quotations about prostitution
Prostitution is not just a service industry, mopping up the overflow of male demand, which always exceeds female supply. Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex.... Prostitutes, pornographers, and their patrons are marauders in the forest of archaic night.
CAMILLE PAGLIA
Sexual Personae
People need to disabuse themselves of the notion that prostitution is a voluntary choice. People prostitute when they don't think they have other options. They often do it after being tricked, forced or compromised into selling themselves sexually. Renegades -- women or young girls who try to operate solo -- don't last long.
MARY SANCHEZ
"Online sex trafficking flourishing", San Angelo Standard Times, January 17, 2017
Pimps troll Backpage and similar sites, too. They're on the lookout for newbies, anyone who might cut into their business. Then they go get them. The approach might be slow: The woman is contacted and taken on a few dates, which might entail buying them clothes, drugs or a new hairstyle. Then they are told that it's payback time. Don't like it? That's when the abuse starts.
MARY SANCHEZ
"Online sex trafficking flourishing", San Angelo Standard Times, January 17, 2017
Prostitution requires for its diminution not only laws, well enforced, to abolish the traffic in womanhood; not only better social protection against harpies who seduce young girls seeking an honest livelihood; not only better chaperonage of young girls in exposed occupations; not only better opportunities for natural enjoyment of youthful pleasure under morally safe conditions; not only these--but most of all, greater power on the part of the average young girl to earn her own support under right conditions and for a living wage.
ANNA GARLIN SPENCER
Woman's Share in Social Culture
Prostitution was not a question of regulating venereal disease and the physical boundaries of immorality. What this issue was all about was plugging a moral leakage from which the whole society was thought to be suffering.
NILS JOHAN RINGDAL
Love for Sale
I'm nobody's idea of what a whore looks like. Maybe that's why I'm scary.
JEANNETTE ANGELL
Callgirl
When prostitution is a crime, the message conveyed is that women who are sexual are "bad," and therefore legitimate victims of sexual assault. Sex becomes a weapon to be used by men.
MARGO ST. JAMES
San Francisco Examiner, April 29, 1979
Prostitution is a fiercely competitive business. The rules are simple. The younger the merchandise, the higher the profits they can draw -- but not for themselves. The money goes to the pimps.
MARY SANCHEZ
"Online sex trafficking flourishing", San Angelo Standard Times, January 17, 2017
No one would accept prostitution as a legitimate career if they were forced to confront the statistics which lie below the surface.
BLAKE YOUNG
"Talking Point: We would best be freed from the scourge of sex work", The Mercury, January 12, 2017
I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness.
PATRICK DEWITT
The Sisters Brothers
Don't use your bedroom for work, unless you're a prostitute.
DAVID LETTERMAN
"Top Ten Sleep Recommendations From The National Sleep Foundation", Late Show with David Letterman, February 3, 2015
Recent numbers released by the FBI show human trafficking for the use of prostitution is the fastest growing business of organized crime and the third largest criminal enterprise in the world.
BRIAN GRAVES
"Human Trafficking: Operation Temptation sting nets 23 arrests", Cleveland Daily Banner, January 11, 2017
To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Anarchism and Other Essays
Did Trump really come and meet with Moscow prostitutes? Firstly he is an adult, and secondly he is a person who for many years has organized a beauty pageant, socialized with the most beautiful women in the world. It is hard to believe that he ran to a hotel to meet with our girls of a low social class, although they are the best in the world.
VLADIMIR PUTIN
"Vladimir Putin dismisses Donald Trump dossier claims as 'rubbish'", CNN, January 18, 2017
Any argument against making [prostitution] legal is really a reaction to fear. It's time that we got rid of some of our fears and thought about both the safety and well-being of everyone involved, and about the fact that taxing this profession would bring in substantial revenue that could be used for all sorts of positive social services.
JEANNETTE ANGELL
"A Wellness Perspective on Prostitution, Freedom, Religion, and More", Seek Wellness, April 30, 2005
Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men!... The economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Feminism
Prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women's sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.
JULIE BURCHILL
"Born Again Cows", Damaged Gods
There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
"On Women", Studies in Pessimism
Our understanding of prostitution is often coloured by simplicity and generalisation. Film and television have left many with a sanitised, even a romanticised idea of what sex work actually looks like. We tend to see prostitution as being a simple matter of unusual consent. A man who wants to have sex and a prostitute (usually a woman) who is willing to have sex with that man for a price. This is a naive understanding and it permits the public to accept three critical errors in reasoning made by activists. First among these is the claim the sex industry is safe.
BLAKE YOUNG
"Talking Point: We would best be freed from the scourge of sex work", The Mercury, January 12, 2017
The street-walkers were much more in evidence then than they are to-day; or is it only that they were more in evidence to a youth under seventeen than they are to a man over seventy? I do not think that is all. That I should not be accosted now as I often was then is natural enough; but I have eyes to see and some common sense to judge whether the women I see upon the broad and well-lighted streets between eleven and twelve o'clock are professionals or not. The upper gallery in most, if not all, of the theaters was reserved for such women, where they might ply their trade, and no woman was allowed on the floor or in the first gallery of most theaters unless accompanied by a man as a guarantee of her respectability.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Reminiscences