We will strive to listen in new ways to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard. – Richard M. Nixon
Sex worker rights activism can be extraordinarily frustrating, especially in the midst of the current moral panic. Sometimes it feels as though the majority of American activists think of this as some sort of game or intellectual exercise, a species of feminist or Marxist navel-gazing; while sex workers in other countries (especially those in the developing world) mobilize to fight bad laws and “trafficking” disinformation, those in the US seem largely content to talk about it (to each other) or to blather nonsense about “patriarchy” and “capitalism”. And even when we do speak out, it seems as though we’re largely unheard no matter how loudly we shout. But in the past year that seems to be changing; the protests at the International AIDS Conference last July made the national news, and decriminalization has at last entered the public discourse.
A lot of this has been enabled by social media, which allows widely-separated and isolated voices to sound together in virtual protest; angry hookers on Twitter got an insulting video show cancelled in a single afternoon, and we recently attacked an old and powerful foe: the Salvation Army, one of the most well-funded and implacable proponents of “sex trafficking” mythology. The Salvationists are not content to paint only whores as the passive slaves of invisible, demonic “pimps”; like many trafficking fetishists they claim that all sex work, including stripping and porn acting, is “trafficking”. This time, however, their hubris led them to bite off a bit more than they could chew:
A new documentary project…has drawn criticism from sex workers and…advocates for allegedly filming women employed in those trades without their consent. Freelance journalist Melissa Gira Grant reported Tuesday that the film, Hard Corps, is being produced by SAVN.tv, an online network funded by the Salvation Army, and purports to link pornography, exotic dancing and other types of sex work to other forms of human trafficking. The page also features a video statement by Salvation Army “Territorial Commander” Jim Knaggs, who calls sex work “nothing less than slavery”…The project is currently seeking funding through the online platform Kickstarter, which Gira Grant reported is “looking into” the matter, according to co-founder Yancey Strickler. The site’s regulations do not permit projects raising money for charitable purposes, but donors have reported seeing the Salvation Army listed as the recipient of their pledges…Hard Corps has raised just over $8,000 of the creative team’s stated goal of $100,000 in funding…
In the trailer, director Guy Noland…shows off a camera hidden on a pair of eyeglasses. The trailer also appears to show sex workers without having their faces blurred…leading to accusations online that Noland and his team were endangering the workers’ lives by exposing their identities. Also, while the project’s Kickstarter page lists interviews with various porn stars, at least one of them, Nina Hartley, said on Twitter…that she “did not know” that her interview would be used for this kind of film…
Melissa later shared Kickstarter’s response, stating that they would not remove the project because it had not violated any of their guidelines. Even so, it’s highly unlikely the documentary will be made through contributions; as Frankie Mullin observed in her Huffington Post article on the subject,
…Hard Corps has until August 19th to raise $100,000. So far it has just over $8,000. That the project will fail seems pretty much assured; even those who don’t balk at its judgemental, repressive tone are likely to be put off by the amateurish wording on the Kickstarter page. Were it not so terrifying, the pitch for Hard Corps would be funny. It’s badly written, nonsensical in places and uses bizarrely quaint terms such as…“flesh peddling”…
Mullin goes on to discuss the danger of exposing sex workers to whore stigma without their consent, using as an example the murder of Petite Jasmine; the worldwide protests spawned by that tragedy, organized in only a few days, are another instance of our growing ability to make ourselves heard. That’s the real point of the Salvation Army pseudo-documentary affair: that a bunch of anti-sex fanatics want to promote their beloved 125-year-old myth of helpless victims at the mercy of evil perverts is not news, but the fact that it took only a few hours for sex workers’ protests against the lies to spawn two sympathetic articles on major websites most definitely is.
This documentary sounds so bad … shouldn’t we want it to come out just so we can mock the shit out of it?
Everyone knows that WE ARE ALL giving to the Salvation Army via federal and state grants (read: Taxpayer funded), right?
After doing a bit of research it seems the SA has to play a bit of a “shell game” with it’s funding – since not all of their programs can be funded by the government …
But I’m willing to bet that an SA program aimed at eliminating “human trafficking” would be something the White House and BOTH houses of Congress would only be too happy to throw some money at.
Which is why they’re doing this shit. They’re a self-licking ice cream cone and they need ever increasing amounts of funding to satiate their desire for money and power. Human trafficking is the new “Daddy Warbucks”.
Kudo’s for having the nuts to use Richard Nixon in an epigram – though I’m not totally sure if you’re gaffing on him or what. He’s actually my favorite President – on the foreign policy side – pretty shit for econmics (except that he single handedly proved, quite unintentionally, that wage and price controls were idiotic. No one on the left or right even mentions them anymore thanks to Nixon’s failure there).
