Sex Work Quotes

“Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Feminists have accepted that choice is possible when it comes to a different, difficult subject: abortion. The feminist position (and I agree with it) is that women own their bodies and therefore each woman has the right to choose to get an abortion if she gets pregnant. This is called being "pro-choice". Feminists should be consistent on the subject of choice. If a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion, she should also have the right to choose to have sex for money. It's her body; it's her right.”
― Chester Brown, Paying for It

“Gay rights aren't predicated on being born gay or having the right gene. Gay rights are predicated on having choice and consent. If you're a man and you can find another man that consents to have sex with you, it's the consent that gives you the right to have sex with him. Genetics are irrelevant when it comes to sexual rights. Just as gay rights are based on choice and consent, so are prostitution rights. All sexual rights are based on choice and consent.”
― Chester Brown, Paying for It

“Can you go back to America and tell all your friends that I do NOT want to be rescued? All these Americans and Viet Kieus who come here thinking that they need to save us are so stupid. If you had to choose between working in a factory for twelve hours a day with bosses who don't let you rest and [who] look at you like they are raping you with their eyes, or working in a bar where you have a few drinks and sometimes spread you legs for a man, which would you choose? Why don't people go rescue factory workers? We are the ones who were not scared to leave factory work for sex work. We are smart hustlers [*nguoi chen lan*], not dumb, scared factory workers!
—Trinh, twenty-four-year-old hostess in Lavender”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Trans-exclusionary and anti-sex-work feminism amplify the mainstream movement’s desire for power and authority, and pursue it by policing the borders of feminism and womanhood. The mainstream preoccupation with threat becomes an overt ‘us and them’ mentality, and the necropolitical desire for annihilation is deliberately turned on more marginalised people.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Prostitution arrests are racist. They have always been racist. In 1866, San Francisco police arrested 137 women, 'virtually all Chinese'; the police boasted that they had 'expelled three hundred Chinese women.' In the 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union found that black women were seven times more likely to be arrested for prostitution-related offenses than white women. This disparity is no relic of the past: between 2012 and 2015, 85 percent of people charged with 'loitering for the purpose of prostitution' in New York City were Black or Latinx- groups that only make up 54 percent of the city's population. Increases in prostitution enforcement mean increases in the arrests of women of color. Between 2012 and 2016, the New York Police Department stepped up enforcement mean increases in the arrest of women of color. Between 2012 and 2016, the New York Police Department stepped up enforcement targeting massage parlors. As journalist Melissa Gira Grant details, during this period the arrests of Asian people in New York charged either with 'unlicensed massage' or prostitution went up by 2,700 percent. Arrests on the street target Black and Latina women - who may not even be selling sex - simply for wearing 'tight jeans' or a crop top. The NYPD do not arrest white women in affluent areas of the city for wearing jeans.”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith

“Words could never express the infinite sadness of a used condom, removed from your already half-limp dick by an expert hand, which then strangles it with a precise, automatic gesture.”
― Zidrou & Aimée de Jongh, L'obsolescence programmée de nos sentiments

“Money buys protection. It buys time off and privacy. And it buys nice, pretty shit. Money also buys food, housing, and health care. Getting paid enough to meet our needs—and more—feels good. I’m not romanticizing the sex industry, I know it has risks; I’m just not going to romanticize economic deprivation in the name of being a “good girl,” either. So do sex workers feel pleasure at work? Yeah. Because you know what feels amazing? Surviving capitalism.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“Giudicare e trattare le donne che fanno sex work come oggetti senza capacità di scegliere e di parlare non significa forse ripetere lo schema patriarcale?”
― Giulia Zollino, Sex work is work

“It will seem absurd to many people, but I have an unbounded sympathy to women of this kind, and I do not think it necessary to apologize for such sympathy. One day, as I was going to the Prefecture for a passport, I saw in one of the neighboring streets a poor girl who was being marched along by two policemen. I do not know what was the matter. All I know is that she was weeping bitterly as she kissed an infant only a few months old, from whom her arrest was to separate her. Since that day I have never dared to despise a woman at first sight.”
― Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias

