A Quote by Melissa Gira Grant

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.
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.
To this day, I continuously get social media people tweeting doing 'Glorious Bombs' from all over the world. You have little kids doing them. You have moms doing them who have no idea what they're doing, but they're doing it. It's become one of those entertaining things.
Our goal is to tell people about the International Space Station. I think very rarely people look up 250 miles and think, What are those guys working on, what are those men and women doing at this moment... They're living and doing regular things, but also doing incredible work as well. We really want to bring that to people.
I have a little two-bedroom house and that's the way I like it. We live in a time where it's cool to present this luxurious lifestyle on social media. I don't want to be a part of something that makes people not be happy with their own life and crave this false sense of reality. I don't want people who are working that blue-collar job and barely getting by to feel bad. I don't want those people to feel like they're not doing something right because they're not flying around on jets or driving fancy cars. I never want to make them feel like they're not worthy.
After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex. Of course, for some people it isn't work because they need the exercise and they've got the energy for the sex and the sex gives them even more energy. Some people get energy from sex and some people lose energy from sex. I have found that it's too much work. But if you have the time for it, and if you need that exercise-then you should do it.
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.
Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.
People who grow rich almost always improve their sex life. More people want to have sex with them. That's just the way human beings work. Money is power. Power is an aphrodisiac. Money did not make me happy. But it definitely improved my sex life.
Navalny is doing a very important thing in his segment of society. Gudkov is a doing a very important thing in his segment of society. Yabloko, or more accurately, some of the leaders of the Yabloko party, are doing a very important job in their segment of the population, people such as Schlosberg. And our organization Open Russia is also doing important work with its segment of society, because those people who are focused on us, our segment, they're not part of those other segments.
It takes a number of different skill sets, I think, to try and be a good producer. You have to be very creative, but you also have to be incredibly financially minded. I jokingly say the job is kind of part cheerleader and part dictator. It is both of those things, because you have to make sure that people are doing what they need to be doing, but creatively you really need to be helping each person in every job across the crew. Cheering them on, keeping them inspired into doing their best work, and you have the director's vision in the forefront.
I would never want to take away the option of sex work from someone, but I would want to create more options so that everyone can make the decision whether they want to do sex work or they don't want to do sex work, and that people who do sex work can do it safely.
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 think we raised awareness of spice and what it's doing to people in prison. The media is also doing a good job of highlighting how dangerous it is as well, so maybe we can add to that.
People asked me, 'Why aren't you doing something more important?' When I was doing well in the D-League, they were like, 'Why can't you get an NBA job? Or a college job?' I don't think people thought much of what I was doing. That's fine. I was learning. Not just X's and O's, but team dynamics.
I tell cold callers I'm very interested but a bit deaf, my hearing aid is not working properly and can they speak up. The idea is to deliberately miss-hear what they say, ask them to repeat, only louder, and see how loud I can get them to shout. After a while I say "I'm not really deaf" and was just wasting their time, as they were doing with me.
Some people say that if you have sex you can't be enlightened. I think it isn't really so much whether you have sex or not, but it's what you're doing with your attention level during that time.
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