Prostitution Quotes
More Prostitution Quotes
prostitution is not a monolith. The newspapers use the plight of the most vulnerable women to symbolize the entire field, ignoring the diversity of the sex-worker community.
Carol Leigh— Quoted in: "Slick S.F. posters advocate decriminalizing prostitution" by Kevin Foley, San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 1995.
prostitution. Selling one's body to keep one's soul?one might say of most modern marriages that they were selling one's soul to keep one's body.
Sir (Edward Montague) Compton MacKenzie— 1918 The Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett, bk.2, ch.5.
What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?
— 1985 Nights at the Circus,'London 2'.
One of the differences between marriage and prostitution is that in marriage you only have to make a deal with one man.
Andrea Dworkin— 1984 In The A.B.C.s of Reading, winter issue. Collected as 'Feminism: An Agenda' in Letters from a War Zone (1988).
Necessity never makes prostitution the business of men's lives; though numberless are the women who are thus rendered systematically vicious.
— 1792 AVindication of the Rights ofWoman, pt.1, ch.4.
prostitution myths justify the existence of prostitution, promote misinformation about prostitution, and contribute to a social climate that exploits and harms not only prostituted women but all women.
melissa farley— "Attitudes toward Prostitution and Acceptance of Rape Myths" in Journal of Applied Social Psychology Vol. 32, issue 9 (2002), p. 1790 - 1796; co-written with A. Cotton, and R. Baron
For many women, the experience of prostitution stems from the historical trauma of colonization.
melissa farley— "Prostitution in Vancouver: Violence and the Colonization of First Nations Women" in Transcultural Psychiatry 42 (2005), p. 242 - 271; co-written with J Lynne and A Cotton
Within the gendered institution of prostitution, race and class create a hierarchy with indigenous women at its lowest point.
melissa farley— "Prostitution in Vancouver: Violence and the Colonization of First Nations Women" in Transcultural Psychiatry 42 (2005), p. 242 - 271; co-written with J Lynne and A Cotton
What I do for a living is somewhat like mercenary prostitution... I spend a lot of energy trying to find games to bring to alternate platforms, like Linux and MacOS, and in my free time, I work on various open source projects, and other freebies like that... so I guess I'm a hooker with a heart of gold, sorta.
ryan c. gordon— Quoted in Michael Larabel, "An Interview with Ryan C. Gordon" Phoronix (2003-09-08)
The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race.
isabel paterson— p. 93 (The God of the Machine (1943))
I'd rather be in Las Vegas 104 degrees than New York 90 degrees, you know why? Legalized prostitution. In any weather that takes the edge off.
ray romano— as "Patient #3" to Dr. Katz in Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist
Feminists are often asked whether pornography causes rape. The fact is that rape and prostitution caused and continue to cause pornography. Politically, culturally, socially, sexually, and economically, rape and prostitution generated pornography; and pornography depends for its continued existence on the rape and prostitution of women.
Andrea Dworkin— Pornography and Male Supremacy (1981), Letters from a War Zone, p 230.
Anti-feminism is also operating whenever any political group is ready to sacrifice one group of women, one faction, some women, some kinds of women, to any element of sex-class oppression: to pornography, to rape, to battery, to economic exploitation, to reproductive exploitation, to prostitution. There are women all along the male-defined political spectrum, including both extreme ends of it, ready to sacrifice some women, usually not themselves, to the brothels or the farms. The sacrifice is profoundly anti-feminist; it is also profoundly immoral...
Andrea Dworkin— "Anti-feminism," Right Wing Women (1983), pp. 230-231.
...pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity – the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her.
Andrea Dworkin— Pornography, Men Possessing Women, Introduction (1979, pg. xxvii).
"If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the commercial growth of prostitution."
darl mcbride— Linus Torvalds
If regular visits with prostitutes kept the political class from launching trillion-dollar war- and welfare programs, and financing Fanny, Freddy and the Fed I would personally contribute to a prostitution fund for Washington whores. The prostitutes would be the patriots.
ilana mercer— “Uncle Sam turns tricks (& stiffs sex workers),” RT, May 11, 2012.
Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name.
camille paglia— p. 11 (Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992))
A male has the right to wander about as he pleases. He has the right to marry any number of girls. This practice has led to prostitution.
periyar e. v. ramasamy— Veeramani, Collected Works of Periyar, p. 513.
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
nassim nicholas taleb— p. 4 (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010))
That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors.
rebecca west— Chapter VI (The Thinking Reed (1936))
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.
— Nassim N. Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 4
[in India] Any sexual intercourse outside socially acceptable unions is likely to be regarded as prostitution.
— New Internationalist, Issue 252 - February 1994.
If regular visits with prostitutes kept the political class from launching trillion-dollar war- and welfare programs, and financing Fanny, Freddy and the Fed I would personally contribute to a prostitution fund for Washington whores. The prostitutes would be the patriots.
— “Uncle Sam turns tricks (& stiffs sex workers),” RT, May 11, 2012.
prostitution is said to be the world’s oldest profession . It is, indeed, a model of all professional work: the worker relinquishes control over himself … in exchange for money. Because of the passivity it entails, this is a difficult and, for many, a distasteful role.
thomas szasz— p. 45 (The Second Sin (1973))
[P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
— Richard Stallman, link, 28 June, 2003.
Plato … says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.
Allan Bloom— “Commerce and Culture,” p. 286
The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry , in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts.
philip wylie— p. 74 (Generation of Vipers (1942))