“The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the ‘good’ woman (cis, ‘respectable’, implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the ‘bad’ ones. Trans women and sex workers are pitted against more privileged women, in a politics that does not challenge how neoliberal capitalism has created massive inequalities of distribution.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The receptionist is confused. "That was quick," she observes. My client booked a thirty-minute session. We used fifteen.
"He tried to slap me on the arse while I was on top," I explain, "He slapped himself on the nutsack.”
― Rayne Constantine

“Indeed, the media continually asks the question, "Can men and women really be just friends?" In the end, we have this situation consisting of men who don’t feel they can express emotion outside of a sexual setting, and women who understand that you can. Therefore we set men up to believe that any form of emotion or display of friendship is automatically sexual. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and this generally results in a stranger paying to be inside my Uranus. That was a terrible joke. You’re welcome.”
― Rayne Constantine, Pizza, Pincushions and Playing it Straight

“Sometimes rapport just cannot be built. Sometimes you don’t want to. This was the case with the One True Dumpster Fire booking. Let me paint you a picture. The booking was with a man who kept insisting that his past girlfriends all came "within minutes" of starting to have penetrative sex. Well, he didn’t say precisely that, he said "They all came within minutes of me entering them, " which is just something else. Who the fuck says "me entering them "? I hadn’t even inspected his dick yet, and I already knew the booking was going to be a complete fucking travesty.
He repeated "come for me" several times during as if I were voice-activated while we were in a position he insisted on using. One which made me hyper-aware that my clitoris was almost jammed into my pubic bone to the point I thought it would invert. None of that is physiologically possible, but you don’t think too rationally when the human version of a wet sock is flopping on top of you making what can only be described as "frantic bird sounds". You start to question your motives in life.”
― Rayne Constantine, Pizza, Pincushions and Playing it Straight

“Reactionary [trans- and sex worker-hostile] feminism accelerates the white feminist ‘war machine’, using the media and social media outrage economy to maximum effect. Although its numbers are small, this movement is tightly networked and highly organised. Its tactics are similar to the notorious harassment campaign Gamergate: it identifies and then relentlessly attacks target after target, seemingly with the aim of total submission.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Every surface encouraged the viewer to call and order a prostitute for fewer than fifty dollars. This did seem like a deal, but I did not know the going rate for a sex worker in this economy.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Holidays with Bigfoot

“Despite the scraps of socialism in its history, [trans- and sex worker-hostile feminism] is bourgeois feminism rooted in disdain for those who think and live differently, whose bodies are not easily assimilated to capitalist production and reproduction.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Sex workers and their allies are dismissed as the ‘pimp lobby’. Trans people and their allies become the ‘trans cabal’, or in an incredibly offensive formulation, the ‘trans Taliban’…. And any challenge to reactionary feminist views is repackaged, via these conspiracy theories, as evidence that they are indeed right. Terms such as ‘trans Taliban’ echo other reactionary monikers, such as the racist ‘woke Stasi’ and misogynist ‘feminazi’, which are common on the far right. They also tap the contemporary appetite for conspiracy that has supported recent rightward shifts. Reactionary feminists may well be the InfoWars of the movement.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Western borders are currently being reasserted in the context of economic crisis, to protect the global ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. And reactionary feminism is complicit with this capitalist and neo-colonial project. It foregrounds narratives of scarcity; it claims resources and support for the ‘good’ women rather than the ‘bad’.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Believe me, porn’s not easy. It’s not just screwing hot chicks. Especially when you’ve made a name for yourself. A lot’s expected of you, man. A lot. Sometimes for hours. You got all those crew members standing around expecting you to perform, waiting on you, wanting to get home to their wives or their kids or whatever but they can’t till you do what you gotta do. And it’s repetitive. There’s only so many ways to fuck somebody. And most of your co-workers become friends and you get to know them too well, to the point they irritate you, and there’s just no sexual chemistry most times—like I said, it’s a job—and you gotta psyche yourself up, like training for a marathon.”
― Philip Elliott, Porno Valley

