What we need now more than ever is for those of you who aren’t sex workers to amplify our voices and support our cause. – “More Than Ever”
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know that in the past two years, the tide of sex worker rights has completely turned. The government’s violent suppression of sex workers has, instead of winning more support for bigotry, instead turned a majority of Americans against the prohibitionists for the first time since such polls have been a thing; a few politicians (even at the presidential election level) have begun to recognize that sex workers and or clients are voters, and that among younger voters support for sex worker rights is as normal as support for LGBT rights was among that age cohort a generation ago. Even “sex trafficking” hysteria has begun to backfire; the wildly-exaggerated wanking fantasies spread by cops and “rescue” profiteers are so at odds with common sense and with what people can see of sex workers on social media, that even the believers are beginning to support decriminalization as a way of directing police resources toward the imaginary “trafficking gangs” rather than toward wrecking the lives of consenting adults. Sex workers of all business models and socioeconomic levels are organizing and speaking out, and most people who aren’t dyed-in-the-wool racists are finally being forced to recognize how much more severely the consequences of criminalization fall upon people of color, trans women, migrants, and other marginalized groups. Even mainstream feminism, which has been trying to destroy sex workers since the late ’80s, is beginning to fragment as more and more chapters of old-guard feminist organizations forsake the pearl-clutching harridans who pretend to speak for everyone with a vagina. The younger activists, those in their twenties and thirties, have got this, and they are more than capable of carrying it; it’s time for older activists like me to move into a more advisory role, working behind the scenes, writing articles, and going one-on-one with movers and shakers who are closer to us in age and need things expressed to them in terms more intelligible to those of previous generations. So with that in mind, I’m going to be spending more of my energy in reaching out to those outside the demimonde in order to win their aid and support for our cause, and in trying to help them see that it isn’t just ours after all, but rather a vital part of the rights of all individuals to control their own voices, bodies, and lives without the interference of violent busybodies.
