First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. – Mahatma Gandhi
Today is International Whores’ Day, the 39th anniversary of a protest in which…
…over 100 French prostitutes occupied the Church of St. Nizier in Lyon. In a very real sense, today is the birthday of the sex worker rights movement; though Margo St. James had already founded COYOTE two years before, the French protests were the first ones large and vociferous enough to gain media attention, and led to the formation of the French Collective of Prostitutes (which in turn inspired the founding of the English Collective of Prostitutes and a number of other, similar organizations)…
Birthdays are a good time for taking stock, for looking at where one has been and where one is going. Like humans, movements have good birthdays and bad ones; the first few anniversaries of that historic protest were good, until mainstream feminism betrayed us in the early 1980s by selling out to the carceral anti-sex crowd and hopping into bed with the religious right. And though there were some dark days after that, the movement continued to grow throughout the ‘90s and early ‘00s despite every opposition. Of course the prohibitionists struck back; they revived the old “white slavery” hysteria under a new name, and for years now they’ve seemed to have the upper hand in the public’s imagination with their lurid masturbatory fantasies of gypsy whores, weeping teenage “sex slaves” and leering “pimps” with magical powers. At the same time, however, the internet has allowed sex workers to organize with each other and reach out to the public at a level we could only dream of when I first entered the business. While politicians, cops and the more ignorant and authoritarian members of the general public have subjected the rights of sex workers, our clients and our associates to unceasing attack, at the same time health officials, human rights groups, and the more well-informed and freedom-loving members of the public have increasingly sided with sex workers in calling for decriminalization.
In “Back and Forth” I provided a snapshot of how things stood last summer, and I think it’s safe to say they’ve shifted somewhat in our favor since then. Oh, one wouldn’t know it to look at the mainstream media; with a few rare exceptions the Fourth Estate has largely abdicated its role of exposing tyranny and instead dedicated itself to the worship of those in power. Every moronic assertion about “sex trafficking” is slavishly parroted without a whisper of skepticism, every asinine lie about sex workers a cop vomits out is presented as gospel, every ridiculous prohibitionist “study” is reverently cited as ironclad proof of the necessity of “rescuing” us by either locking us up or starving us to death. The horrible Swedish model has advanced in Ireland and France, was recently adopted as a “recommendation” by the European parliament, has been re-introduced in the UK after being sent packing once before, and is being touted by the Canadian government in a sleazy attempt to circumvent the court decision which struck down criminalization in Canada last December. The week doesn’t pass that some US jurisdiction doesn’t come out with a new draconian law designed to save nonexistent “trafficked children” by shredding the Constitution and scattering its remains to the four winds; and even countries which have previously taken a more liberal view such as Germany, the Netherlands and Australia are now infested with prohibitionists demanding state control over adult sexual behavior.
The ranks of our allies, however, increase every day. Over 560 organizations advised the Parliament to adopt decriminalization over the Swedish model, and over 300 academics gave the same advice to Canada. A few reporters are beginning to question “trafficking” mythology, and anti-criminalization articles by activists and allies are getting far more common not only in libertarian publications like Reason, but also others all across the political spectrum from Jacobin to Vice to Salon to The Economist to National Review. It won’t be long before prohibitionists recognize that they’re on the wrong side of history, and begin to adopt the sort of delaying tactics they’ve used for decades against gay rights and are using now against the erosion of the drug war. The fight won’t be over soon, not by a long shot. But I predict that every year on this day, I’ll have ever-increasing amounts of good news to report.
Hmm my concern with issues like this is that once the battle is won people settle down and become complacent while the ideologues continue pushing to have their opinions forced on other people.
The worst feature of democracy is that no issue is ever truly settled. This is why our country is not supposed to be a pure democracy, and has a Bill of Rights, but the people in charge have mostly forgotten both those things.
I had been so hopeful that here in Canada sanity would win out, but that hope grows dimmer day by day. The vast majority of responses to articles about prostitution seem to support decriminalization but the government seems bent on ignoring the public in favour of appeasing the religious right.
They are touting the fact that the results of the consultation supports criminalizing the purchase but not the sale of sex but that support was only 56% so not exactly overwhelming. I will need to write letters to the appropriate people but sometimes it starts to seem pointless.
I don’t want to out myself but it seems to be a good idea at times in an attempt to combat the perception of clients being uncontrolled sexual degenerates.
Remember, we aren’t fighting for ourselves, but for our grandchildren and all the other generations of humanity which will follow us in the long march of time. Sometimes injustices take decades or centuries to correct.
I guess I just need to look towards the long game. Selfishness is an ugly motivation.
Hopefully the accountants and economists are sitting quietly in their rooms doing the numbers. LOTS of foreign dollars have flowed their way for the past many years because even in its present iteration Canada does not criminalize individual escorts. I knew a number of women who didn’t even see locals–no need. Going to a Swedish model could change the equation dramatically. I know Canada is feeling flush at the moment, but still…
one of the reasons they trotted out against decriminalization was an increase in sex tourism. Of course, we know nothing of the sort occurred when New Zealand saw the light. Unfortunately, I think the conservatives are to married to the Nordic model to bring an alternative to the fore.
I don’t think the Nordic model would pass a charter challenge which would explain why the gov’t won’t take this to the SCC before passing it. They might just be hoping to put it off until after the election scheduled for October ’15
To be clear, did the 56% literally support the Swedish model, or was that calculated from support for criminalizing one and the other?
Like, I could see someone twisting numbers so that 56% support for criminalizing purchase and 44% support for criminalizing sale could be claimed 56% support for the Swedish model even though it’s really 12%.
it was 56% support for criminalization of buying sex and 66% opposed to criminalizing the selling of sex. And honestly I don’t see 56% as “overwhelming” support and there are some serious methodological flaws with this consultation. For starters, not tracking IPs allows self righteous busybodies with nothing better to do to fill out the question 25 times a day. I will admit I filled it out twice from 2 separate locations.
The only people supporting the Swedish–in Sweden or anywhere else–model are neofeminists, law enforcement, bureaucrats, religious types, and the ignorant–which kind of describes the first four anyway.
Reblogged this on johnomason.
[…] here is a good background piece on the movement to bring respect and justice to sex […]