Life & Wisdom Quote by Gail Sheehy

Sheehy’s line is a grenade lobbed into the polite fictions of heterosexual romance: that exclusivity is a natural right, and that women’s sexuality is a property arrangement waiting to be notarized. By framing the “defiant denial” as the prostitute who “refuses to be redeemed,” she isn’t really talking about sex work so much as the cultural machinery that turns women into before-and-after stories. Redemption here is not spiritual; it’s domestic. It’s the demand that a woman’s desirability be converted into respectability by attaching it to a single man, a single household, a single narrative arc.

The provocation works because Sheehy flips the usual moral hierarchy. The supposedly fallen woman becomes the one with agency, precisely when she rejects the rescue script. The “one man” in the sentence is less a person than a system: the entitlement to exclusivity, the fantasy that commitment is ownership with better branding. Her diction makes that entitlement visible by making it sound as naked as it is: “possess…exclusively.”

Context matters. Sheehy came out of the second-wave feminist era, when debates about sexual liberation, marriage, and the policing of women’s choices were roiling mainstream media. The quote carries that period’s appetite for confrontation and its blind spots, too: it risks flattening sex work into a metaphor and using “the prostitute” as a rhetorical device rather than a lived reality.

Still, the subtext lands: the true scandal, Sheehy suggests, isn’t promiscuity. It’s a woman declining to be converted into someone else’s proof of control.