did the sex workers simply move one or two streets over? ... Was there displacement? There was not. It turns out that most [sex workers] would rather try something else, leave the field entirely, change their behavior, than shift their location.

This placement of the authority to "stop violence" into the hands of the police produces a crisis of meaning. The police are often the source of violence, especially in the lives of women, people of color, trans women, sex workers, and the poor. And the police enforce the laws of the United States of America, which is one of the greatest sources of violence in the world.

Queer theory's challenge to heteronormative discourses of the sexual world confronts the traditional binary divides between pure/impure womanhood, or good/bad sexuality, presenting an alternative construction of sexuality which views sex workers as neither deviants nor victims, but as one group within a world of diverse sexual actors.

The epidemic of violence against sex workers would be a national emergency if any other group were involved; but sex workers, particularly those who are working on the street and may have addictions or be radicalized, have not been the object of any great concern.

If the media were doing their investigative job properly, the net of deviants would either be widened or abandoned altogether as ludicrous, as more and more of society's members - more and more members of the public - would be implicated in the tracing of this net. To single out sex workers serves a specific function: it removes the "disciplinary gaze" from all others.

Numbers are difficult to calculate in part because sex workers can't be divided neatly into categories of those working voluntarily and those working involuntarily. Some commentators look at prostitutes and see only sex slaves; others see only entrepreneurs. But in reality there are some in each category and many other women who inhabit a gray zone between freedom and slavery.