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.

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.

It doesn't service anyone any to say, "This is a terrible violation in any circumstance always," because that robs us of our ability to write our own lives. I've had people cheat on me and it's been devastating, and I've had people cheat on me and felt that it showed their true colors.

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.

I'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.

I remember being in high school in the '90s, and even then somehow hearing about the the Canadian Supreme Court's Butler decision which was meant to keep "obscene" material from entering Canada. The stuff being stopped at the border was almost all lesbian.

We 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.