sex work stigma Quotes

The U.S. prostitutes are fighting with everybody, shooting at everybody. It's like dating a gangbanger.

I don't understand why prostitution is illegal, Selling is legal, f***ing is legal. So why isn't it legal to sell f***ing? Why should it be illegal to sell something that's legal to give away?

It occurs to me that there's been a relatively recent tendency in the media to see prostitutes as victims and johns as exploiters. I don't think most prostitutes see themselves as victims or see their clients as exploiters, but that way of seeing prostitutes and johns is pretty common now outside of sex-work circles, and it's more shameful to be the exploiter than the exploited.

The worst part about prostitution is that you're obliged not to sell sex only, but your humanity. That's the worst part of it: that what you're selling is your human dignity. Not really so much in bed, but in accepting the agreement - in becoming a bought person.

Prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women's sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be done to, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.

Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession. It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself... in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.

Prostitutes go to jail. Their customers go home and read the New York Times. In this country you're allowed to buy anything. If you need a shirt, you have a right to buy it. If you need sex, you don't. What's more important, sex or a shirt?

There are brothels now that are run a certain way, and women make educated choices to become part of the sex industry. Their health is taken care of, and their children can be put through school. But, sadly, there's the underbelly of that, and I think that back then women did hold a lot more power in that regard.

The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race.

I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one.

The stigma of the prostitute is the badge of her identity. That is why the client goes to her. If he wanted someone without a stigma, he'd go and screw the lady next door.

I'm an honest hoe, and all my hoes is honest.

In Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell.

I think a lot of women look at prostitutes like they're scabs crossing an union picket line, where they go: You can't just go out and sell it for what it's worth, we're holding out for so much more!

No more astounding relic of the subjection of women survives in western civilization than the status of the prostitute.... In connection with what other illegal vice is the seller alone penalized, and not the buyer?

there are scores of thousands of women who are denominated prostitutes, and who are supported by hundreds of thousands of men who should, for like reasons, also be denominated prostitutes, since what will change a woman into a prostitute must also necessarily change a man into the same.

Prostitution is really the only crime in the penal law where two people are doing a thing mutually agreed upon and yet only one, the female partner, is subject to arrest.