Government…persecutions [of sex workers]…are nothing but the temper tantrums of frustrated authoritarians. – “Whores’ Day 2016”
42 years ago today, French sex workers occupied the Church of St. Nizier in Lyon to protest the depredations inflicted on them by the police; the event garnered worldwide attention and is considered the beginning of the sex worker rights movement. For a long time, not much changed; the early successes of the movement were suppressed within a decade by the growing anti-sex coalition of fundamentalist Christians & fundamentalist feminists, fueled by the AIDS panic (which also choked the Sexual Revolution). But slowly, sex workers won rights in many countries, and public opinion slowly turned in our favor; by 2004 the only way prohibitionists could effectively fight us was to intentionally launch a moral panic by recycling the century-old “white slavery” hysteria. Governments found the myth of sex workers as passive, “voiceless” victims a useful one for expanding their police states and restricting immigration while pretending not to be racist, and so applied themselves to spreading the panic on a scale unprecedented since the witch panics of the 15th to 18th centuries.
But even though governments continue to pour money and manpower into anti-whore propaganda and campaigns intended to terrorize sex workers, our clients and our families, and police abuse of sex workers is at least as bad as it was in 1975, the rise of social media has allowed sex workers to interact with the public on an unprecedented scale. Every day, sex workers of all backgrounds, all around the world, work to debunk prohibitionist lies and expose the ugly truth about government persecution of individuals for the “crime” of consensual sex. All reputable human rights and health organizations, and every academic and journalist who has actually taken the time to objectively research the subject, now support sex workers’ demands for decriminalization; the foundation of lies on which prohibition is built is now crumbling, and soon everyone not blinded by their own sick need to control others’ private behavior will see the prohibition of sex work as the destructive evil it is. This does not mean the War on Whores will end soon; the War on Drugs is now recognized as a tyrannical abomination by the majority of people both in and out of government, and yet its demise will still take years due to the fact that powerful interests profit from it both monetarily and in increased power. But any cultural change requires a victory in the court of public opinion, and we’re slowly winning that; we’ve already passed the turning point in this war, and all that is required for eventual victory is that we keep relentlessly hammering at the lies, fighting bad laws and policies, and sharing the truth.
