The Autobiography of a Sex Worker Quotes

“Even if you’ve been with such men a thousand times, there’s no change in their attitude: ‘I’m a respectable individual; you are a whore.’ They never arrive at the realisation that they are clients.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“I am a sex worker among the intellectuals’ – that is how you described yourself recently, in response to a barbed comment that ‘Nalini is now the intellectual among sex workers”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“I think that femininity is a woman’s strength.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Another change is in the men who come all prepared after watching blue
films. They think it’s possible for people to go on and on for thirty minutes.
Of course, they point out that the film they watched had lasted thirty
minutes! And of course, it’s not they who are at fault, it’s all our
inadequacy! It’s the middle-aged folk who act this silly. The youngsters
aren’t as bad”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Since I was a
fairly good-looking person, no one would give me alms. To be given alms,
you have to create sympathy and that requires high-grade acting.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Those days, clients used to be very
much like husbands. We couldn’t ask them anything about themselves, but
they wanted to know every single thing about us. And even when they
deigned to tell us something about themselves, it would be with a holierthan-
thou attitude.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“With that shift, I grew up as a person; I became very bold, quite ready for
anything. ‘Twirl them around, get your job done, get good wages. But keep
your position without giving in to them,’ I thought. Each step I took
afterwards was in tune with this philosophy.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“To be one's own boss, one has to work.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Etched
in my memory is the picture of Father’s mother coming up close, on all
fours, crawling, because she couldn’t walk. My little brother bawled at her
approach; she was brimming over with affection, trying to sing a lullaby.
She was ninety. I was also scared. But she was afterall our granny, said
Father. That comforted me. My fear finally faded when I was four or five.
The scene is imprinted in my mind: Father’s mother, on all fours, trying to
cuddle a screaming infant.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Getting married is no safeguard against violence, even though the common consensus is that one can bear violence from a husband, but not violence from a client.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“It’s not as if elite women don’t know this; but it is convenient for them not to recognise this. They have much to gain if the divide between ‘dignified’ them and ‘undignified’ us stays intact. However, my co-workers in the sex workers’ organisation know that the divide is very thin.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Time has flown, but still no one tries to look at women as fellow-creatures and beings that can demand sex from them! They view sex as a right they can demand from any woman.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“It was at Mangalore that I met a man waiting for male clients for the first time. It was like seeing an alien creature. This was twenty-seven years ago. Sulaiman had made up his face just like a woman; he was also a broker for women sex workers. When I met him as a broker, I found out that there were many others like him. Now I know many such people who are part of our work. Today in Kerala, there are more male sex workers than female sex workers.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“In 2003, we held the Festival of Pleasure at Thiruvananthapuram, and it caught public attention. The police firing at Muttanga happened around that time, and we changed its name to Festival of No Pleasure.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“My very first documentary was Jwalamukhikal . The second one was Nisabdarakkapettavarilekku Orettinottam ( A Glimpse of the Silenced ). This was about police atrocities.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“When the police fired on the tribals at Muttanga, a large convention was held in protest at Manantavadi, and I also took part in it. I went there because I was invited. When I was called to speak, a young girl came up to the mike and announced loudly that Janu and a sex worker were not to be treated alike. It was clear that someone had made her do that. I didn’t want to create trouble in those circumstances, and so I got up and declared that I wasn’t going to speak. This experience was a good eye-opener with regard to the prejudices that even highly motivated political activists lug around.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Why do we insist that all sexual relations should end in family ties? Do we have to wait till life-long relationships are forged, to know about real sex? Why do we decide that women are only for bearing and rearing children? What is wrong in accepting that lesbianism is family planning?”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Know through the eye’: we often say. There’s sex in seeing; in touching and caressing; and then there’s deep, intense sex. These are all different.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Sex work does not connote only sex. Buying sex may just be limited to a caress. It can be between people of the same sex, and not just between those of the opposite sex. I know many who tax their brains trying to figure out how lesbians can have feelings for each other. That sort of question should never be asked.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“However, he tried to control me, tell me how to spend my money, the same way he used to do with Mother.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“The day before Father had shouted at me, ‘So, you could find only a Christian boy to fall in love with?’, and had given me a beating.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Don’t touch the pitcher with your lips while drinking water, they’d say, Kunhikkavu has to drink from the same vessel!”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“The men who hung around there playing cards sometimes harassed girls. ‘Harass’ is not a euphemism for having sex. It meant satiating their gluttonous craving by pawing and fondling us.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“I saw my mother choke in this house; and this made me realise that pride and dignity come only out of having money.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Father would not permit me to mingle with girls. Our neighbours were Dalits and Christians. Father’s official line was that religion and caste were unnecessary, he was not just a Communist but also a follower of Sree Narayana Guru. Yet, he would not allow us to mingle with people of other castes.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“We used to be really happy if Father wasn’t at home; we couldn’t wait till he went off somewhere or the other. It was then that my older and younger brothers and I played tag and climbed the mango tree. We were very happy when Father was hospitalised for quite a few days because of asthma.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“This is the only pleasant memory I have of my Father — the once-a-month, whole orange.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“It was this experience that made me realise that to be one’s own boss, one had to work. No one had been able to bully us when Mother was working.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“She was dismissed on the pretext that Father had become active in the Communist Party.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker

“Houses as big as ours were few in that locality. To the right, there was a Dalit settlement. In the middle of it, a person called Velayudhan owned a big house.”
― Nalini Jameela, The Autobiography of a Sex Worker