Please remember that any contribution – loud or quiet, public or private, eloquent or laconic, lengthy or brief – is important and worthy, and everyone one will hasten the day when governments no longer believe it’s acceptable for them to persecute sex workers, our clients and our associates in any way they please. – “Friday the 13th”
Except in leap years, February is exactly four weeks long; that means every date in March falls on the same day as it does in February, except in leap years. And that means that both February and March will have a Friday the Thirteenth this year. “So what?” new readers may ask; “You aren’t superstitious, are you?” Well no, I’m not; not about Friday the Thirteenth, anyway, which if anything would be a good luck day for whores. In fact I intentionally chose to be on the road today – in Las Vegas, to be precise, but not in a casino because I don’t actually believe in luck. But I digress. Long-time readers know that every Friday the Thirteenth I ask those of you who aren’t sex workers to speak up for us in some way. In 2013, I explained it like this:
The gay rights movement didn’t really take off until the friends and families of gay people got involved, and it’s the same for us; since only about 1% of Western women ever formally work as whores, we’re going to need a lot of help to make our voices heard. We need all the sex workers (such as strippers, dominatrices and porn actresses) whose fields aren’t currently criminalized, and the sugar babies and other women who have informally or indirectly taken money for sex at least once (which might be as high as 10% of all women). We need all of the men who hire us at least occasionally, which comes to about 20% of the adult male population. We need all of the women who recognize that cops can’t tell the difference between professionals and amateurs, and that laws which can be used to arrest us will also work to arrest you. We need all of those who love porn, polyamory, BDSM or kink, because even though policing of sex usually starts with harlots, it never stops with us. We need all of the public health and human rights experts who understand the necessity of decriminalization in light of their respective fields, all of the libertarians who recognize that governmental prohibition of consensual behavior is both indefensible and dangerous to individual liberty, and all of the feminists who recognize that a woman’s right to control her own body and make her own sexual and economic choices is the primary feminist issue. And we need all of the decent human beings who don’t fall into any of those categories, but are simply disgusted by the idea of armed thugs arresting, humiliating and ruining people for the “crime” of consensual sex.
In 2012, I even provided a number of suggestions for how you could do it; one such suggestion was to fund activism, and since then I’ve even made it possible for you to donate directly to me if you like (and I’d welcome it if you did, since I have a lot of work to do this year). But because we’ve got two Friday the Thirteenths so close together this year, what I’m going to do is the same thing I did in December 2013: provide links to every post any of you makes today. And this time, I’ll also include a section acknowledging every fund-donor by whatever name he or she prefers. Ready? Set? Go! 
Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
I love your blog and your book and I’m an ally and I’m speaking up for sex workers rights today!
As the sex worker monument in Amsterdam says “Respect sex workers all over the world”!
[…] I am bringing all this up for two reasons: There have been a raft of laws proposed or passed recently (like #C36 in Canada, or the law in Alaska) in an effort to eliminate sex work, and today is Speak Up for Sex Workers Day (h/t Maggie McNeill). […]
As a liberal-minded kid graduating high school in 1974, I had immense respect for the feminist movement. However, in the decades since, I’ve been dismayed to watch feminism hijacked from its original call for “genuine choice and equal treatment for women and for everyone”, and perverted into a quasi-religious tool for preaching the opinions of a vocal few women Somehow, this vocal few think they know better than most other women what is best for all women and intend to foist their opinions on all women. That vocal few only allow women “choice” as long as women choose what that few have decided and insist is “right”.
A subset of their “only-true-and-right opinions” concerns adult women’s choice to engage in sex work. The vocal few essentially insist no woman should have the choice, nor is able even to make the willful choice, to earn income through the sex industry. A movement that began with the cry for ‘women’s rights” degenerated into a denial of a woman’s ability and right to make up her own mind and choose her own path. According to this recent wave of perverted feminists, apparently a woman DOESN’T have the say over her own body after all.
For the last year or two since I discovered your blog, I’ve been directing people to it and discussing the subject of sex workers rights when I’ve been able to.
Also, as a sexual assault survivor, I can confidently say that feminism has wedded itself to outdated 1970s ideas about sex/sexual abuse, and spurious accused all who point out the flaws in these ideas of ‘hating women’ so to speak.
[…] Friday the 13th – Maggie McNeill […]