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Quote of the Week

WHOOPS! Here I was thinking that the interplay between sex work and forced labour was complex and multi-causal, involving structural factors like poverty, identity-based discrimination, and anti-migration policies! BUT IT’S ACTUALLY INCREDIBLY SIMPLE! Turns out pimps (or, as they’re also known, “drug dealers”!) are simply luring young girls into the game with sequinned knicker shorts and the “Single Ladies” video, and if Beyoncé would just put some damn clothes on, the sex trafficking industry would dissolve!

Sorry to snark, it’s just that I can’t seriously engage with your evidence-devoid theory. The anti-sex trafficking cause is already thick with moral panic, misinformation, and ill-informed, PR-boosting celebrity activists, and you’re cluttering the already-diminished discourse with further nonsense. This wouldn’t especially bother me if it weren’t for the fact that theories like yours spawn attitudes and policies that actively harm sex workers. You are ignoring the freely available perspectives and requests of real-life sex workers because they interfere with your romantic notion of the Prostituted Woman as a forlorn, passive victim who needs to be saved. If you engage with sex workers before you form a view onwhat’s oppressing them, you might find that criminalisation and stigma are higher-priority concerns than mythical drug-dealing pimps wielding persuasive charm and Beyoncé’s hotpants.

Maddie Collier at the Pantograph Punch writes An Open Letter to Rakhi Kumar, Beyonce Hater: Your Feminism is Not My Feminism

Quote of the Week

Imagine, if you are not too delicate to do so, that you are a lady who gives handjobs for a living. Maybe you’re an experienced dominatrix and you like the extra cash you can make from them; maybe you’re an erotic masseuse with basic knowledge of fetishes advertising in the domination and fetish section because you could use some new clients. Whatever the precise nature of your business strategy, it works for you.

Why on earth would you change your system in order to make life easier for the competition? And why would you change it so you make less money?

“But they offer such cheap sessions! People ask me for discounts and sex acts.”

This is a competitive business. Learn to say no and fucking get used to it.

Mistress Ouch resurrects her “Shut Up About the ‘Prostidommes’ Already” rant on her tumblr as the extras debate resurfaces.

Quote of the Week

There are only two kinds of whores in the media and in the minds of most feminists; the gorgeous rich glamazon and the beaten-down junkie whore. Hilariously, you can be both. You can also be neither. In fact, I’d say that most sex workers in the developed world fall along the axis somewhere in the middle and shift up and down depending on their circumstances. This binarist thinking is largely due to feminists appropriating sex worker’s experiences for their own selfish ends; the good whore supports the sex posi agenda and the bad whore supports the radfem agenda.

from “10 Tips on How To Be A Feminist Ally To Sex Workers” by Olive Seraphim on her new blog. Such a primer has never been more desperately needed.

 

Quote Of The Week

Smith didn’t just consider it irrelevant to ask these women what the law has meant (and hasn’t meant) to them. She also refused to engage with the many sex workers who tweeted her to point out this omission […] She allowed police officers – people who see it as their mission to drive sex workers out of business, people who have a long history of using sex workers for their own ends in all sorts of nefarious ways (yes, even in post-criminalization Sweden)  to define their experiences for them. I have a few words for that type of reporting. ‘Feminist’ isn’t one of them. 

Wendy Lyon responds to the silencing of sex worker voices in The Independent columnist Joan Smith’s whorephobic discussion of criminalization in Sweden this week. Another excellent response from Jem of It’s Just A Hobby here

 

Quote of the Week

Soderbergh, in Magic Mike, takes it for granted that the desire to be the object of a man’s reckless, aggressive lust is neither fetish nor pathology. The strippers’ dance routines are nearly all spectacles of male strength and power […] Just as the strip club precludes the possibility of actual fucking, the film hints at sex without showing it. Magic Mike may be the first example of pop art that plays with female fantasies of submission in a setting that is free of physical and emotional complication.

Because we can’t get enough of that film, here’s Hannah Tennant-Moore on Magic Mike.