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."

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.

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.

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.

It's a misnomer to say you can criminalize one part of the transaction and not criminalize the entire transaction. For example in Sweden, where the law was passed in 1999. Those laws didn't actually decriminalize people who sell sex; they introduced new criminal penalties for the people who buy sex. Nothing changed in the legal status for the sex workers themselves. It's impossible for them to operate a legal business. When you criminalize part of a transaction, you're creating collateral damage for all those engaged in it. You are now making them work in a criminalized context.

Most people aren't encouraged to think of their labor as very valuable. We usually think of it as the necessary thing we engage in in order to survive. We live in a world where our ability to survive is connected to our ability to draw a paycheck. But there are other ways of organizing labor and culture. For example, people who are pushing for fixed universal base income, or a welfare system that separates wage labor from the compensation required to survive. It was only when I thought of those alternatives that I was able to really understand what we mean when we say sex work is work.

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.