Politics
Going Negative in the Champagne Room: Rick Perry Edition
As another long-term governor would say, it would seem to require a dead girl or a live boy to stop lucky Rick Perry from being elected. But one passionate Ron Paul supporter, Robert Morrow, wants so badly to find live girls who’ve slept with Perry that he placed this ad (pictured at the left in the dressing room of an actual Austin strip club) in the Austin Chronicle last week.
Morrow wrote a virulent screed detailing what he considers to be Perry’s biggest transgressions under the amazing headline “Tea Party Fraud Rick Perry is Political Herpes.” He unashamedly sources his claims to his own strip club conversations. By the way, good for you, Robert, for not being ashamed to be out as a strip club patron.
Quote of the Week
I hear a lot of supporters of the Swedish model say that the legislation does not target sex workers because we are not the ones who are criminalised by the laws. To me, this buys into a long history of treating sex workers like we exist independently of community, clients, family and other human beings. […] The main reason this is relevant to the Swedish model is that while the legislation does not specifically criminalise the sex worker, it criminalises everyone around the sex worker.
Most disturbingly, the strict pimping laws apply to people who live with sex workers (the good old ‘living off the earnings’ schtick) which may include partners and even sex workers’ children. There have been cases in Sweden already where sex workers have had their children charged with pimping because they were living with them and not paying rent. Anti sex work feminists, this is your legislation that you claim does not harm us. This is the danger of treating sex workers like we are not part of our communities and families. It is not feminist to support legislation that punishes women by targeting their children.
Hexy on Feministe explaining why the oft-championed “Swedish model” of criminalization still penalizes and endagers sex workers.
Don’t Hit Women Or Whores: Whorephobic Domestic Violence and Its Discontents
“Don’t hit women or whores” reads an oh-so-helpful comment under one of the many reports of the brutal assault and attempted rape of porn actress and dancer Christy Mack by her ex partner, War Machine (formerly known as John Koppenhaver), this past week. And that’s one of the nice ones. Most of the not-nice ones start with “what did you expect?” and get worse from there. Koppenhaver himself seems to see his role in the attack as a tragic victim of fate, a “cursed” man who had hoped to be engaged to the woman he broke up with in May, whose house he broke into in August.
While, in the face of the graphic and horrific story that Mack released, Koppenhaver’s view seems woefully out of touch with reality, the truth is, he’s right to predict sympathy for himself. Assaulting a sex worker, especially one that you once deigned to be in a relationship with, is viewed as pretty understandable. Just by watching TV or using the internet (ever), how many hundreds of jokes and not-jokes did Koppenhaver encounter excusing and encouraging him to do just that? It might be tempting, for the sake of our views on the state of humanity, to label his on-the-run tweets as a disingenuous ploy for public understanding, but I believe it is the less likely explanation of the two. What reason have we to believe that Koppenhaver was special, that he was somehow immune to the prevailing cultural narrative about the worth of those who do sex work? Why wouldn’t he think of himself as a lamentable casualty of an unfair system?
I Did Not Consent To Being Tokenized
I am a sex worker who was coerced into doing work I felt violated by, and I am horrified by SWERFs (Sex Worker Exclusionary Reactionary Feminists) who insist that all sex work is by nature coerced and non-consensual.
Recently, I’ve noticed a disturbing rise in anti-sex work rhetoric that rests on the premise that all sex work is coerced. The proponents of this claim argue that because the workers may need the money and thus feel unable to turn down a proposition they are uncomfortable with, sex work encounters are always non-consensual. As far as they are concerned, if money is involved, sex can never be consensual. They claim that by promoting the criminalization of all forms of sex work, they are “protecting” sex workers and engaging in “feminist solidarity” with us.
I’ve already seen a number of brilliant sex workers debunking this argument: by discussing their own consensual sex work experiences, by pointing out that all professions involve money and thus a potential for coercion or abuse of workers, and so on. Tits and Sass contributor Red wrote a particularly interesting piece on her tumblr in which she notes that she finds the term “constrained consent” a far more accurate term than “coerced consent.” All of those points are valid and important, if often ignored by the audience they’re intended for.
But I’ve noticed one perspective missing from the discussion: that of someone who was sometimes unable to consent to sex work, and is harmed by those who would tokenize that experience and devalue the experiences of other sex workers. After seeing my experiences casually commandeered by SWERFs as a talking point, I’ve decided to speak up.