The times when those slain by the evil policies of the police state were simply left to rot in the shadows are over. – “The Body Count”
Every year on this day, sex workers around the world gather to mourn our dead, but this year, the observance will be different in two very important ways. You can probably guess the first: Most of the gatherings are likely to be virtual ones, as people choose to physically isolate themselves to ward off disease. The second, however, is far more important: in the two years since the passage of the massive anti-sex censorship law FOSTA, attention and support for sex worker rights has grown dramatically among the general public, the media, and even the parasitic hangers-on who proclaim themselves “leaders”. Increasingly-punitive laws engendered by “sex trafficking” hysteria and the general worldwide rise in authoritarianism, aggravated by pandemic-driven desperation, have produced the effect desired by prohibitionists: dramatically increased violence against sex workers. Most governments have added insult to injury by cutting those they know to be sex workers out of their pandemic relief programs, and even as the “sex trafficking” panic implodes those who have used it as an excuse for violence have redoubled their efforts. Nor has the shift to online forms of sex work (again, driven by the pandemic) allowed sex workers to escape this violence: sociopathic fanatics such as the creeps from Morality in Media and Exodus Cry, in collusion with sociopathic profiteers like Nicholas Kristof, have succeeded in cutting off revenue from the sex workers who sold their content on Pornhub, just as they did with Backpage, and it’s unlikely they will stop there. But sex workers are no longer dying in the shadows, unnoticed and unmourned; social media has given us a megaphone, and FOSTA has galvanized those of our community who never considered organizing before to do so in numbers far too large to ignore. Yes, there are still far too many (including the arch-prohibitionists who recently won the US presidential election) who want sex workers silent, invisible, and preferably caged, enslaved, or dead. And they still hold tremendous power, and have been handed terrifying weapons over the past decade by a gullible public quaking in fear of imaginary bogeymen. But they can no longer commit their atrocities in the dark as they once could. As I’ve said before, we’re in the part where it gets worse before it gets better. But now, many more people than ever before are watching, and increasing numbers of them do not at all like what they see.
