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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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 wouldn't advocate for a feminism that's buttoned-up and divorced of the messiness of our real lives. Your feelings are your feelings, but you're not going to litigate your feelings about my body. The feminist ethics that I signed up for were respect for my bodily autonomy, that my experience is my experience, and that I'm an expert in my own life.