It’s not even a plea bargain. It’s Feministe shooting the internet the double bird.

Fuck them. Cowards.

That is a great and thorough comment, and I think that Feministe needs a lot more of that stuff to appear as posts, not comments. If you’re interested in rescuing any more, there’s a cached version that shows what it looked like as of Wednesday. I don’t know how long Google caches last, though. I’ve saved it to a .webarchive file.

Yes, and they also have a history of stealing sex workers’ ideas without crediting them–there’s a weak attempt at an apology here: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2013/02/08/centering-sex-worker-voices/

I actually managed to save this excellent comment from a former street sex worker by quoting it on my tumblr:
http://marginalutilite.tumblr.com/post/61117592837/lawd-knows-even-a-former-street-work-like-myself

Whoops. That link above is missing the protocol. It should be: Feministe is Apparently Never Going to Learn This Lesson

I have not. I got an email from my blog at about noon on Friday (PST), telling me that the links had gone dead, so it’s been at least that long since they decided to take it down. (I have a plugin that monitors the site for broken links.) So, they’ve had at least 72 hours to craft some kind of response or apology. I have seen none, either on their blog or on their Twitter feed, and at this point, I’m not holding my breath. I’m writing a piece on that now, because if anything, I think that the deletion was even worse than the original decision. Notice that by deleting the article, they also deleted several hundred comments, many of which were strongly critical of it from multiple aspects. I feel that the greatest loss was Kitty Stryker’s excellent comment talking about why and how she made her decision to become a sex worker. The deletion functions as another way of silencing sex workers and ignoring their criticisms.

I also think that it’s important not to get over-focused on this post, because it’s not the real problem; the problem is a long-established pattern at Feministe of centering non-sex worker voices, and then ignoring sex workers when they’re criticized. This was just a particularly glaring chapter in a long pattern, and we don’t want to ignore that this is a systemic thing, not a momentary fuckup.

If you haven’t seen it, I also recommend Jadehawk’s critique, Feministe is Apparently Never Going to Learn This Lesson.

Thank YOU—your take down was astute, and most importantly, it highlighted and credited sex workers’ responses. I’m really seething about the lack of accountability from Feministe regarding this post–thinking if they just delete it, the problem will disappear. You haven’t heard any more news regarding this, have you?