4 Feminist Reasons Why We Need to Support Sex Workers‏

Timebandit wrote:

None of the four haven't been argued here before. Nothing new.

They're still important reasons to support sex worker rights, IMO.

Seems like a good place to post this:

[url=http://www.thenation.com/article/amnesty-international-calls-for-an-end-... International Calls for an End to the ‘Nordic Model’ of Criminalizing Sex Workers[/url]

Quote:

Citing a pattern of police surveillance, evictions, deportations, and other forms of penalization that violate the rights of sex workers, “Amnesty International is calling on the Norwegian government to undertake a program of legal reform that decriminalizes adult consensual sex work,” the organization’s new report states, “and ensures legal protections from exploitation for people who sell sex that comply with international human rights standards.”

Not sure why they've chosen to focus exclusively on Norway, and not all of the countries (including Canada) that use the nordic model as their legal framework around sex work, but I see it as welcome nonetheless.

I wonder if anyone else in this thread (other than Susan) has actually done the front-line mental health work that sex work largely entails, or if it's just me and a bunch of entitled cisfeminists arguing that work with a cumshot is infinitely more exploitive than work with hot grease, and how this intersects with attempts to limit transition and otherwise regulate access to estrogenic bodies through anything other than a monogamous state-regulated relationship in which CAFABs hold structural advantages. But then we'd have to start asking why the nominally cisfeminine are less homeless, jailed, dead, assaulted, abused, raped (yep, when you count all rapes), murdered, bullied, and forced out of school, likely to do manual labor, likely to have a non-management job if participating in the labor force, detatched from the ability to spend their earnings, than the nominally cismasculine... in a society that coerces cisidentification... and I've given up hope of the Canadian left ever managing that.

Not just sex workers, but my clients are disproportionately trans women. The diffrence is, the latter usually haven't accessed identification yet, but are buried in transmisogynistic, lesbophobic, cisessentialist arguments as to why they aren't women. CAFABs don't have to pay someone to make them feel desired, they also don't have to endanger themselves as badly to get more mainstream forms of mental healthcare more easily than CAMABs do.

The second part of the first paragraph is rife with antifeminist MRA doctrine. I won't comment on sex work in this forum, but I will comment on misogyny.

I'm not sure I understand all the arcane vocabulary in the second paragraph, but as far as I can make out, this is misogynist bullshit:

CAFABs don't have to pay someone to make them feel desired, they also don't have to endanger themselves as badly to get more mainstream forms of mental healthcare more easily than CAMABs do.

If I understand correctly, the writer is talking about women who are not transexual as opposed to men who aren't transexual. Firstly, I agree that there is very strong discrimination and even pervasive violence against transpeople.

But it is certainly not easy for many women, especially those of us who are of a certain age, to "make ourselves feel desired".  And it is difficult for women and for men to access proper mental health care. Agreed that there again, it is harder still for transpeople.