“I’ve only ever met one woman who actually was a prostitute of her own free will.”
The Humanist interview (2012)
Context: If someone wants to be called a sex worker, I call them a sex worker. But there is a problem with that term, because while it was adopted in goodwill, traffickers have taken it and essentially said, “Okay, if it’s work like any other, somebody has to do it.” In Nevada, there was a time when you couldn’t get unemployment unless you tried sex work first. The same was true in Germany. So the state became a procurer because of the argument that sex is work like any other. This is not a good thing.
I also do not feel proud when I stand in the Sonagachi, the biggest brothel area in all of South Asia. It’s in Kolkata, and everything is written in Bengali except “SEX WORK.” And the term is used in various sinister ways by sex traffickers, who even describe what they do — which is to kidnap or buy people out of villages — as “facilitated migration.”
I’ve only ever met one woman who actually was a prostitute of her own free will. She didn’t have a pimp. She could pick and choose her customers. That’s so rare. So we have to look at the reality and not romanticize it. We have to be clear that you have the right to sell your own body but nobody has the right to sell anybody else’s body. No one has that right.
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Gloria Steinem 97
American feminist and journalist 1934Related quotes
Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 8, "Birth Control; A Parents' Problem or Woman's?"
"True Liberation Of Women" http://gos.sbc.edu/g/gandhi1.html, speech, inauguration of the All-India Women's Conference Building Complex in New Delhi, India (March 26, 1980). Published in Selected Speeches and Writings of Indira Gandhi, September 1972-March 1977 (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1984, pp. 417-418).
[The Quest for beauty, http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/10/01/quest/index.html, June 16 2006]
Introduction http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/PornIntro2.html, p xxvii.
Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)
In an interview in Film Quarterly, Winter 1991-92
Interviews
“You are martyred, as woman is ever martyred, particularly if she seeks her own power.”
Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 19 (p. 446)
Chronicle "Interdit aux hommes" (Forbidden to men), by Doris Veillette-Hamel, Journal Le Nouvelliste, March 24, 1973, page 17.
Chronicle "Forbidden to men", 1973