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 GrantI 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.
Melissa Gira GrantWe aren't defined by our work. People think if you over-identify with your work, then that must mean you're giving over too much of yourself to it, that there's something wrong with that. We're trained to believe in things like work-life balance. So much work is tending towards service. It's very much about creating experiences rather than products, and it makes those boundaries between life and work very slippery.
Melissa Gira GrantWe 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 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 GrantI've moved away from writing about and describing actual experiences of sex work, whether mine or anybody else's, because the culture is obsessed with the behavior of sex workers. They want to figure out why they do what they do and who they are. What I'm trying to do is to shift the focus onto the producers of the anti-sex work discourse: the cops, the feminists, the anti-prostitution people. Those are the people whose behavior needs to change.
Melissa Gira GrantAlmost 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