However destructive a wildfire may be, it’s at least possible to fight it when there aren’t hordes of fools running around throwing lit matches everywhere they go. – “New Year’s Eve 2023“
Though “sex trafficking” hysteria has imploded, that does not mean we will soon enter a new golden age of sex workers rights; as I wrote two years ago today,
When the last iteration of “sex trafficking” hysteria died in the 1920s, the laws it spawned remained and are still being used to persecute people for thoughtcrime to this very day; the laws passed over the past 20 years will likewise long outlive the moral panic which spawned them.
Furthermore, no massive structure built over 15 years disappears without leaving debris. Trumpists are still vomiting out “sex trafficking” myths in support of their anti-migrant, anti-LGBT, anti-porn, and anti-brown people agendas; cops still use the propaganda to justify raping Asian sex workers; gullible stenographers who dare to call themselves “journalists” still uncritically repeat copaganda; and even those who have finally admitted that the “trafficking” mythology is a load of dingo’s kidneys now label it a “right-wing conspiracy theory” and refuse to admit their own culpability for the society-wide toxic effects of the racist, misogynistic wanking fantasy they helped spread for so long. The ascendance of Trumpism and the re-criminalization of abortion across much of the US are the direct results of that ugly narrative, and both book-burning crusades and the widespread demonization of anything to do with LGBT people are other offshoots of the same noxious root system which, had it been dug out and burned in the Oughts, would have been neither robust enough nor extensive enough to engender such toxic growths. The moral panic is over, but its rotten fruit have burst, spewing xenophobic, anti-sex, authoritarian poison all over American society. It’s going to take many years of arduous, unremitting effort to clean it up, and that’s assuming there are more willing to do so than are actively engaged in making it worse.
