4 Feminist Reasons Why We Need to Support Sex Workers
http://mic.com/articles/142879/4-feminist-reasons-why-we-need-to-support-sex-workers#.srgo7EXTK
As sex-positive as our generation might be, the sex industry itself is still a contentious topic. Some feminists think sex work objectifies women and is inherently exploitative, while others argue that sex work can be empowering.
Nonetheless, there's a growing movement to decriminalize sex work, a movement that was bolstered by the human rights organization Amnesty International advocating for global decriminalization in August. A recent New York Times Magazine piece also focused on the growing conversation surrounding sex work, featuring the voices of sex workers fighting for decriminalization. (Note: There's a legal distinction between legalization, which involves regulating "where, when, and how prostitution could take place," and decriminalization, which essentially "eliminates all laws" regulating sex work, according to Professor Donna Hughes at the University of Rhode Island.)
There are various complex class, race and gender issues at play in the debate over whether the sex industry can be a positive force for women. But one thing is clear: It's time to take an honest look at how anti-prostitution laws affect real sex workers today...
hi everyone....hope all is well with everyone!
susie
Great to see you back, susan!
thanks! i do check in here every day but just haven't felt like posting....it's a bit busy here as well so...
no excuses!!
susie
They're still important reasons to support sex worker rights, IMO.
And I still think they're highly debatable, oversimplified, facile and only cursorily feminist on closer examination. And each point has been argued to death.
thank you for coming to the sex workers rights forum and once again dismissing our perspective....
you have a feminist forum to debate your completely unsubstantiated claims....
this forum of for sex wrkers and allies to discuss these issues from a sex workers rights perspective....
thanks though...
for posting in every one of my threads dismissing and insulting us....
no really...
thank you
a question was posed as to why sex workers would be near to a day care and it was suggested that it wouldn't be likely for a sex worker to be there......perhaps to drop off their children...duh....as if law enforcment wouldn't use any tool we give them to enforce against and humiliate sex workers....
it was also suggested that sex workers won't be arrested, that we can hire security with out fear, etc....bull crap....tell that to the people in calgary
the new canadian laws are ridiculous....
illegal searches looking for youth in independent sex workers homes, forcible entry under the guise of an appointment booked by police....or in edmonton...calling the workers to outcalls in hotels where they are met by police and a "supprt worker" who proceed to tell the sex worker they will die if they stay in sex work....promoting fear and of course....wasting the sex workers time durng their work hours...for no money...cab fare lost....having had to pay for transport to a fake appoinment with a cop and female lookey -loo....
the idea that this law is protecting sex workers is a joke....the abolitionists here are like osterich.....heads in the sand....if they don't see it it didn't happen and even when we do share our experiences...
we are "sex work lobby" or "pimp lobby" or "sex workers"....
a construct meant to diminish our humanity and our voices and lump us all in as a thing to eliminated...
unbelievable
Seems like a good place to post this:
Amnesty International Calls for an End to the ‘Nordic Model’ of Criminalizing Sex Workers
Not sure why they've chosen to focus exclusively on Norway, and not all of the countries (including Canada) that use the nordic model as their legal framework around sex work, but I see it as welcome nonetheless.
i took part on the global consultations whch helped to shape amnesty's understanding....if only people would listen to the real facts about this issue...
i dream if a day where we can feel safe and accepted in society....
maybe in my lifetime....maybe....
I wonder if anyone else in this thread (other than Susan) has actually done the front-line mental health work that sex work largely entails, or if it's just me and a bunch of entitled cisfeminists arguing that work with a cumshot is infinitely more exploitive than work with hot grease, and how this intersects with attempts to limit transition and otherwise regulate access to estrogenic bodies through anything other than a monogamous state-regulated relationship in which CAFABs hold structural advantages. But then we'd have to start asking why the nominally cisfeminine are less homeless, jailed, dead, assaulted, abused, raped (yep, when you count all rapes), murdered, bullied, and forced out of school, likely to do manual labor, likely to have a non-management job if participating in the labor force, detatched from the ability to spend their earnings, than the nominally cismasculine... in a society that coerces cisidentification... and I've given up hope of the Canadian left ever managing that.
Not just sex workers, but my clients are disproportionately trans women. The diffrence is, the latter usually haven't accessed identification yet, but are buried in transmisogynistic, lesbophobic, cisessentialist arguments as to why they aren't women. CAFABs don't have to pay someone to make them feel desired, they also don't have to endanger themselves as badly to get more mainstream forms of mental healthcare more easily than CAMABs do.
Get your cisfeminist whorephobia the fuck out of this thread, please.
The second part of the first paragraph is rife with antifeminist MRA doctrine. I won't comment on sex work in this forum, but I will comment on misogyny.
I'm not sure I understand all the arcane vocabulary in the second paragraph, but as far as I can make out, this is misogynist bullshit:
If I understand correctly, the writer is talking about women who are not transexual as opposed to men who aren't transexual. Firstly, I agree that there is very strong discrimination and even pervasive violence against transpeople.
But it is certainly not easy for many women, especially those of us who are of a certain age, to "make ourselves feel desired". And it is difficult for women and for men to access proper mental health care. Agreed that there again, it is harder still for transpeople.
RTTG is no longer with us.