Thank you Andrew for your support in reaching out to sex worker communities around the Asia Pacific. You are a true friend to sex worker communities and your bright soul is irreplaceable.

I’m really glad you like the article, Meena, and thank you for all this background! By the way, we’d really love it if we at Tits and Sass could interview you directly in an Activist Spotlight interview at some pt–you’re such an incredible role model as a sex workers’ rights advocate. Not that Parker didn’t do an incredible job in this piece and in “Equality Now, Or Else?” documenting her interviews with you.

Glad you mentioned the movie kerfuffle and linked to it–Parker had a few sentences about it in the rough draft of this piece but it was ultimately too tangential. Also, thanks for all this info!

It’s complicated. Most people disapprove of it on many grounds. The main ground everyone sort of frowns upon is the dedicating of the girls to the God and temple when they are underage- and then them doing sex work underage.
But that doesn’t mean the whole system needs to be disbanded. Like many religious traditions it needs respectful reform, and reform led by those who are part of it. It doesn’t need to be destroyed by some state-feminist alliance as some ultimate embodiment of evil.
I’m not religious at all- but i do see the social function that religious orders play- like the Buddhist monkhood providing education and housing for so many young boys whose families would be too poor to feed and educate them otherwise. No one is demanding the disbanding of the monkshood because there is sexual abuse of young novices by some monks, and no one is demanding the end of the Catholic Church because of the child abuse scandals.
So thinking about it now I think it’s the hatred and misunderstanding of sex work, and plain, simple misogyny. The Devadasi System provides food and shelter and more for poor young women. But because it often involves sex work and it’s for women it is condemned.
A few years ago VICE magazine made a film on the Devadasi system called Prostitutes of God. It was really disgusting. VAMP members helped them and got totally fucked over. The film even disclosed the HIV status of one young Devadasi woman.
Vamp made a short video response that is really worth watching- inly 3 minutes long but has Devadasi women speaking for themselves.
the link is here: http://youtu.be/16OGyssJTvo