“Lo sfruttamento può riguardare qualunque ambito lavorativo. Il fatto che appaia peggiore quando si parla di sex work è indicativo dell'atteggiamento ambivalente che abbiamo nei confronti del sesso: considerato basso e sporco da un lato, glorificato e santificato dall'altro. Fare un pompino per 5 euro sembra più grave che raccogliere le fragole per 3 euro l'ora. Ma lo sfruttamento è sempre sfruttamento.”
― Giulia Zollino, Sex work is work

“Ci chiedono se proviamo dolore al termine di una giornata di lavoro e io gli rispondo di provare a fare la stessa domanda al muratore che è stato tutto il giorno attaccato a un'impalcatura o alla domestica che ha stirato in piedi per ore. Loro lo hanno scelto? Qui è dove notiamo che la questione è morale”
― Giulia Zollino, Sex work is work

“Le prostitute costituiscono l'unico proletariato la cui condizione commuove tanto la borghesia”
― Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory

“... something in the back of her mind whispered that there was no help coming and if she ran out of money, she had no real way to earn more. Her only skills were embroidery and weeding gardens. I suppose I could sell my body, but I'm not sure how one does that, either. It seemed like it would be a lot more complicated than getting a seat on a coach. Dis you approach people, or did they approach you, and how did you start a conversation that ended in money for sex? Was there an etiquette?

This was not the sort of thing one was taught at convents. It was easier just to sleep in the coaches.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“It wasn't cheating if it was a job. It wasn't cheating if it was only for money. If that was all it was, taking my clothes off pushed that line, but it was not crossing it.”
― Valentine Glass, The Temptation of Eden

“The sweet-talking is not necessary ... I am doing this because you are paying me, not because you charm me.”
― Valentine Glass, The Temptation of Eden

“At the beginning of this business relationship, it had not occurred to me he would not be forthcoming. (Cumming, yes, but not forthcoming.)”
― Valentine Glass, The Temptation of Eden

“I pulled my dress to my hips, bunching it there in a way I was sure must look awkward, but there was no other way to move my legs apart. I considered unzipping the back and slipping it off to seem less ungainly, but I intended to give him not an inch more than he paid for or deserved. I had no illusion of modesty, but I was well aware of my worth as a commodity. If he wanted to see the curve of my back—and certainly if he wanted another look at my tits—there would be a price tag attached.”
― Valentine Glass, The Temptation of Eden

“I want to bring us back to basics. Prostitution: what is it? It is the use of a woman's body for sex by men, he pays money, he does what he wants. The minute you move away from what it really is, you move away from prostitution into the world of ideas. You will feel better; you will have a better time; it is more fun; there is plenty to discuss, but you will be discussing ideas, not prostitution. Prostitution is not an idea. It is the mouth, the vagina, the rectum, penetrated usually by a penis, sometimes hands, sometimes objects, by one man and then another and then another and then another and then another. That's what it is.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death

“From my understanding, this is a matter of value?” asked Andrei. “Like other men have had her leg, so her leg doesn’t mean anything to you anymore?”

“No... no, that’s not even it. It’s that you can’t pretend to give someone your leg. Even if it’s just a photo. Legs can’t pretend. You can, but legs can’t. And when someone gets your leg, it’s given. And you multiply that by a hundred, but she has only two. Two little legs. And it’s as if her legs know. The body is not meant to be mass distributed, Andrei. We’re not large gods in Olympus—we need assistance climbing up the stairs and eventually porcelain teeth to chew our food. Thousands of strangers have every part of my girlfriend’s body, down to the ears. But the one thing they don’t have is a woman in the other room sending herself away. They don’t have that,” cried Raphael. “I have that.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost