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Online Forum at Sex in the Public Square

By Chris Hall
February 23, 2008

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SitPS Forum on Sex Work, Trafficking, and Human RightsNext week is going to be an exciting one, online and off. First of all, Tuesday is the kickoff for Cinekink 2008. Cinekink LogoCinekink is always good — far better than it has a right to be, in fact, given that sex often just gives indie filmmakers one reason to ramp their egos and pretensions up to eleven and beyond. I shudder to imagine what reams of crap Lisa Vandever has to comb through just to get quality programming for one week together. The GF always work the events as volunteers, and it’s a great time for anyone with a dirty mind and an artistic bent.

On a more personal level, though, we have a really important event of our own starting up at Sex in the Public Square. My partner and co-conspirator, Elizabeth Wood, is always looking for ways to come up with ways that we can take the pro-sex dialogue from spinning our wheels in the mud, and this time she came up with a brilliant one: rather than play the same old game of sex-work bingo with the cast of usual suspects, she’s assembled a bunch of the smartest activists and writers in the blogosphere today and invited them to participate in week-long online discussion on the themes of sex work, trafficking (and “trafficking”) and human rights. I’m all cranked up like a kid waiting for Santa Claus, except that in this case, Santa isn’t just my parents making shit up. It’s actually going to happen, and we’ve really got some great people who have committed to making it happen. There are so many things to say on these subjects, and so little of it ever gets said because we on the sex-poz side are busy just trying to hold ground from people who want to demonize us as haters of women, rapists, or just sling shit at us in childish ways by calling us “sex-poxes” or some other ridiculous thing. It’s going to be public, but that doesn’t mean it’s an open forum; comments are going to be strictly moderated, and people who want to play games like that don’t get to have their say this time around. That means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel once more by making the case that no, not all sex workers are victimized, trafficked, or acting out toxic scripts left over from childhood sexual abuse. Sex worker bingo is not allowed. I highly recommend everyone who’s interested check it out, especially if you want to contribute in a courteous, meaningful manner. Everything kicks off on Monday the 25th. The formal press release, complete with our contributor list, is below the fold.

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Activism, Sex in the Public Square, Sex Work Tagged With: Elizabeth-Wood, forum, Politics, Sex Work, trafficking

Audacia Ray on Brian Lehrer

By Chris Hall
June 16, 2007
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I was at Viviane’s tea party for the NYC pervert community last Sunday when Audacia Ray mentioned that she was going to be on the Brian Lehrer show the next morning, debating with a member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) about sex work.

“Oh, really,” I said, eager to show off my naïveté, “I kinda thought that NOW had gotten smarter about that stuff.”

Apparently not. Although NOW officially takes the stance that sex work should be legalized, the New York State chapter has recently sponsored legislation that increases penalties for patronizing a prostitute, and is engaged in a campaign to get newspapers and magazines to refuse advertising from escort agencies and massage parlors. This all happens under the guise of fighting “trafficking.”

I am, in general, a supporter of feminism. Our gender roles are a complete mess, and we need to keep questioning them. My problems with feminists usually arise when they stop asking questions about gender and instead become gatekeepers against inquiry into gender. NOW and the Ms. Foundation have, despite much good work, traditionally acted as guardians of middle-class morality in certain areas, such as pornography and sex work.

Dacia does a great job, as usual, of putting forth an alternative, radical perspective on sex work. Although trafficking is an atrocity and needs to be dealt with seriously, it’s often used as cover for a barely-suppressed horror of sexuality and a paternalistic attitude towards poor people of color. I find that there’s a very visible difference between the philosophies of those who see sex workers as pitiful things to be rescued (e.g., Nicholas Kristof) and those with a more layered view of sex work. For the former, the emphasis is on the word “sex”; for the latter, the key word is “work.” To talk about the realities of prostitution or stripping, whether as an individual choice or as forced exploitation, we have to approach it as a labor issue, not a failure of sexual morals. Work is something that we all understand. We don’t like it, but we do it every day, and a lot of us wind up getting screwed. That part is happening more and more as corporate power becomes more hegemonic and the protections that we gained through so much hard work and organizing turn into ash. The story of most Americans in the workplace is this: no union, no health care, no vacation, and little, if any, right to sue when our employers’ abuses get to be too much to bear.

But no matter how much shit we take in the straight workplace, we can always think of ourselves as better off than a whore or a stripper, both morally and materially, because even the legal kinds of sex work are only barely so, and just doing it makes you disposable in the eyes of a lot of people.

If there’s ever going to be a humane solution to the problems that come with sex work, we have to legitimize the work itself and see those as labor issues, not moral ones. The fact that the woman on my favorite porn video is working in shitty conditions is a problem in the same way that it’s a problem that my shirt was made in a sweatshop by underpaid, abused workers. Both are realities of the society that we live in. Both need to be taken seriously, but the reality invalidates neither the use of porn nor of shirts. In a way, the average American worker is in a situation much closer to that of sex workers than they like to admit; too many Americans have accepted that their bosses can do whatever they want with their lives and livelihoods, and passively allow themselves to be trafficked by the corporate hierarchy.

The major point that Audacia made in her discussion with Brian Lehrer is that the NOW plan is a very, very bad one because it doesn’t do anything to address trafficking as such; it targets both voluntary and involuntary sex workers, and drives the ones who need help further underground. What NOW is proposing is much more effective as a strategy to protect mainstream moral sensibilities: out of sight, out of mind. She also points out that Amsterdam, rather than increasing punishments against johns, has had great success with using them as a resource to identify women who don’t want to be there. The American model of vengeful law ‘n’ order plays well in headlines and serves the reputation of politicians, but in the end does bupkiss for any of the people who matter.

You can listen to Audacia on the Brian Lehrer show in the player below, or download it at WNYC.

Resources for sex workers’ rights:

  • Sex Workers’ Outreach Project
  • $pread Magazine
  • Network of Sex Work Projects
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Filed Under: Politics, Sex Work Tagged With: Audacia-Ray, feminism, sex-workers, trafficking

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