Every December 17th, sex workers…renew our pledge to keep fighting for a day in which our own society no longer brands us fair game.
– “Against Violence”
In the year since the last December Seventeenth, the violence against sex workers that the observance protests has grown dramatically worse in the United States, largely due to the intentional and premeditated actions of our own government. The War on Whores, pretended for almost two decades now to be a war on the imaginary scourge of “sex trafficking”, grew to a fever pitch with the passage of FOSTA, a massive internet censorship bill intended to drive sex workers off of the internet and into the streets, where we are easier prey for cops and other predatory men. Naturally, no one law can accomplish what a century of such laws has failed to do, namely wipe sex work out entirely; however, in the time it has taken new overseas advertising sites to appear and people to find ones that work for them, many of the most marginalized of our number were indeed driven to the streets or otherwise forced into more precarious circumstances. But even though the unprecedented scale and viciousness of this assault on our persons and livelihood has galvanized sex worker activism and attracted the attention and sympathy of many who were previously uninterested, far too many reporters, commentators and even would-be allies continue to cede ground to prohibitionists, giving their motives the benefit of the doubt. The great majority of articles on the subject claim that attempts to destroy our lives and incomes and silence our voices are “well-intentioned”, or that men who use oppressive laws as an excuse to literally rape and rob us “want to help”, or that the harm to whores, our clients, or families and our associates are somehow merely “collateral damage” even though every gun in this war is aimed squarely at us. The reason for this minimization of state violence is simple: even though the number of people who support the human right to consensual sex is growing by the month, most of them are too horrified by what is going on to admit that prohibitionists, both in and out of government, are using high-sounding narratives as a cover for a systematic campaign to brutalize, impoverish and exterminate everyone involved in every aspect of the sex trade. This jihad is no more “well-meaning” than the Drug War, alcohol Prohibition, Jim Crow or any other campaign of government violence against individuals and civil rights; it is a well-planned and well-funded program of terrorism designed to punish sexual behavior authoritarians have deemed deviant, and to break the spine of the greatest tool for the facilitation of free thought ever developed by the human race. And until the media and our allies are willing to admit what the Whore Nation already knows, the best we can hope for is to minimize the damage and try to keep things from getting even worse.
