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 GrantWhen 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 GrantEven at legal brothels, sex workers have very little power and control over their workplace. They might have power with their customers on a case-by-case basis in terms of what they want to do and not do, but they don't necessarily have a lot of power in how that business operates. There's this presumption that sex workers are broken people, so how could they engage in something like workplace democracy? How could they even have demands?
Melissa Gira GrantKristin 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 GrantOur feelings alone don't change what happens with the police, what happens in jail, what happens when someone tries to go to the welfare office, the unemployment office, or any kind of state agency where a criminal record comes up for prostitution. How we feel about the commodification of sexuality and violence doesn't actually translate to those people's lives. A lot of the debate is really academic and a waste of time.
Melissa Gira GrantWe'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 GrantI 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