'a certain kind of sex is vanishing from the internet'

[agender]

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/30/congress-online-sex-trafficking-bill-impact-sex-workers-craigslist

One of the Guardian's euphemisms. They repeat it " a particular genre of online sex, it seems, is vanishing from the internet."

They are referring to prostitution.

Why do they use euphemisms?

Thanks for link Langcleg- moving and informative.
I enjoyed the political analysis on this thread.

I love MN. Just learned more about politics than I have in the last 49yrs. I wish I could contribute something. But please know that you're doing a brilliant job enlightening others and helping people like me to properly think for ourselves and hopefully make better decisions politically. I will try harder not to argue with the TRAs on Twitter

Unless one has had a lived experience of being the target of male violence and hence deemed a "user" of services for women - DV, sexual assault, debt counselling, and so on - I imagine you'd think these services and the justice system work. The sad fact is they don't - and worse still, these services, unless run by feminists for women (as in early feminism), re-victimise and re-traumatise the users. They do the opposite of what they are tasked to do.

The fact that some social workers and DV workers come from these "mediating classes" is very problematic as they think they know better than the women they "support". Using private charities leaves traumatised women and children, in a vulnerable state, open to such things as religious abuse, as the churches and others looking for new recruits, move in to "help".

Leave it to women to organise services for women- as soon as govt gets involved, whether through funding and / or delivery, the silencing and control starts through "policy" and the policing of what services can be delivered, what cannot, who gets recruited, who doesn't, - the needs of the women are wilfully ignored - and the mediating classes, the instruments of male entitlement, move in and boost their influence and income. Women owned and run services are the only defence against this pervasive wolf in sheep clothing.

Labour really have got themselves into a kind of "eat (organically sourced, artisanal, anti-capitalist) cake" mindset.

If you tried to explain to them that not everyone can afford that, and not every town and village has a place where you could even buy such a thing, they'd be first baffled, then irritated, and heavily imply that it was your own fault and if you just tried harder to live an ethically correct life...

My MP, Lisa Nandy, seems to be thinking along the same lines (link to speech transcript below for anyone interested). I don't know her specific views on self-I'D (currently formulating a letter), but she sees the gulf between the so-called liberals and her core support of traditional labour voters. She's not in favour with Corbyn et al after supporting the failed leadership challenge. I have a lot of time for her and she's the reason I still pay my membership dues and have voted labour up to now. Corbyn appears to be surrounded by ex-SWP fundamentalists. I've had dealings with those types in other contexts and it's not pleasant. They're exactly the sort of aggressive believers who would get involved with intimidating women and kids organising a clothes swop to 'defend' their political ideology. They frighten me and I don't think I will be able to vote Labour again while they have so much influence.

m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/lisa-nandy/lisa-nandy-ippr-speech_b_15216124.html

Lang private philanthropy is the model in a lot of "left" (i.e. less right) circles in the US - it used to surprise me when I first went there how much "socialism" there was, under the radar. Lots of worker owned co-ops, quite a lot of public utilities run as co-ops for instance. I'm certainly trying to bung tins in the foodbank among other things to make up for the failures of the current government (failures is an understatement - wilful desire to shaft the poorest of the poor as badly as they can might be more accurate).

But that private philanthropy model doesn't help with the really big ticket items - the NHS, a decent social-security safety net which allows people to live dignified lives (not lives of utter desperation), or a massive council-house building programme (without right-to-buy) which the country desperately needs to help people on low incomes live in affordable and decent housing.

That's why I'm so furious with Labour allowing itself to be hijacked by authoritarians. We need Labour fighting for these things, but instead they're putting their time and energy into drawing up secret squirrel lists of those who are defending women's rights, or interpreting the actions of people fighting against anti-semitism within the party as "personal disloyalty to Corbyn".

please humour an idiot

what are they actually trying to say?!

HairyBallTheorem - couldn't agree more. It's rage-inducing, isn't it?

Spring - are you asking about the original article?

What actually happened - Craig's list has cracked down on ads for prostitution following an investigation which showed that far from being "happy hookers" the majority of such ads were in fact for trafficked and enslaved women.

How the Guardian is trying to spin this - "Repressive prudes are trying to stop innocent men people indulging their kink for trafficked consensual commercial sex."

Thanks Hairy

I really am sorry to sound so stupid

it's just the headline mystified me - I suppose they can't say "possible prostitution ads are now banned" because that would be libel in itself.

but "certain type" I just thought, WTF are they on about? And then because of all the banned words, I thought maybe certain types of more violent porn would fall under this but that would be good.

SpringNowPlease2018 - a similar thing happened with another US classifieds website, Backpage. A lot of the trafficked women were minors. There's a Netflix documentary you could watch, I Am Jane Doe, which covers it. And, as Hairy said, the Guardian's rationale for all this is about as woman-hating as you could get.

