"The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?"
About this Quote
Quindlen’s move is to take a moralized hot button and strip it down to a blunt, almost bureaucratic inconsistency: same act, same bodies, same risk, different legal universe because money crosses the air between them. The question is phrased like common sense, but it’s a trap for the listener’s reflexes. If you feel an immediate need to distinguish the two situations, she’s forcing you to name what you actually object to - exploitation, coercion, public health, patriarchy, “decency” - rather than hiding behind the softer rhetoric of “privacy.”
The intent is journalistic in the best way: not to romanticize sex work, but to interrogate why the state gets to decide which female sexual choices count as autonomous and which get recast as social threat. The bar hookup is framed as “private” because it fits a culturally legible script: messy, maybe regrettable, but still within the sanctioned realm of desire. Add $100 and suddenly the same behavior becomes a matter of policing, courts, and stigma. That pivot exposes how “privacy” is selectively granted, often to protect conventional sexuality rather than women.
The subtext is also about class and credibility. Money doesn’t just change the act; it changes who society believes is entitled to sexual freedom without surveillance. Quindlen’s line lands because it refuses euphemism and makes the legal distinction look like what it often is: moral sorting dressed up as public policy. Contextually, it sits in late-20th-century debates over feminism, sexual agency, and criminalization, where the fight wasn’t only about sex work, but about who gets to define harm.
The intent is journalistic in the best way: not to romanticize sex work, but to interrogate why the state gets to decide which female sexual choices count as autonomous and which get recast as social threat. The bar hookup is framed as “private” because it fits a culturally legible script: messy, maybe regrettable, but still within the sanctioned realm of desire. Add $100 and suddenly the same behavior becomes a matter of policing, courts, and stigma. That pivot exposes how “privacy” is selectively granted, often to protect conventional sexuality rather than women.
The subtext is also about class and credibility. Money doesn’t just change the act; it changes who society believes is entitled to sexual freedom without surveillance. Quindlen’s line lands because it refuses euphemism and makes the legal distinction look like what it often is: moral sorting dressed up as public policy. Contextually, it sits in late-20th-century debates over feminism, sexual agency, and criminalization, where the fight wasn’t only about sex work, but about who gets to define harm.
Quote Details
| Topic | Privacy & Cybersecurity |
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