"Most people I know won't work with anybody that seems impaired, drunk, stoned, or what have you.  They'll actually come to me and say, 'I think so-and-so's on something,' or, 'I'm not comfortable.'  The idea that everyone's showing up high as a kite in porn and we're all drugged out of our minds -- it's so untrue.  People like that are pushed out of the industry because they self-destruct, and nobody wants to work with them.  Then once they can't get work they try to get on Celebrity Rehab or write memoirs about their life as a tragic porn star, and in my opinion it's very disingenuous.  These people are just con artists working a new con.  They're drug addicts who would have been drug addicts no matter what industry they were in, but they came to porn hoping to be accommodated, hoping to indulge and be indulged.  Then when they're not accommodated, they blame their behavior on the industry.  It actually makes me furious."

-- Nica Noelle, director/owner of Sweetheart Video, in Interview with Nica Noelle on Danny Wylde's trvewestcoastfiction.blogspot.com

"The verb is transitive: someone gives power to another, or encourages them to take power or find power in themselves.  It’s used among those who want to help others identified as oppressed.  In Latin America, in educación popular, one of the great cradles of this kind of concept, the word itself didn’t exist until it was translated back from English.  To many people, if they know it at all, the word empoderamiento sounds strange. It’s an NGO word, used by either volunteer or paid educators who view themselves as helpers of others or fighters for social justice, and is understood to represent the currently ‘politically correct’ way of thinking about ‘third world’, subaltern or marginalised people.  But it remains a transitive verb, which places emphasis on the helper and her vision of her capacity to help, encourage and show the way."

-- Dr. Laura Agustín, in Empowerment, Victims, Violence and Gender Equality on lauraagustin.com

"It is striking that in the year 2001 women should so overwhelmingly be seen as pushed, obligated, coerced or forced when they leave home for the same reason as men: to get ahead through work.  But so entrenched is the idea of women as forming an essential part of home if not actually being it themselves that they are routinely denied the agency to undertake a migration.  So begins a pathetic image of innocent women torn from their homes, coerced into migrating, if not actually shanghaied or sold into slavery.  This is the imagery that nowadays follows those who migrate to places where the only paid occupations available to them are in domestic service or sex work.  The ‘trafficking’ discourse relies on the assumption that it is better for women to stay at home rather than leave it and get into trouble; ‘trouble’ is seen as something that will irreparably damage women (who are grouped with children), while men are routinely expected to encounter and overcome it."

-- Dr Laura Agustín, in Leaving Home for Sex: Prostitution, Sex Work, Travel, Trafficking on lauraagustin.com

"One hardly ever sees mention of prostitution anymore where human sex trafficking is not also invoked.  It's bizarre, this assumption that the vast majority of men are not only paying for sex, but willing to pay for sex with unwilling partners.  Says a lot about what the people making these assumptions think of men, I guess."

-- Dr Brooke Magnanti, in Sex + Sport = Trafficking Hype on sexonomics-uk.blogspot.com

"Charities aside - and, let it be said, there are many worthy and honest ones - there are also the academics, researchers, and writers who earn their living not through hands-on effort, but by writing papers.  Papers which allow them to win grants.  Grants so that they can write more papers.

[...]

For instance, funding for studying trafficking is enormous - in 2009, it was funded worldwide to the tune of nearly a billion US dollars. This is a total greater than the amount of grant money awarded to study lung cancer, which of course, is also devastating, and affects far more people. And spending on trafficking since 2000 has dwarfed the grant awards on such important international health concerns as malnutrition, malaria, or tuberculosis - conditions that kill millions of people worldwide every year, and affect hundreds of millions more. "

-- Dr Brooke Magnanti, in How the Anti-Sex Lobby Profits on sexonomics-uk.blogspot.com

"At least the Salvationists are up-front about their religious motivation.  If anything they tend, as individuals, to be considerably less judgemental than their ideologically-driven counterparts in the feminist movement.  As regards their motivation and objectives, there's little to choose between the two groups: they use the same language of degradation and objectification, and they share the same fundamentally conservative view of a woman's "proper" sexual role.  When it comes to sexual illiberalism, religious and feminist groups have long been in covert and sometimes overt agreement.  Yes, the Salvation Army probably at some level want to convert the women they rescue to Christianity.  But [British anti-sex worker group] Eaves want to convert them to their brand of doctrinaire feminism.  Is that really any better?"

