Sex Workers Quotes

“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

“If a girl wants to sell her body, so be it. None of my business. Don't athletes sell their bodies, too? People can do behind closed doors whatever they want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Bad Choices Make Good Stories - Going to New York

“Prostitution isn't illegal to protect women. Prostitutes would be much safer if it was legal. It's illegal to protect men. Men are addicted to sex. Sex is like heroin to men. If all women were allowed to charge admission to their pussy, they would have total control over men and it would cause a giant wealth transfer. Men would go broke and women would end up with all the money and power.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert: Comics, Deep Thoughts and Quotable Quotes

“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

“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

“All celebrities that tell you to wear masks are feeding the system of fear. All celebrities that wear masks are hiding their shadow self, the side that hires sex workers for their hidden sexual satisfaction while acting married and monogamist or single and celibate.”
― Deborah Bravandt

“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

“Prostitution is not exactly a reputable business over there either, even though the girls actually have to pay taxes on their earnings, and submit to regular health check ups. Even the prostitutes have universal healthcare over there. The benefit of legal prostitution is obvious: tax income for the city, healthier girls, and safety. In Amsterdam, each girl has an alarm button next to her bed that she can press if one of her "customers" tries to rape or hurt her. The police will arrive within minutes and protect the girl from harm.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Bad Choices Make Good Stories - Going to New York

“...the whores were the strongest social group in the whole country.”
― Arturo Arias, After the Bombs

“Within their distinct niche markets, sex workers employ competing technologies of embodiment that in turn reveal how desire reflects and constructs different national formations in the global imaginary.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Feminist conversations about sex work are often seen as arguments between those who are 'sex positive' and those who are 'sex negative.' . . . We have no interest in positioning ourselves within that terrain. Instead, we assert the right for all women to be 'sex ambivalent.”
― Juno Mac & Molly Smith

“I know porn stars are supposed to be the height of sexual immorality or some bullshit. The way I see it, we’re providing a service. We’re here for all the sexually confused men out there, all the women who want to explore their own sexuality more, couples who want to spice up their love life, and all the millions of men and women who are bored and horny. We’re practically fucking saints. Pun intended.”
― Nora Phoenix

“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

“Love is
more than
blind.
It's
brain-dead.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Tricks

“There are
more imperfect
diamonds than
flawless stones.
So, what the hell?
I'll give it a try,
and do my best
to
keep
moving
forward.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Traffick

“I saw a documentary about prostitution in Holland a few years ago, that said over there health insurance actually pays for monthly visits to a prostitute for the disabled, because they feel that sex is part of a healthy life, so unmarried disabled men have a right to have sex, even if it's with a paid prostitute. Pretty bizarre, huh? Can you imagine a US health insurance company picking up the bill for your romp in the hay with a hooker?”
― Oliver Markus Malloy

“Therefore, while changes in the global economy structure relations of intimacy between clients and sex workers, intimacy also serves as a vital form of currency that shapes economic and political relations.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“As I sat on the back of his bike, Anh Bao pointed out local sex workers he recognized as they walked out of a bar with their arms wrapped around Viet Kieu men. He had gotten to know these women when he parked his bike outside the bar around closing time to offer cheap rides home to the women who had been unable to secure a client for the evening. Over the course of nearly three hours spent cycling the city, I took everything in—making mental notes of things I would later enter into my research. Anh Bao was a storyteller; and as we stopped outside each place, I propped on his bike laughing as he made up dramatic scenarios about the kinds of love affairs that occurred in each segment of the sex industry.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang

“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

“Sit in a chair and keep still. Let the dancer's shoulders emerge from your shoulders, the dancer's chest from your chest, the dancer's loins from your loins, the dancer's hips and thighs from yours; and from your silence the throat that makes a sound, and from your bafflement a clear song to which the dancer moves...”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy

“Women in prostitution tend to perceive the male as the root cause of their fall, and if anything the rudeness of those who frequent them further deepens their antipathy towards men. Besides, having lost their inhibitions through constant exposure to assorted males, the whores become coarse to settle scores even with those they solicit. Yet with a considerate man, the innate woman in them comes alive, inducing them to shower themselves on him and it is thus they make such feel at home even in their brothels.”
― B.S. Murthy, Benign Flame: Saga of Love

“Money and looks are Ok to an extent to lure women, but better realise that it’s the luck that enables one to lay them. Why, you can’t even screw a whore if you’re not destined to have her for your visit to the brothel would’ve coincided with her periods, and the next time you’re eager, she could’ve shifted out of the town itself.”
― B.S. Murthy, Benign Flame: Saga of Love

“When the police cracked down, did the sex workers simply move one or two streets over?
...
Was there displacement? There was not.

It turns out that most [sex workers] would rather try something else, leave the field entirely, change their behavior, than shift their location.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking To Strangers: What We Don't Know About Strangers

“Ghost Wail Square by Stewart Stafford

There's a place that canines shun,
In The Witching Hour stark,
Dogs wandering misty avenues,
Flee from Pandora's Park.

Nicknamed Ghost Wail Square,
Once whispered as Harlot's Row,
Twilight cobblestones flooded with blood,
Extinguished collusion's glow.

Blue bloodlust inflamed there,
In scented carriages and filthy lanes,
Carnivores at the butcher's block,
As they scattered ill-gotten gains.

At Devil's Hour, the horror peaks,
Death rattle knocks on doors,
As screams for mercy fill the air,
No rescue missions for whores.

A killer sheltered 'neath potent wings,
A skittish stranger to the noose,
Then sewn mouths shall speak,
As festering skeletons slip loose.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Of course when the history books tell of the groups murdered by the Nazis, they never list the prostitutes, because I'm sure the mention of their deaths is considered a stain on the other victims. The attitude is that the lives of prostitutes are worthless. I think it is self-hate. Our world hates anyone who would accept us and our bodies, and our secret desires without reservation. But that is what the ladies taught me... to welcome disdained things.”
― Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Vol. 1

“Kadınlar da konuşuyorlar hani. Bütün ezilen topluluklar gibi, kadınlar da konuşkan insanlardır, çünkü onlara başka hiçbir anlatım olanağı tanınmaz.”
― Kate Millett, The Prostitution Papers: A Quartet For Female Voice

“Und eins sollte keine und keiner von denen, die immer wieder predigen, Prostitution sei „Sexarbeit“ und ein Beruf wie jeder andere, eine ganz normale Dienstleistung, je vergessen: Wenn wir uns als Gesellschaft dafür entscheiden, dass Sex Arbeit ist, müsste man Prostitution auch dir auf dem Arbeitsamt als Jobangebot unterbreiten dürfen, und außerdem wird jeder Typ, der dir nachts auf der Straße hinterherpfeift und ruft: „Ey, Süße, willste ficken?“, keine sexuelle Belästigung begangen, sondern dir einfach nur ein Jobangebot gemacht haben.”
― Huschke Mau, Entmenschlicht - Warum wir Prostitution abschaffen müssen