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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?
Anna Quindlen
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote highlights the discrepancy between personal privacy and societal judgment regarding sexual decisions.

Anna Quindlen's quote challenges the societal norms that dictate when personal choices about sexuality become subject to legal intervention. By contrasting the private decision of engaging in sex with a stranger against the criminalization of transactional sex, she questions the moral and legal frameworks that govern our understanding of consent and privacy, ultimately advocating for a more nuanced view of individual autonomy.

Themes

PrivacySocietySexualityConsentAutonomyJudgment

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in discussions about sexual ethics in university seminars.

More from Anna Quindlen

The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
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The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
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I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
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Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
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I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
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