Debauchette responds to further “benevolent” dehumanization of sex workers.
“I’ll stop posting quotes from sex workers stating they have agency when folks stop telling them they don’t.” – spreadmagazine
This is my biggest pet peeve, the relentless assumption that anyone who chooses sex work, in any form, must be mentally handicapped, damaged, child-like, and otherwise incapable of making intelligent and fully rational decisions about their own lives. It’s such a fucking Rorschach response, these people who project their own anxieties and fears about sex and commerce and sexual commerce all over our bodies.
The Rorschach barb is actually pretty well taken because it applies equally well to uninformed sympathizers and detractors alike. A “libertarian” belief that anything between consenting adults isn’t just virtuous but rational income maximizing can be no less brutally detached than a serial predator’s, a conservative’s, or a paleo-feminist’s, or too many customer’s belief that prostitutes are necessarily sub-human thralls.
For that matter, because sex work is highly stratified, segmented, and because it’s illegal also adversarially information-opaque you probably want to be careful about Rorschach effects even if you’re reasonably well informed.
The barb about projection of anxieties is also pretty interesting. I had a minor ephiphany earlier today while reading about genuinely barbaric treatment of lowest-class sex workers in cultures where, well, lower-class all kinds of workers are treated barbarically. And because I’ve at least learned that when I have that reflex it’s a good idea to question whether they might also apply in non “barbaric” cultures like mine I wound up with the little epiphany that based on everything from “ladies auxiliaries” to “women’s work” to “feminine complaints” to daddy/daughter chastity pledges to door-holding to who can “legitimately” carry condoms our society’s assumptions about the subhumanity of “whores” isn’t really all that different from our nominally more affirmative but actually highly custodial attitudes towards “virgins” and “Madonnas.”
