Playing the Whore Quotes

“People who are profiled by cops as sex workers include, in disproportionate numbers, trans women, women of color, and queer and gender nonconforming youth. This isn't about policing sex. It's about profiling and policing people whose sexuality and gender are considered suspect.”
― Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work

“The presence of money does not remove one's ability to consent. Consent, in and out of sex work, is not just given but constructed, and from multiple factors: setting, time, emotional state, trust, and desire. Desire is contingent on all of these. Consent and desire aren't states frozen in our bodies, tapped into and felt or offered. They are formed.”
― Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work

“These strands of the movement converge and go their own ways, but their common purpose is to value and believe the experiences of people who sell sex, to insist that it is not sex work that degrades us but those people who use our experiences to justify degradation.”
― Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work

“If the sex workers standing in the doorways in Phnom Penh's red-light district looked out on the street with fear, it could be just as likely from the prospect of rescue as due to any customer.”
― Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work