[The War on Whores] 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. – “Malice Aforethought”
Every December 17th, sex workers around the world gather together to mourn our dead. Last year, the list was far longer than I had ever seen it before, and for the first time almost everyone who isn’t a violent prohibitionist fanatic understood and acknowledged that the reason is the criminalization of our work; furthermore, most understood that the reason for the increase was the massive internet censorship law called FOSTA. Now, it’s true that most outside of the demimonde still choose to believe the contemptible lie that this law, intentionally designed to cripple the internet and to expose sex workers, our clients and our support services to persecution, legal harassment and violence, was somehow intended to “help” us, presumably in the same way that burning down a house constitutes “redecoration”. Because even in the Trump era most people are far too frightened of reality to admit that their government wantonly enacts laws and procedures whose specific and intentional purpose is to destroy the lives of anyone it has designated an “enemy of the state”, they prefer to pretend that this bloated abomination, passed nigh-unanimously by both houses of Congress, was just a massive “whoopsie” and that politicians weren’t repeatedly warned (by sex workers, academics, human rights experts and even their own Department of “Justice”) that it would do exactly what it has done. Of course this is utter nonsense: most of those who supported the law knew exactly what it would do, which is why they supported it in the first place; the ones who didn’t know simply didn’t care because votes bought with blood are still votes. But the prohibitionists and their political stooges foolishly thought that sex workers would continue to cower like whipped dogs, and that FOSTA would make it even easier for them to continue to speak for us and tell lurid masturbatory fantasies about our lives; in their hubris they did not stop to consider that once whores were pushed into a corner with nowhere to go, that they would be forced to fight. And fight they have, to a degree I’ve never before seen in the US. Many journalists have taken note and are siding with us; academics in many fields are joining them in pointing out the hopeless garbage that prohibitionists represent as “facts”. And possibly most important of all, even a few politicians have come around to recognizing that we represent a valuable constituency. I do not know what the body count will look like a year from today, but I do know that the time when those slain by the evil policies of the police state were simply left to rot in the shadows are over. Now when we mourn our dead, others are paying attention, and many of them are at long last pointing fingers at the culprits with titles and costumes.