Ah, well.. Once we also throw out all the illegals, you can have one of those vast list of not even minimum wage jobs that the Rethuglicans say are being “taken away”. That will solve everything. Of course, a year later the economy will hit another artificial bubble, thanks to the same idiots, and you will have to fight Trump for a job picking beans in a field, but… it will all be a grand utopia. lol

Seriously though.. This is the whole problem I have with this sort of politics. Not that its just stupid and wrong, in principle, to attack the industry at all, instead of working to fix thousands of years of, “These people are scum we need to either arrest, or otherwise put out of business!”, but that, to the moralizing imbeciles that come up with the “solutions” to the wrong problems – there is no interconnections, or unseen, never mind blatantly obvious, consequences. Well, at least to any one that **maters**.

I totally agree and I’m very sorry that you and others who have relied on rentboy are now faced with this situation.

It’s too bad that rentboy chose not to join the ESPLERP (erotic service providers legal education and research project) Legal challenge as advertiser plaintiffs as they were invited to do. They would have had legal leverage to stave off this attack. It truly is unfortunate.

It’s time to fight for decriminalization harder than ever! For more info go to http://decriminalizesexwork.com

Right now we desperately need decrim as well as anti discrimination legislation.

I hope you will be able to find/make a way and without compromising your safety. I’m so sorry. These are hard times for sex workers and until we establish decrim I’m afraid it’s just going to get worse, I’m afraid there is going to be more and more casualties of the war on prostitution and sexual freedoms (including reproductive rights) in general.

http://youtu.be/GCwDcPTRnFA

http://youtu.be/OBslqq9li9Q

http://youtu.be/hmtUe3baWU0

It’s exactly because I do see you as having agency that I’m appealing you to think about the way you and I and people around the world are looked at by the wealthy clients you are attending to. They crave fairy tales. That’s why I put “workers” in quotes. It’s because I want to indicate that the idea has become a toy played with by a handful of writers and elites, not because I don’t think sex workers do work.

Funny. His name doesn’t appear to be “New York Times”. He stated that this was the “excuse” given for why the actions of the company was nothing special, and it was all harmless. I don’t doubt, given the sort of people running various operations in Afghanistan, and other places, which has included hired thugs, and murders, to “protect” companies (like Black Water), that exploitation was involved. But, the Times.. opted to simply say, “Nah.. Nothing wrong here. Just good old normal business.”

In any case, I tend to agree with most of what he wrote. If they somehow “ended” sex work every place else, the rich would still be buying it. But, they would call it something else, or hide it, or pay people of, or just bang the servants, then poo poo each other, when every one of those servants got uppity and decided to speak out about what they where being asked to do, and what threats where made to them if they didn’t.

There is, as I have said someplace else, a damn good reason why the new law was changed to “exclude” the requirement that coercion be used, for it to be an illegal act, and why sex work was **expressly** placed, dead center, of the legislation. Corporations, by their very nature, are “exploiters”. They cut hours, pay, benefits, and on, and on, then lobby to kill unions, or pass right the work laws, then tell you, “Do what we say, or, if you don’t like it, go to one of the 500 identical places, who will tell you the same thing, and make you possibly do worse, instead.” Because, they know damn well there **isn’t** anyone else, or not near enough to overcome their tactics.

Trying to end “real” exploitation, across the board, in all industries… is a bit like GMO labeling. If you are completely dishonest, you label the “sex work” industry as exploiting, and quietly shuffle the rest under the rug, the same way as you label “single gene modification”, and “uniquely dangerous”. If you are honest, you have to hunt down damn near every company on the planet, for things they are coercing people to do for them, just as, an honest GMO label would leave you with, probably 5 pieces of fruit, and a single can of beans, as, “Never altered in any way by man, using any form of genetic modification.”

