Hi, my name to tumblr I’ve decided will be Kira cause it’s fairly close to my real name. I’m 20 years old and have been doing survival sex work since I was 17 years old. I started as a Sugar baby. Eventually moving my way into escort work and camming/digital services. Including but not limited to, videos, photos, sexting, findom, and many others. I now work as a stripper. I am also a “SWERF”
Why is this? Why would I, an actual sex worker, subscribe to a sect of feminism (radical feminism) that is “Sex Worker Exclusionary”? Why would I support a cause that “harms” girls like me? The answer is actually really simple. I don’t.
Now, I’m not sure why being anti-legalization of prostitution is considered being anti sex worker. It’s not. Areas where prostitution is legal have the highest rates of human trafficking, ESPECIALLY in high income countries, because of the higher buying power by the wealth in said country (and the trafficked girls themselves often come from poorer countries). Would legalization help women who do it by choice? Yes, absolutely. However, helping the small number of women, who are already ridiculously fucking privileged, is NOT worth putting vulnerable girls and women in even more risk. In an even shittier situation than they already in.
How some people who call themselves feminists can advocate for legislation that’s only going to assist privileged individuals is completely beyond me. How can you look at the facts, the statistics, the information, and tell me benefiting someone who had the privilege to choose this is more important than protecting the one forced into it, and call yourself a feminist?
Sex work is not fun unless you choose it over another option, and even then I don’t understand it. It is not a feminist act to sexually objectify yourself for money.
“Because men have to pay to objectify me, and my clients respect me.”
a. No they don’t. Men on the street are going to objectify you still. Men at my JOB still objectify me and don’t pay me. You think everyone who’s watching me dance on stage and filling up their spank bank is gonna tip me? You think everyone who’s sitting there, thinking about what sick twisted things they’d do to a girl like me all come up to the stage behind the tipping bar and put bills on my stage or tuck them into my panties? No. They don’t.
b. Your clients do not respect you. Someone who holds your livelihood (money) over your head and refuses to give it to you until you perform a sex act does not respect you in the least.
I also am not sure how you think these laws are going to protect women anyway. Murder is already a crime, assaulting someone is already a crime. When I give private dances, they try to take my panties off. I tell them no, and later they “forget” and try to do it again. This is my personal rule, and also a strictly enforced rule of the club I work for. If these men can’t even follow a simple fucking rule at a strip club, with huge bouncers and security and tons of other people, what the FUCK makes you think they’re going to respect a prostitutes boundaries or follow the law when they’re alone in a hotel room with nobody else around?
If your ultimate goal is legalization to protect victims from being arrested and further put in pain, I’m here to tell you that’s not the answer. Legalization makes it worse. If you truly want to help trafficked victims, DO something. Raise awareness. Learn the tell tale signs of what a victim looks and acts like. Call your representatives. Donate to anti trafficking organizations. Report anything even slightly suspicious you see.
Vilify and destroy the men who buy sex. They do not deserve respect.
I know you want to help, but making it exponentially worse for victims to make it slightly better for privileged choosers is not how you help.
Feel free to reblog, in fact I encourage you to do so.
One of my best friends, a girl I have known since I was like 16, is a “sex worker”. She was abandoned by her father and abused by her unstable mother. She has multiple learning disabilities, processing difficulties, and executive dysfunction. She has never received proper treatment or diagnosis other than being labeled with a form of Autism in early elementary school.
She is the single mother of a child conceive by the man who, when she was fresh out of HS, essentially kidnapped her to the other side of the country and pimped her out to support his crack habit, all while starving and beating her almost to death.
She risked her life to leave, only to be left completely dependent on her still-abusive mother (who not only starves and degrades her, but also refuses to allow her to see a psychologist because the mother “doesnt believe in mental illness” and considers people on psych medication to be “drug addicts”).
