Via of Amber Rhea’s quote of the day, Born Whore says
I know you want me to be safe because you care about me. But when you say “be safe”, who do you think we sex workers need to protect ourselves from? Were you thinking about all the times we’re tokenized, treated like pariahs, refused visas, criminalized, researched like a bug, had others speak for us, caricatured in the media, asked totally offensive invasive questions, had our sanity and humanity questioned, our skills erased and ridiculed, risked arrest, deportation, eviction and (in my family) the threat of losing child custody? Were you thinking about the burden of secrecy from my family, or how many times I’ve tried to refute the same stereotypes over and over, and what it’s like to be told by a friend that I’m damaged? Is that what you meant?
It seems like the irreconcilable contradiction involves our assignment of blame to those human beings we ourselves insist are nevertheless only objects. To acknowledge sex workers as human beings obliges us to engage them as human beings.
One way or the other, though, the more you think about it the more clear it becomes that the biggest dangers sex workers face are consequences of our efforts to “protect” them rather than consequences of the work itself.