But for foriegn policy – the guy had balls. Here’s an interesting read on Nixon and Kissenger and “Game Theory” and ending the Vietnam war …
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/16-03/ff_nuclearwar?currentPage=all
Nixon’ll be coming back into fashion very soon since the current occupant of the White House makes Nixon look like a choirboy … ahh, if Nixon had only been born black – the things he could have done! 😀
Don’t read anything into the fact that the epigram came from Nixon; I’ve used epigrams from a number of unsavory characters before, including Hitler and the Marquis de Sade. It’s just a good quote no matter who said it.
I’d like Nixon better if he hadn’t sabotaged a plan to end the Vietnam War so he could win the election. That’s right: Tricky Dick deliberately prolonged the war to keep Humphrey from winning.
When I told my mother about it, I made sure to preface it with the fact that this was in October of 1968, and my father was killed in February of 1969, so even if the Johnson plan to end the war had succeeded, it wouldn’t have gotten her husband, my father, out of Vietnam by February. So Nixon probably didn’t kill my father, but I don’t like that bastard.
Showing peoples’ faces unblurred without their consent is why we don’t want it to come out, especially people who will be put in real danger as a result.
There are a lot of parallels between Nixon and Obama. Neither is ;particularly driven by ideology, both are political opportunists. Both lied frequently, but were cagey about it. Both gladly did things that offended their political bases if they seemed likely to be politically useful. Both did not much care about obeying the law if they thought they could get away with it, a feature of many modern presidents to be sure.
But I would not say Obama and Nixon are the same. Obama has not accomplished nearly as much as Nixon, though much of that has to do with the extraordinary lengths to which Congressional Republicans have gone to block legislation. And he has not engaged in the sort of petty criminal activity that Nixon did. Neither of them is a particularly wonderful example of statesmanship, and I say that as a progressive.
If you look at the nuimber of egregious scandals and coverups – Obama beats Nixon hands down. Nixon was “accused” of having an enemies list – and he covered up a break-in after he found out about it after the fact.
Obama’s crimes … are not only more numerous – but much worse. The black panther voter intimidation scandal, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and the IRS scandal have put Obama light years ahead of Nixon.
krulac,
I’ve heard fast and furious described as Watergate – with a body count.
The “black panther voter intimidation scandal” was two guys and Obama didn’t have anything to do with it. Fast and Furious was a true scandal though. Benghazi is the sort of thing that happens in a dangerous world when a country has interests all over the world. From at least Truman on these sorts of things have happened. The IRS “scandal” is a joke. NONE of the Tea Party groups lost their tax-free status, and it turns out some liberal groups were also investigated.
Obama, AFAIK, didn’t prolong a war in order to win an election. May Nixon burn in hell, and if he doesn’t, then there is no hell.
Now, all of that said, Obama didn’t get my vote in 2012. The reasons have nothing to do with this scandal-mongering.
Ok, the use of Kickstarter to fund this Salvation Army dreck (despite their “no charities” rule) should be put in the larger context of Kickstarter using their increasingly influential position as a middle man on fund raising projects to inflict their particular brand of mainstream “feminism” on the Internet. What Kickstarter reminds me of is Paypal. Paypal filled a role that has been necessary on the Internet, that of a trustworthy middle man who you could give your credit card number and not find mysterious trips to Cabo San Lucas charged on it later. However, this gave Paypal a certain amount of clout, which it used to implement typical Silicon Valley neopuritan morality on the portions of the Internet it had control over:
Nanny PayPal Hates Porn, Won’t Let You Spend Your Allowance on It
Oh, and of course a similar thing happened when “Pope” Steve Jobs made his pronouncement about the Apple app store, another middle man project designed to make buying software safer:
Steve Jobs vs Porn
“Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. ” — “Pope” Steve Jobs
Kickstarter, now that it is the “go to” site for fund-raising has started to implement similar neofeminist morality. I was far from shocked that Kickstarter didn’t see a problem with a Salvation Army hit piece against all aspects of the adult industry from escorting to pornography. It’s how they roll.
hehe…
I watched that trailer and that’s 4 and a half minutes of my life I won’t get back…
It’s like reefer madness mon…
porno is teh gateway drug…
how the hell can you become addicted to sex, if that is so, can’t you also be addicted to food??? Neural pathways, dopamine, seratonin, survival instincts, stuff above my paygrade, blah,blah,blah…
anyways, if they did ban porn (which he claims he doesn’t want to do “but it would be nice.”) Well, won’t guys just go back to fapping to the bra section of the JC Penny catalog? It’s like even if they could ban firearms. Well, you can still tear someone’s face off with the claw end of a hammer, you can still run ’em over with a car. You can still strangle ’em with your hands. Sure, maybe shootings might go down but you can’t ultimately ban murder…
So is he suggesting that porn is the cause of broken homes everywhere, insomnia, cannibalism and all of societies ills? Or is he suggesting a much bigger horror? Sticky keyboards????
They can’t ban porn we live in the age of “everything is a camera.”
true that…
have y’all heard of this???
I wish the Salvation Army would get off of this sex trafficking kick. They really are in a position to help poor people, and they can help a lot more of them if they’ll leave the hookers alone.