The new law, and the focus on sex work, isn’t about stopping exploitation, its about distracting everyone from everyone else doing it, including the, inevitable, rich people, who will still be “buying” it, stabbing people in the back, and making, “deals you can’t afford to not accept”, when they want to, but calling it “giving gifts”, or “good business”, or who knows what else, when the last “sex worker” is caught trying to trade for a sandwich, under a bridge, from a card board box. They don’t want to save victims, they want, at best, to be seen as having tried to save them, while, at worst, despising the fact that they where “someone else’s” victim, first, or instead.

If you want to come in here and start a conversation with sex workers, you shouldn’t invalidate what we do with quotation marks, portraying us as victims with no agency and disguising that sort of condescension with leftist rhetoric.

Before WW2, psychologists, mostly German, had been working with fits and starts to liberate gay people as well as women. But after the US came out of World War 2 (with a handful of Nazi counter-democracy manuals), they instituted a disgusting, often sex-obsessed purge of the left-wing agitators in the ACLU and unions. By the 70’s, academics began researching bisexuality, shirking the old binaries, but it was too late. “Pimp” was already become a coveted status.

Some of this is still used against us, for example the notion that Bradley Manning and Glenn Greenwald are monstrous freaks who love Putin. When buying sex is legal, will it keep Eliot Spitzer fighting the banks or will he step down in shame because the law won’t change cultural pressures? One of the few countries in the region where gays are allowed to march, Israel, holds the population of Palestine captive, many in prisons where they sexually abuse them. Afghanistan remains to this day under brutal patriarchy and occupation, the only progress being some girls are now in school. The Revolutionary Women of Afghanistan regularly criticize both the occupation and the Taliban. If you really believe elites are looking out for us, you might try searching the press for Amnesty International statements when they accuse the powerful of committing war crimes, rather than muse over a sensational sex topic. In fact, pundit and former prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg can bump elbows with Ta Nehsi Coates, one of the leading writers on race.

It’s because the abuse is global that I don’t think having sex with rich people in my neighborhood is really a way the LGBT community is going to heal. I see it as being asked to turn my back on, and even encourage the continuing abuse of immigrants, women, and young men who face trauma and sometimes lethal diseases. And so it’s relevant where the fight over this is occurring. It seems a fight being taken mainly by educated whites in the West/ global North. When the famed philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte discovered that one of his countrymen, author Gustave Flaubert, had taken interest in young boys in Egypt, he attributed it to macho exaggeration! The powerful simply do not want to believe they can be abusers. If we can’t point out abusers, how can they be free? If they can’t be free, how can we?

Rhetoric aside, the end-result being the powerful continue servicing their sexual desires with vulnerable bodies because 1) the vast majority of people depend on elites for support in the face of the increasing cost of college and daily life, which is caused by policies created by the same elites “workers” are servicing. and 2) the powerful delegate their own sexual urges onto an idol (“professionals” “workers”) who are contractually obligated to take responsibility for it. In other words, we are being used as a manufactured commodity to make excuses for sex, rather than helping accept their sexuality as something natural. This can only increase confusion when you add in the element of power. Whether they’re wealthy clients or millionaires who run a service on work that they aren’t doing, the powerful are *dying* to tell themselves stories about how they are liberating people. Occupied workers in Palestine are given space to defend their generous employers. Saudi Arabian women are told they are special and looked after,and so too “Rentboys” are given scholarships to college. GI’s were told the same thing. But the GI bill did not end abuse of traumatized veterans, although you likely won’t hear someone currently in the army say that.

In conclusion, “sex work” is a way for the powerful to indulge themselves away from accountability, abuse their status, and does not contribute to LGBT liberation anymore than the recent Batman film does. Recent studies also show paying for elites to play-act their own dominance over us only encourages rape culture. In addition to a dollar, not through it, we should be fighting for recognition as human beings, continuing the proud tradition of pre-Nazi agitators before us who got us here, even if it can seem impossible.

BAM. And to STEAL from the people as well as generate revenue for municipalities.