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.

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?

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?

What shocked me was three different anti-prostitution feminists asking me to justify that I had been a sex worker, to prove it. That either I hadn't done enough sex work by their standards, or I hadn't done the right kind in order to have the right to speak about it. I couldn't understand them. I'm not speaking for you. I'm not speaking "for" anyone. I'm trying to put together this picture of the different forces that are producing a result in the lives of sex workers. You can't contest the fact that tons of people are going to jail and experiencing violence.

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."

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.

Even 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?