-- The Heresiarch, in Feminists and Evangelicals compete to rescue fallen women on heresycorner.blogspot.com

"18 years later, I'm still stripping.  It's gotten harder in the past few years to explain this.  For most of my years in the industry, I have been a university student.  When I was younger, it was a very plausible story: the stripper working her way through college.  I finished one degree, entered my mid-twenties, decided I was enjoying life too much as it was, so continued stripping, and headed back to school for another degree.  I traveled lots, earned the envy of others while at the same time accumulating greater disdain.  It was celebrated that I was so committed to my education, so well traveled and free-spirited, but there was a growing sense of impatience among my loved ones about when I would exit the sex industry.

[...]

Apparently when you are in the sex industry, the only way to keep it remotely respectable is to have a clearly mapped out plan for your escape.  It doesn’t matter if you are happy, healthy, satisfied.  You MUST have an exit plan."

-- Wrenna Roberston, in The Healing Power of Sex Work on lovesexfamily.com

"I realize that talking shit about strippers might make you feel better about yourself, or justify to you why you think you are a better person/girlfriend/mother/whatever.  We can hear you, and it's dehumanizing.  Believe it or not, comments like, 'That one's so ugly,' 'Ugh, my boobs are so much nicer,' 'At least I don’t have (xyz flaw),' etc. do hurt girls.  This is my body.  I do hear nasty remarks that are made by women, even when you think you're being quiet.  It's hurtful in a deeply personal way.  I am not a flawless body… I'm a human being."

-- Piper, in Women Customers on strippr.tumblr.com

"Abolitionist feminists see sex work as coercive and violent and sex workers as 'prostituted victims' in need of rescue.  Abolitionist feminists are frequently socially and economically privileged citizens of the global north who use their economic and political clout to support and promote the 'rescue industry'.

[...]

By portraying all sex work as violent and all sex workers as naive victims desperate for rescue, abolitionist feminists perpetuate patriarchal stereotypes and silence the very people they are supposedly trying to help.  By refusing to support sex workers in their quest for legitimacy and recognition as workers, they are condemning sex workers to lives in the shadows."

-- Natasha Burge, in Selling Sex: How Abolitionist Feminists Hurt Sex Workers on cchronicle.com

"We have an enormous problem with trying to counter people's emotional arguments with rational facts.

After all, if facts were enough, we wouldn't need scare warnings on cigarettes, since the connection between smoking and lung cancer is well and widely known.

From my point of view, while the evidence is clear, there's a problem with trying to gain support from people who don't already subscribe to this view.  We definitely need to keep pushing the research, but also, try to tap into the emotional argument in a way so people can understand why the facts matter.  Bottom line, when it comes down to Facts vs. Fear Related To Your Kids, most people will choose the fear option 'just to be on the safe side'.

[...]

We need to start thinking about how to make the truth appealing, not inaccessible.  We need to tap into cultural values as much as we already rely on intellectual honesty.  Let's start the discussion."

-- Brooke Magnanti (aka Belle de Jour), in The Irrationality of the Anti-Sex Lobby on freedominapuritanage.co.uk

For me, as a sex worker, this sort of thing ties into my pleas for more of us to be out.  Knowing sex workers, just like knowing queer people, does a lot to chip away at people's prejudices, and ultimately, the laws and politicians put into place by the public.  It's harder to legislate against and disregard the safety of sex workers if your brother or daughter or mom is a sex worker.