Regular readers know that every Friday the Thirteenth, I ask those who aren’t sex workers to stand up for us. If you’re one of them, you already know the sorts of things I’m going to say; if you aren’t, you can simply go back and read the essay for the previous occurence in November, and the one before that from March 2020. So this time, as I did on July 4th this year, I’ll content myself with reminding y’all of everything I’ve previously said on previous occurences of this particular day and date combination.
Governments sending brutal thugs to inflict violence upon those who enjoy themselves in ways their overlords dislike is less popular in this country than it has been in a century, so now is the time to push even harder to chip away as much of the edifice of prohibition as possible before the pendulum inevitably begins to swing the other way again. – 11/13/20
Though many people conceive of sex worker rights as a “special case”, in truth it intersects with many other movements. – 3/13/20
If our allies get lazy and think we no longer need their help because the politicians are finally giving us lip service, we’re going to lose the ground we’ve worked so hard to win. – 12/13/19
One of the reasons so many outside the demimonde are afraid to stand up for the obvious fact that the government has no business “regulating” private sexual arrangements is they’re afraid of guilt by association. – 9/13/19
We need your support more than ever, because now voices calling for sex worker rights are more likely to be taken seriously than ever before. – 7/13/18
Though the sex trafficking hysteria is dying, moral panics get worse as they collapse, and even after the panic is history the tyrannical laws it engendered will still be there for “authorities” to destroy lives with. – 10/13/17
It doesn’t so much matter what you do today, as long as you do something to promote sex worker rights. – 5/13/16
Stupidity, ignorance, prudishness, statism, control-freakishness and bigotry run deep in human society, and it will take vast resources and millions of voices to beat those back into the outer darkness where they belong. – 11/13/15
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. – 6/13/14
It’s time we let the prohibitionists know that if they want to pick on sex workers, we have a whole lot of brothers and sisters they’re going to have to face as well. – 9/13/13
Even though any one person’s influence is small, lots of buckets eventually fill a pool. – 7/13/12
Sex worker rights are human rights, and there can never be too many voices speaking up for them, nor too many occasions on which to speak. – 4/13/12
No collective, “authority” or government has the right to tell women what we can and cannot do with our own bodies. – 1/13/12