Revolting Prostitutes Quotes

“There is no progressive version of criminalisation. Abuses such as racist policing, corruption, and sexual assault are fundamentally bound up with the vulnerability of the sex worker who, when defined as criminal, has little recourse to justice or protection.”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“A sex worker who is living precariously or in poverty, who is at risk of criminalization or police violence, or who is being exploited by a manager or lacks negotiating power is not likely to be particularly 'sex positive' at work. These factors are structural, not a function of the worker's state of enlightenment.”
― Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“the police appear as the most benevolent protectors in the minds of those who encounter them the least.”
― Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“There are no throwaway people. If you care about the most marginalised people in society, why not start from thinking about what can be given to them?”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“Sex workers are the original feminists. Often seen as merely subject to others' whims, in fact, sex workers have shaped and contributed to social movements across the world. In medieval Europe, brother workers formed guilds and occasionally engaged in strikes or street protests in response to crackdowns, workplace closures, or unacceptable working conditions. Fifteenth-century prostitutes, arraigned before city councils in Bavaria, asserted that their activities constituted work rather than a sin. One prostitute (under the pseudonym Another Unfortunate) wrote to the Times of London in 1859 to state, "I conduct myself prudently, and defy you and your policemen too Why stand you there mouthing with sleek face about morality? What is morality?”
― Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights

“Why are these people the only voices you are hearing? What structures are silencing the others?”
― Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“Uncritical use of the term trafficking is doing the ideological work required for these contradictions to ‘make sense’; it hides how anti-migrant policies produce the harm that we call trafficking, enabling anti-migrant politicians to posture as anti-trafficking heroes even as they enact their anti-migrant policies.”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“Uncritical use of the term trafficking is doing the ideological work required for these contradictions to ‘make sense’; it hides how anti-migrant policies produce the harm that we call trafficking, enabling anti-migrant politicians to posture as anti-trafficking heroes even as they enact their anti-migrant policies.”
― Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“Representation is a feminist issue, and campaigns to get women into boardrooms, into government cabinets, and onto banknotes are all very well. But all this is ineffectual without a material analysis of working class lives. To only examine the way sex workers are represented in society – instead of the mechanisms of their oppression – is a politics of gesture.”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“What the Left actually favours is labour rights, to redress the balance of power between employers and workers. In a capitalist society, when you criminalise something, capitalism still happens in that market. When we are asked, in a capitalist society, to choose between criminalising commercial sex and decriminalising it, we are not offered an option for the ‘free market’ to not govern the proceedings.”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“All I can think of is drudgery. It’s rotten and hopeless; not even half a life. It’s immoral. Yet as I say, it’s expected of working class women that they deny themselves everything … Why should I have to put up with a middle class feminist asking me why I didn’t ‘do anything – scrub toilets, even?’ than become a stripper? What’s so liberating about cleaning up other people’s shit?”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“The worker’s interests are not identical to those of the client. Ultimately, the worker is there because they are interested in getting paid, and this economic imperative is materially different from the client’s interest in recreational sex.”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

“Prostitution is heavy with meaning and brings up deeply felt emotions. This is especially the case for people who have not sold sex, and who think of it in symbolic tenns. The idea of prostitution serves as a lightning rod for questions about work, masculinity, class, bodies; about archetypal villainy and punishment; about who 'deserves' what; about what it means to live in a community; and about what it means to push some people outside that community's boundaries. Attitudes towards prostitution have always been strongly tied to questions of race, borders, migration, and national identity in ways which are sometimes overt but often hidden. Sex work is the vault in which society stores some of its keenest fears and anxieties. Perhaps the most difficult questions raised by prostitution involve what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society.”
― Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights