This is, in my experience, 100% true:
"When when will Amnesty International give the same platform to listen to the voices of sex workers. The anti's do silence us everywhere in the media, and they refuse to even debate the issues with us. Since they are trying to create policy that directly effects us, should't be be apart of their conversation. I find it OFFENSIVE that the anti's are allowed to call us TROLL just because we support sex worker rights."
C'mon, how many actual sex workers are you hearing from - COUNT THEM?
I have been at the coal face, running headlong into unofficial press embargos (if I had a pound for every article written by a sane, friendly journalist that got spiked higher up I would be a very happy puppy). I have been the one who had to find work arounds for the Machiavellian maneuvers aimed at excluding the voices of real sex workers from all media and consultation...only to find that just when I thought I got SOMEONE in they were, in fact covertly affiliated to the antis AND organised crime (who LOVE any form of criminalisation BTW because, for them, it is an opportunity to make MORE MONEY).
Sex workers are only allowed to speak if it is "happy hooker" sensationalism, or "misery memoirs" for the antis (and, in the case of the latter nobody even bothers to check if they were ever really sex workers, they just get carried shoulder high while the money rolls in to them). NOBODY is allowed to tell simple truths like:
- Sex work is about a sex workers right to make money, not anyone's right to sex.
- The Nordic model is about attacking sex workers by attacking the market they depend on, because even capital criminalisation has failed to "end prostitution" because wherever you have a mum looking at hungry children with no options let and there is a market for sex there will always be one who has her priorities straight even with her life at risk.
- Sadly, there are always more women who need, or want the money badly enough to sell sex than there is money to go around. You may have ended poverty and desperation on your planet, but here, on planet earth, we are not even close.
- Scratch the surface and under 75% of sex workers you will find someone who has already been failed abysmally and often badly damaged by social services NGOs etc who do not understand her situation and have nothing appropriate to offer her past present or future. She has a basic human right to prefer selling sex to more of the same however much better it would make you feel..
- If a woman sells sex because she needs the money to survive and you take her market away she will cease to survive.
- The merits of education and/or counselling based upon denying all the above reality along with a whole lot more are limited at best.
This is absolutely true too:
"as the anti's are the biggest PIMPS of all, making their entire living promoting violence against sex workers. To the tune of hundreds of millions each year in funding."
The conservative right and the radical left are pouring multimillions into abolitionism.
A lot of those campaigning most vocally are getting salaries over £100k JUST FOR CAMPAIGNING (unless you count ensuring real sex workers are silenced, gagged and talked over as work):
- Its great PR
- It offers multiple indirect backhanded opportunities to deny that recession is real and that austerity can have devastating impact
- It is a brilliant excuse for imposing control on other people and telling yourself that you are superior to them.
- It is a great distraction from the brutality of austerity. People LOVE any for of sanctified witchhunt.
- It is an outlet for the sexually conservative backlash that was inevitable as a byproduct of the usual paradigm pendulum swing combined with the onset of AIDS after the permissive 60s
...on the other hand, sex workers started selling sex to make money, not to become political activists. Many of those who have taken over the "voice of sex work" have nearly as many alterior motives as the antis, but, thankfully, do not get paid anything like as much.
Being honest, I do not feel this is an issue anyone should be discussing at all until sex workers, and REAL former sex workers ("exit" is a euphemism for euthanasia and NOBODY should be using it in this context - EVER) have had all the say they need.
I am a real former sex worker, I hated it, but I thank the heavens there was a market where I could sell sex, because there is no way I could have survived otherwise, and I think all women have a moral right to that option WITHOUT laws that attack the market so the only way you can make money at all is by turning yourself out like a movie star, offering services I would blush to name, and ALL without a condom and cheaper than anyone else...because THAT is where the "Nordic Model" really leads...while making sex workers, unsafe, destitute and homeless along the way.
Everything else is just high rent horsesh*t.