I've stopped asking, Why have we made prostitution illegal? Instead I want an explanation for, How much violence against "prostitutes" have we made acceptable?
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
Transgender women who sell sex are presented in media accounts only in stereotype, and they often aren't understood even by sympathetic campaigners in relationship to other women in the sex trade. While there has also been a long history of gender nonconformity in the industry, it being one reliably available form of income for people who face discrimination in other forms of employment, gender nonconforming people in the sex trade are nearly invisible to those outside sex work. Anti-sex work feminists, meanwhile, don't see sex work as a place for any woman. It is telling that many feminists who wish to abolish all forms of sex work, like The Transsexual Empire author Janice Raymond and author of The Industrial Vagina Sheila Jeffreys, refuse to accept that trans women are women. They appear to believe that those engaged in sex work are not yet capable of being real women.
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
What we should also bear in mind when considering any study or news story that purports to examine prostitutes or prostitution is that many who are described with these terms do not use them to describe themselves. When many researchers and reporters go looking for prostitutes, they find only those who conform to their stereotypes, since they are the only people they think to look for. If sex workers defy those stereotypes, that is treated as a trivial novelty rather than reality.
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
Use of the phrase "sex work," then, like those that preceded it, is unevenly and politically distributed. Sex workers may be referred to in the literature of public health, for example, but that is due to their own advocacy, and in particular of those who pushed back early in the AIDS era against the notion that prostitutes were responsible for the illness, an update of earlier health panics--syphilis, VD--in which many saw the bodies of prostitutes being considered little more than "vectors of disease." Outside of sex workers' own political networks, the shift to "sex work" is most complete in the world of AIDS, at least linguistically, though in putting policy and funding into action, fights do remain.
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
(Responsible for making sex work attractive to potential sex workers, according to antiprostitution activists: the movie Pretty Women, the television show Secret Diary of a Call Girl, and what they call "pimp culture" in hip-hop. Not as responsible, apparently, are: the labor market, the privatization of education and healthcare, and debt.)
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
In the first decade of this century United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and several bodies within the UN called for an end to the criminalization of sex work; these included the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, which was created by the United Nations Development Program for the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS, an independent commission. The International Labor Organization recognizes sex work as labor and discrimination against sex workers--included forced HIV testing--as a violation of their labor rights. Human Rights Watch recommends the decriminalization of sex work. The World Health Organization recommends that "all countries should work toward decriminalization of sex work and elimination of the unjust application of non-criminal laws and regulations against sex workers."
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
(continued directly from above)
All this isn't to say that with increased visibility sex workers' lives have unilaterally improved, that these recommendations have been adopted without struggle (if they have been adopted at all), or that a new focus on sex work as work has meant an end to the social phenomenon of prostitution.
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
if sex workers' speech is where whole lives are made criminal, how does that carry through to public demands to make sex workers' lives visible and relatable through "sharing our stories"?
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
[Anne] McClintock argues, with reference not only to specific treatment in the courts but throughout sex workers' lives, that this is precisely the point of soliciting their testimonies: "By ordering the unspeakable to be spoken in public, ...by obsessively displaying dirty pictures, filmed evidence, confessions, and exhibits, the prostitution trial reveals itself as structured around the very fetishism it sets itself to isolate and punish." Sex workers are to understand that they're outsiders and outlaws for selling their bodies, and yet what's called for in relaying their stories is the repetition of that sale, and to a much broader public than they encounter in their work.
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
Very rarely does sharing anything in these venues serve them [sex workers], or the public. Sex workers are there for the sake of some unseen owners' profits.
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
The men, she said, would call the mobile phone number listed in an ad in the paper. Some met her in a motel or hotel but many also invited her into their homes, and in those homes they would leave their mail out, their family photos. It was astounding, she said, how many men felt so safe, to do that; that men maybe always feel safe, even around strangers who are women; that what she knew about these men's lives could put her in far more danger than if these men were cops.
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
A division had been constructed between them and me, prostitutes and all other women, which had resulted in a break in transmitting such vital information. It was the breakdown, not the sex work, that kept us apart, that could cause us to suffer unnecessarily. Now I wanted everyone to know exactly what it could be like, what their choices were, what power they had, should they ever be in the situation of explicitly trading sex for something they need.
I remembered the workshops during college, held each spring in a barn on a nearby campus where you could learn how to perform a menstrual extraction--which can be used as a form of abortion--at home. There was no subtext: This information was shared in case abortion was criminalized again in the United States. Did you ever want to have to use it? Most likely you didn't. Were you ashamed to know it? You should not be.
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lee :Fire_Trans:replied to lee :Fire_Trans: last edited by
Sex workers' ability to share information among themselves is essential for supporting all sex workers in negotiating their work, and in turning down work that is unsafe, underpaid, or undesirable. This is true of any job. But what does make this aspect of sex work unique, and what creates the thump of panic in my gut when I open such an e-mail, is that to share this lifeline of information could be construed as criminal. Selling sex in the United States is usually a misdemeanor, but sharing information with someone about how to do it is considered a more serious criminal offense.