Not stupid at all, Spring. The Guardian spins things so hard that if we put it in the England cricket team, we'd regain the ashes in no time. And they lie by omission (Cologne attacks, for instance? They misreported the number of assaults by a factor of 10 for quite some time.)

If, like me, you grew up with the Guardian thinking of it as a serious broadsheet newspaper with an editorial policy to the left, but new reporting which was solidly reliable, it comes as something of a shock when you realise it is no longer anything of the sort. Which is a tragedy because we desperately need good investigative journalism which will expose the excesses of capitalism. However, the Guardian has decided it prefers fiddling while Rome burns.

Hairy "The Guardian spins things so hard"

thank you Hairy for making me less foolish. I don't understand a lot of what I read in the Guardian these days - not just this article, but the pregnant man thing had me scratching my head for a while, mostly because I don't understand how this level of crazy passes as news.

also the article has a tone of raising some kind of problem and I was reading through it thinking "what is the issue"!!!

It would be unfair to single out guardian for spinning things to suit their agenda. All msm is guilty of it.

GardenGeek - exactly. A lot of bullshit jobs, as David Graeber calls them. (No offence!)

I hope you're not suggesting that women would benefit from not having access to publicly funded state provided services but instead rely on charities?

I hope you're not suggesting that women would benefit from not having access to publicly funded state provided services but instead rely on charities?

Read the whole thread. Of course not. I'm an actual leftist, not some pomo-addled fool currently hijacking leftist activism.

I am saying that it is becoming uncomfortably plain to me that the current electoral choice is not between poorly funded public services with little-to-no safety net for the vulnerable (Tories) and well-funded public services with a comprehensive safety net for the vulnerable (Labour).

I am saying that the higher tax burden under Labour may well be directed towards the middle classes by its pomo-addled activists who place the needs of middle class white males (in lipstick) above those of working class women. Evidence in the manifesto, too - 4x the funds directed at removing university fees (most benefit to middle classes) than to repairing the cuts to social security or legal aid combined (most benefit to working class women).

If my political view prioritises the needs of working class women, why should I vote Labour? Labour are not only failing to tell me why I should: they are doubling down on the reasons I shouldn't.

Aubergine totally agree that all MSM spins stuff (and you need to know in which direction in order to decipher what they're saying). But the Guardian recently has stepped away from its traditional spin of favouring the underdog (the poor, the working class, racial and religious minorities, even people in the criminal justice system) in favour of a kind of hierarchy of oppression, where you play top trumps with who's the most oppressed-est ever, and it would appear that "woman" doesn't carry very many top trumps points. But unless you've been following this shift in their editorial spin, it's easy to be caught out by it. You find yourself reading an article thinking "but isn't the Guardian meant to be on my side? Why are they now telling me I'm a fusty old bigot for thinking it's wrong to traffic women into prostitution? Why am I suddenly a SWERF when what I'm opposed to is pimps trafficking vulnerable women and girls?"

Lang puts it more succinctly. 4 times as much money proposed to go into removing university fees as proposed to go into repairing cuts to social security and the removal of legal aid.

This in a country where increasing numbers of people - with women disproportionately hit - are now relying on food banks, where people are having to wait 6 weeks without any money at all while they wait for universal credit, where women can't leave abusive husbands because there's no legal aid to help them.

ALittleAubergine "It would be unfair to single out guardian for spinning things to suit their agenda."

I think every aspect of media will do that, but that's not my issue with them. At the moment, I feel like I need some sort of guide to understand what they are saying. Like when an article appeared which I think - not sure - was written by a transgender woman, who hadn't had medical transition, but wanted access to rape crisis centres.

It took me a while to understand who wrote the article and that was key. But it isn't just the Guardian doing this - I've reached the stage where I don't understand what I don't understand so I don't know how or where to start understanding what's going on.

I'm childfree and I never used to agree when people said "You don't have to worry about the next generation". I thought, I'm human, of course I'm going to worry about future generations and try and engage with politics in a way that I think will be helpful for them.

now I look at the world and think, actually, I haven't a fecking clue what's going on so should I just stay out of it and let the next generation worry about themselves!! That's not really a me way to think. But then I look at the TRA stuff, the endemic misogyny of absolutely everything, the way things are going backwards and I think, well, what I can do?

And this is why I am saying that - given the current choice - if I want more money to go to working class women, I might as well vote to pay less tax and have more money to give to them myself. Cos no party is planning to give them anything much as things stand at present.

All I can say to the Labour Party is this: give me a better choice.

In my view, the Labour party ballsed up big time by allowing non-members to vote in the leadership elections. Stupid. Next thing you know, they'll be opening up all women short lists to men.. oh wait

It's a fucking sad state of affairs.

I'm newspaper and politically homeless.

Hear, bloody hear!

Awesome thread and place marking.
I am reminded of my brother's t-shirt: THINK while it's still legal.