Latest Melissa Gira Grant Quotes from Interviews

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Once when I told sex workers about my own sex work, it ended up building inappropriate trust with some people. But there have been events now - like covering the protests against Backpage at the Village Voice - where I've talked to sex workers who don't necessarily know that I've done sex work.

Melissa Gira Grant

People, Done, Inappropriate

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
I have to do this all the time - choosing what to print based on how it might come back to harm people from whom I've earned trust.

Melissa Gira Grant

People, Print

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
I respect people who come forward and speak, but I'm not asking most of the sex workers I interview now about their work. I'm asking them about their lives in general or their political organizing. I take pains source things pointing back to intellectual work that sex workers have produced, because that's really absent.

Melissa Gira Grant

Dolor, Gente, Política

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
When I interviewed the evangelical Christian youth group who were protesting the Village Voice, I wanted them to feel they could freely tell me things like, "Did you know that 90 percent of prostitutes don't want to be doing it?" Is that unfair? That's sort of an invisible privilege for me.

Melissa Gira Grant

Christian, Youth, Invisible

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
I've always been a writer. I started getting paid for writing in college. Where it transitioned from commentary to journalism was in that shift - not wanting to write personal stories because people are hungry in not necessarily great ways for the sexy, sexy, sex work story. I was trying to shift the focus, and journalism was the tool I needed to write about people outside my own life and range of experience.

Melissa Gira Grant

Sexy, Writing, College

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
Almost everything I've learned about journalism has been from other friends who are journalists, taking advantage of the money I hope they don't think they threw away at j-school. I studied comparative literature, but the professional vagaries of journalism I've learned through other people's trial and error, and my own.

Melissa Gira Grant

Thinking, Literature, Journalism

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
Another sex worker and writer I respect put it this way: she said that as a writer, you're not about pleasing people, and as a sex worker it's all about pleasing people. It's all about creating this fantasy. I still feel like as a writer you actually do have put on a show. You can't just hand over your notes. And there is a degree to which you are appealing to the reader's vanity, whether you tell yourself you're doing that or not.

Melissa Gira Grant

People, Over You, Fantasy

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
It doesn't service anyone any to say, "This is a terrible violation in any circumstance always," because that robs us of our ability to write our own lives. I've had people cheat on me and it's been devastating, and I've had people cheat on me and felt that it showed their true colors.

Melissa Gira Grant

Writing, People, Cheat

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
Say you're a sex worker and your partner knows you're a sex worker, but you're not out to your family. That could be very dangerous, particularly in an unhealthy relationship, where it could be a recipe for conflict, for something potentially violent that could lead to someone going to jail. There's so much pressure because of the criminalization and stigma. If we lifted that, it's only going to benefit more women.

Melissa Gira Grant

Conflict, Violent, Dangerous

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
I don't use "feelings" as a diminutive word. I'm trying to take feelings back. I think of everyone on the internet whose response to everything is: "#Feelings! This is important, this is real, this is significant!" That connects to power, too. Wanting to feel like you have power and control over your life.

Melissa Gira Grant

Real, Thinking, Over You

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
In the current situation with criminalization, we've created situations where sex workers have very little power and control over their lives. Increasing one group of women's power and control over their lives does not take anything away from other women. When a woman's value has been constructed as keeping a man and keeping him faithful, then when he's not we've been taught to internalize that there's something wrong with us.

Melissa Gira Grant

Men, Faithful, Situation

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
Anything that is going to be good for sex workers is going to be good for women across the board. Less women in jail is going to be good for all of us.

Melissa Gira Grant

Sé bueno

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
Kristin Gwynne has been writing some great stuff about the sexually violent element of "stop-and-frisk." This isn't just "turn out your pockets." This is young people being groped. That form of power - using sexuality for power and control - seems pretty straightforward to me. When are we going to just say that the cops are the enemy here?

Melissa Gira Grant

Writing, People, Enemy

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
I went to college in Amherst and lived in Northampton for many years and we had our quaint little feminist sex toy shop that somehow made it in town and wasn't scandalous. But you still got the vibe once in awhile that this didn't used to be okay. That twenty years ago women would have come in saying, "You can't sell realistic-looking sex toys. You have to only sell things that look like dolphins or something."

Melissa Gira Grant

College, Feminist, Okay

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
I remember being in high school in the '90s, and even then somehow hearing about the the Canadian Supreme Court's Butler decision which was meant to keep "obscene" material from entering Canada. The stuff being stopped at the border was almost all lesbian.

Melissa Gira Grant

School, Decision, Remember

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
We're missing a lot of the real-life stories of what people's work looks like. Those are the people that I want sitting on the zoning board meetings, on the zoning commissions. Those are the people I want participating in business improvement in their own industry. The gentrification processes that often happen in cities so often manifest in street sweeps of sex workers. How do you get sex workers on neighborhood associations, regarded as members of the neighborhood?

Melissa Gira Grant

People, Missing, Improvement

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
We hear from sex workers who have through their own volition become media figures, or have despite their own wishes become media figures. Like Ashley Dupré, who has a sex advice column in the New York Post. You get outed and then people expect you to write a memoir because they think, what else are you going to do with your life?

Melissa Gira Grant

Escribir, Pensar, Personas

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
I hesitate talking about a program for change because we're in this moment where no one is listening to sex workers about how things should change. So I'm even speaking less as a former sex worker and more as a person trying to see the bigger picture that might be hard to see when you're doing sex work full-time, or running a social service organization, or doing all the things that a lot of sex worker activists are doing. It's hard work, and they don't necessarily get the time to step back and see the whole picture.

Melissa Gira Grant

Running, Hard Work, Listening

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
A lot of the political change that could happen is going to be super boring.

Melissa Gira Grant

Political, Boring

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
It makes me so angry when people say, "We never hear from people who are happy doing sex work." Well, that's because they're working. The activism privileges people who hated doing sex work, are no longer doing it, and have a job at a social service organization, for example, that trains them on how to speak to the media. We are hearing from those people quite a bit.

Melissa Gira Grant

People, Speak, Activism

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
Women in the past thought all they had to do was see if he comes home late, or smells like cigarettes. But nothing's really changed, right? People still cheat. They're going to do what they're going to do. But now that sex work is more private, there's that chance to have a double life.

Melissa Gira Grant

Home, Past, People

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
This is the hardest thing to articulate: I think that there is a legitimate space for sexual commerce. And like every other industry, particularly the service industry, the workers are getting the short end of the stick. Are there some industries that just shouldn't exist? Yes. But I don't think the sex industry is one of them. As it currently operates it's not damaging, necessarily, but it might itself be damaged. It's busted.

Melissa Gira Grant

Pensar

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
Look at how successful the domestic workers movement has been. But it's different when it's your husband hiring someone. Domestic workers quite literally say, "You need to get your house in order. You can't join this movement unless you look at yourself." And they're very forgiving, amnesty for everyone. "You haven't been paying into your nanny's unemployment insurance? That's cool, we'll teach you how to get right and go from there." What would the parallel be around sex workers? I don't know if there can be one.

Melissa Gira Grant

Husband, Successful, House

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
Everyone's politics are born of self-interest, particularly around sexuality. We just have to own up to that.

Melissa Gira Grant

Sexualidad

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com
It's actually not much of a risk to say, "I don't think we should put sex workers in jail." That's a decent, normal thing you should believe. But then what are you going to do about it?

Melissa Gira Grant

Believe, Thinking, Risk

Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

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Melissa Gira Grant

Fecha de nacimiento: 1978
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