workingitinportland:

Tara Burns is keeping ongoing score of SESTA casualties, to us and civilians. I’ve been asked multiple times to explain why this is bad and it is fucking TRYING—it’s like that article from last year, you know the one, the one with the headline “I don’t know how to teach you that you should care about other people”, except SESTA adds the dimension of “and your own fucking constitutional rights” as we see it begin to take hold with CL personals & expand to Skype.

I don’t know how to teach critical thinking skills—that was never my interest, my interest is in harm reduction but teaching critical thinking & empathy has become CRUCIAL to harm reduction as the already-fragile laws we relied on & hoped to one day develop into acknowledged human rights, are gutted, leading to weakness in the currently acknowledged human rights, only no one but swers seems to notice or care.

A common argument I keep seeing is that tired old trope “this is good for the children, FUCK liberal rich first world white women who see prostitution as an exercise of their freedom”

But that fundamentally misunderstands & misrepresents what SW is to me & to millions of women, men, & children, white & brown, around the world.
We live in a world where we have to work to survive unless we got exponentially lucky and were born into the 1%. Most of us live in places where min wage—if there is one—is FAR outstripped by cost of living. I had a 40hr/week job with the gov’t making well over min wage at $15/hr, and I STILL couldn’t afford rent and basic things like food or a phone. I was working 40 hours a week & squeezing clients into my weekends, too exhausted to do anything but sleep between my different jobs. I’m FAR from the only one.
SW isn’t about empowerment except insofar as survival is powerful. Money is the closest thing we have to freedom under capitalism. SW offers people with very little social/educational/financial capital a way to survive & possibly even THRIVE.

It is not possible to eradicate sex work without creating and enforcing a TRUE living wage, REALLY affordable housing, affordable healthcare, free childcare, &c.
These things are not impossible! They aren’t FICTION