A Quote by Melissa Gira Grant
I think the anti-prostitution feminists need to do some consciousness-raising amongst themselves about their feelings. But that's a different political activity. Asking ourselves, how do we feel about the fact that our boyfriends, our husbands, our male partners might hire sex workers? They should have that conversation, but they shouldn't attach it to policy conversations that affect people.
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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'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.
Its [Dreams from My Father] also a reflection about how we might start a better conversation in our democracy about how to solve problems, because it feels as if our political system - it just seems there is so much cynicism and negativity in our politics.
Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.
The truth is that we won’t receive the support we need until we ask for it. Just because we can do it all doesn’t mean we should. And when we don’t speak up about our needs, we’re asking our loved ones to read our minds—and then we resent them when they fail our test. By not being open and honest about the support we need, we’re selling ourselves short and setting our relationships up for failure.
Many of our feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction have their roots in how we compare ourselves to others. When we compare ourselves to those who have more, we feel bad. When we compare ourselves to those who have less, we feel grateful. Even though the truth is we have exactly the same life either way, our feelings about our life can vary tremendously based on who we compare ourselves with. Compare yourself with those examples that are meaningful but that make you feel comfortable with who you are and what you have.
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.
But how can we love someone if we don't like him? Easy-we do it to ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender, comfortable feelings about ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we always love ourselves: we always seek our own good. Indeed, we feel dislike toward ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because we love ourselves; because we care about our good, we are impatient with our bad.
Sex workers are the last women police stand in to protect. Sex workers are the last people that room is made for in many ways. You get a different kind of feminism if you put people at the margins at the center. It's a recently resonant lesson, but black feminists have been saying this for decades. Now when I talk to people engaged in sex workers' rights advocacy and people who identify as intersectional feminists, this is the air they breathe. We can't just make feminism about improving the lives of all women. Because there is no such thing as all women and universal female experience.
Our relationship to money reflects how we feel about our power to affect the world. Since money is a mirror of our consciousness, the more comfortable we are with being powerful, the more money we are likely to create in our lives.
Not enough of our society is trained how to understand and interpret quantitative information. This activity is a centerpiece of science literacy to which we should all strive-the future health, wealth, and security of our democracy depend on it. Until that is achieved, we are at risk of making under-informed decisions that affect ourselves, our communities, our country, and even the world.
There is a quality of murky grandeur we give ourselves in having our own feelings, recoiling, separate from other things... To feel that we can care for ourselves without seeing our feelings as objects, and liking them as objects, is to be wrong about our care for ourselves.
I do feel that the world is entering into a period of the incredible period of reflection and introspection. A lot of people are questioning the future, and I can't help but think that's a positive thing. I'm not sure about the art world, but the design world may be able to offer some solutions. Design is about troubleshooting. As a designer, I ultimately feel like a gun for hire. Companies hire me because they've got a problem. That's kind of what it boils down to. And I think this is a moment in our history where we need different solutions.
If you don't put the spiritual and religious dimension into our political conversation, you won't be asking the really big and important question. If you don't bring in values and religion, you'll be asking superficial questions. What is life all about? What is our relationship to God? These are the important questions. What is our obligation to one another and community? If we don't ask those questions, the residual questions that we're asking aren't as interesting.
We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.
Most of the time, people are not actually concerned with prostitution and sex work. They're concerned about seeing people who they think are prostitutes and sex workers in their community. Sometimes this just comes down to profiling, the feeling of "I don't want someone who looks like that in my neighborhood." We need communities and neighbors to regard sex workers as part of the community and fellow neighbors. But that's really difficult. There's certainly nothing supporting that.
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