Sex workers tend to prefer to be referred to as sex workers. "Prostitute" is historically a term of victimization and stigma that denies agency to sex workers, and it certainly wasn't a term created by feminists or by sex workers. To say "feminists are against it" is inaccurate on multiple levels. Feminists are not a monolith. Many sex workers are feminists, many feminists who are not sex workers support them. And most of the feminists who insist on conflating sex trafficking with sex work have across the board shitty politics. Capitalist exploitation exists in all kinds of work, and sex work has specific characteristics and specific kinds of exploitation (along with, frequently, much better pay), but sex workers themselves can and do speak for themselves about all these things.
I would also add that many people near and dear to me are sex workers so I'd ask you to be mindful if you're going to continue talking about this.
I do not use that term. It is true that people calling themselves feminists support the sex industry. Just as people who support the destruction of the planet for "renewable" energy call themselves environmentalist.
So let me get this straight. In Pride Month, you compare some of the most intelligent, radical, and engaged feminists out there to reformist, corporate environmentalists, and then as a reference to the kind of feminism you're promoting and that you evidently think is more radical, you link to an article filled with inaccuracies about what sex work actually entails, that is blatantly not anticapitalist since it minimizes or elides regular forms of exploitation in other jobs, written by someone who clearly doesn't know what they're talking about, and posted on the website of a liberal NGO founded by an anti-porn academic who goes on Fox News (because there she can find an eager audience for her brand of feminism), an organization of mostly white academics that also includes people who work with police and the prison system.
And you probably don't understand the relevance of my reference to Pride Month, or know, for example, who Marsha Johnson is.
Since you're someone who feels so comfortable talking about things that primarily affect other people without even listening to those people or becoming informed about the topic, I'm pretty much done with this conversation. Just so you know, if you try to keep pushing this conversation, I'm probably just going to unsubscribe you because I don't feel any respect or trust in your opinions or your process for arriving at those opinions. But you'll be fine, cuz you can read Chris Hedges or whatever.
You linked to an organization that supports the prison system. Do you support feminists who trust in the bourgeois state to respond to harm? Conflating sex work with trafficking is extremely dangerous and harmful to people who are actually trafficked or uniquely exploited. There are many, many sex workers who choose to work in the industry because it provides a FAR better solution to surviving under capitalism than other forms of employment. That does not erase the fact that there are victims of trafficking and also people, usually women, who participate in the sex industry who don't want to or feel coerced in uniquely challenging ways to the rest of us who are also coerced to sell our bodies under capitalism. Sex workers are often better at identifying, helping, and supporting those women since they are in networks where they can see who is and isn't operating from safe(r) conditions. Decrim is the only path that actually helps keep women safer. I am a feminist who has been in radical organizing spaces since 2002 (and I have a PhD in Feminist Studies, which may or may not matter to you, and I'm fine either way on that), and for you to suggest that I am the same as reformist environmentalists is deeply insulting.
Sex workers are prostituted women. The capitalist exploitation of women. Feminists are against it.
Sex workers tend to prefer to be referred to as sex workers. "Prostitute" is historically a term of victimization and stigma that denies agency to sex workers, and it certainly wasn't a term created by feminists or by sex workers. To say "feminists are against it" is inaccurate on multiple levels. Feminists are not a monolith. Many sex workers are feminists, many feminists who are not sex workers support them. And most of the feminists who insist on conflating sex trafficking with sex work have across the board shitty politics. Capitalist exploitation exists in all kinds of work, and sex work has specific characteristics and specific kinds of exploitation (along with, frequently, much better pay), but sex workers themselves can and do speak for themselves about all these things.
I would also add that many people near and dear to me are sex workers so I'd ask you to be mindful if you're going to continue talking about this.
I do not use that term. It is true that people calling themselves feminists support the sex industry. Just as people who support the destruction of the planet for "renewable" energy call themselves environmentalist.
https://www.culturereframed.org/vednita-carter-challenges-why-prostitution-is-not-sex-work/
So let me get this straight. In Pride Month, you compare some of the most intelligent, radical, and engaged feminists out there to reformist, corporate environmentalists, and then as a reference to the kind of feminism you're promoting and that you evidently think is more radical, you link to an article filled with inaccuracies about what sex work actually entails, that is blatantly not anticapitalist since it minimizes or elides regular forms of exploitation in other jobs, written by someone who clearly doesn't know what they're talking about, and posted on the website of a liberal NGO founded by an anti-porn academic who goes on Fox News (because there she can find an eager audience for her brand of feminism), an organization of mostly white academics that also includes people who work with police and the prison system.
And you probably don't understand the relevance of my reference to Pride Month, or know, for example, who Marsha Johnson is.
Since you're someone who feels so comfortable talking about things that primarily affect other people without even listening to those people or becoming informed about the topic, I'm pretty much done with this conversation. Just so you know, if you try to keep pushing this conversation, I'm probably just going to unsubscribe you because I don't feel any respect or trust in your opinions or your process for arriving at those opinions. But you'll be fine, cuz you can read Chris Hedges or whatever.
You linked to an organization that supports the prison system. Do you support feminists who trust in the bourgeois state to respond to harm? Conflating sex work with trafficking is extremely dangerous and harmful to people who are actually trafficked or uniquely exploited. There are many, many sex workers who choose to work in the industry because it provides a FAR better solution to surviving under capitalism than other forms of employment. That does not erase the fact that there are victims of trafficking and also people, usually women, who participate in the sex industry who don't want to or feel coerced in uniquely challenging ways to the rest of us who are also coerced to sell our bodies under capitalism. Sex workers are often better at identifying, helping, and supporting those women since they are in networks where they can see who is and isn't operating from safe(r) conditions. Decrim is the only path that actually helps keep women safer. I am a feminist who has been in radical organizing spaces since 2002 (and I have a PhD in Feminist Studies, which may or may not matter to you, and I'm fine either way on that), and for you to suggest that I am the same as reformist environmentalists is deeply insulting.
No, I'm not very good at making graphics, but I'm glad you liked it!