If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. – Desmond Tutu
2019 will be remembered as the year it became fashionable for opportunistic prohibitionists to pretend to be concerned about the harm done to sex workers by the policies of criminalization they have supported for the past two decades. While the deranged puritans who deny our agency, share their disgusting sexual fantasies about us in public and intentionally send thugs to deceive, rape and cage us (while pretending they want to “rescue” us from the bogeymen who reside only in their fevered imaginations) are just as awful as ever and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future, those who merely jumped on the “sex trafficking” bandwagon to sell something or gain power are now pretending to have been “neutral” before, but sympathetic now because they finally bothered to look at the mountains of data we’ve been showing them since the turn of the century, or something. But because these sociopaths wouldn’t know a moral compass if one were driven into their faces with an impact wrench, their attempts to sound sympathetic are pathetic at best and deeply insulting at worst.
Power-mad shitbag Elizabeth Warren, for example, has signed on to support a “study of the impact of FOSTA” while simultaneously scheming (again) to steal sex workers’ money and shut us out of the banking system. But while her duplicity is disguised well enough to fool the insufficiently-cynical, this recent effort by the staunchly-prohibitionist New York Times is embarrassingly transparent. The newspaper which launched “sex trafficking” hysteria 16 years ago this month with a fantasy called “The Girls Next Door”, and which has since then functioned as one of the primary organs spreading “sex trafficking” hysteria with lies, masturbatory fantasies from Nick Kristof, and copsucking propaganda, now wants us to believe that it gives a shit about us. And yet, it isn’t even trying to remove prohibitionist fecal matter from its lips before speaking up. It starts in the lede by referring to censorship as “holding tech platforms accountable” and then refers to sex workers’ ads & online activism as “sex-trafficking schemes” and “the ills of the internet”. It then goes on to argue that censorship is mostly a good thing as long as the government precedes that censorship with years of propaganda demonizing & dehumanizing its intended targets, and describes FOSTA-enabled censorship as “mostly positive” (“the results are not all positive” is semantically equivalent to “the results are mostly positive”). And that’s just in the first two paragraphs; a little further along sex work is dysphemized as “the bartering of children and adults” and a law specifically designed to censor the internet and opposed by every human rights and speech group in the country is said to have been “hailed as a way to catch up to…reality”.
The most astonishing part of all this? The Times’ writers are so clueless they really think this milquetoast admission of the harms of FOSTA is enough to erase a generation of cheerleading for tyranny. It will be interesting to see how they, and myriad others of their ilk, try to avoid being “held accountable” for their incredibly irresponsible actions as sex worker rights follows the footsteps of LGBT rights into the mainstream of US political discussion.
