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… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share Image
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… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share Image
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… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share
We hear from sex workers who have through their own volition become media figures, or have despite their own wishes become media figures. Like… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share Image
One person was basically saying that feminists aren't interested in criminalizing prostitutes, that they don't want to do that. I responded that whether or… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share Image
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… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share
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… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share Image
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… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share
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… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share
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… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share Image
In New Zealand, sex workers are regarded as workers, as people who are members of the community, people who have a stake in the… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share Image
Even at legal brothels, sex workers have very little power and control over their workplace. They might have power with their customers on a case-by-case basis in terms of what they want to do and not do, but they don't necessarily have a lot of power in how that business operates. There's this presumption that sex workers are broken people,… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share
I've moved away from writing about and describing actual experiences of sex work, whether mine or anybody else's, because the culture is obsessed with the behavior of sex workers. They want to figure out why they do what they do and who they are. What I'm trying to do is to shift the focus onto the producers of the anti-sex… — Melissa Gira Grant Copy Share