Her mother also refuses to get her the testing that would possibly entitle to her to some sort of social security disability benefits, job placement programs, and other resources for the disabled. Her mom also regularly steals her meager WIC checks and food stamps allowances as ‘rent’. She’s going through all sorts of programs and on all sorts of waiting lists trying to do the right thing and get into a work placement program and she’s being strangled by red tape and bureaucracy.
She is the strongest woman I know but she is also, in every sense of the word, a vulnerable person.
In order to provide for her son, she has resorted back to ‘sex work’. She doesn’t talk about it much. In fact, the only thing she’s said since taking it back up took my breath away.
We had just finished painting Halloween pumpkins with her little son. The baby decided he was hungry, and attempted to open a fresh bag of cereal that we’d just picked up from the store. He wound up breaking the bag open, and everything spilled out over the yard. The cereal all spilled out, and some eggs were ruined; maybe 6 dollars worth of food. We were cleaning it up and she broke down crying. “He doesn’t get it.” She kept saying, over and over. “He doesn’t get what I had to do for this.”
There’s nothing empowering about a mentally disabled abuse survivor sobbing on her front lawn over a single broken bag of groceries because it means she’ll have to be raped again, sooner than expected, to keep herself and her child alive.
I’ve said it before and Ill say it again, if you buy sex in any form, you are a rapist who deserves a painful death and I personally hate you. This is not some one-off shock story, either. These are the girls you are buying. Most of their stories are even worse, a lot of their stories start as children. If you can perpetuate that and still live with yourself you need to be removed from this earth.
This is it. This is the post I found months ago that opened my eyes completely. This post ripped my heart out and fucked me up for weeks. I would still probably be stuck in pro-porn “sex positive” hell if I hadn’t stumbled upon this post. This is hell. I want to make it my goal in life to make sure no one ever has to go through something like this ever. I want to help every trapped sex worker exit and find a better job, a better life. One where they don’t have to be raped and abused just to survive. I owe everything to this story.
One of my best friends, a girl I have known since I was like 16, is a “sex worker”. She was abandoned by her father and abused by her unstable mother. She has multiple learning disabilities, processing difficulties, and executive dysfunction. She has never received proper treatment or diagnosis other than being labeled with a form of Autism in early elementary school.
She is the single mother of a child conceive by the man who, when she was fresh out of HS, essentially kidnapped her to the other side of the country and pimped her out to support his crack habit, all while starving and beating her almost to death.
She risked her life to leave, only to be left completely dependent on her still-abusive mother (who not only starves and degrades her, but also refuses to allow her to see a psychologist because the mother “doesnt believe in mental illness” and considers people on psych medication to be “drug addicts”).
Her mother also refuses to get her the testing that would possibly entitle to her to some sort of social security disability benefits, job placement programs, and other resources for the disabled. Her mom also regularly steals her meager WIC checks and food stamps allowances as ‘rent’. She’s going through all sorts of programs and on all sorts of waiting lists trying to do the right thing and get into a work placement program and she’s being strangled by red tape and bureaucracy.
She is the strongest woman I know but she is also, in every sense of the word, a vulnerable person.
In order to provide for her son, she has resorted back to ‘sex work’. She doesn’t talk about it much. In fact, the only thing she’s said since taking it back up took my breath away.
We had just finished painting Halloween pumpkins with her little son. The baby decided he was hungry, and attempted to open a fresh bag of cereal that we’d just picked up from the store. He wound up breaking the bag open, and everything spilled out over the yard. The cereal all spilled out, and some eggs were ruined; maybe 6 dollars worth of food. We were cleaning it up and she broke down crying. “He doesn’t get it.” She kept saying, over and over. “He doesn’t get what I had to do for this.”
There’s nothing empowering about a mentally disabled abuse survivor sobbing on her front lawn over a single broken bag of groceries because it means she’ll have to be raped again, sooner than expected, to keep herself and her child alive.
I’ve said it before and Ill say it again, if you buy sex in any form, you are a rapist who deserves a painful death and I personally hate you. This is not some one-off shock story, either. These are the girls you are buying. Most of their stories are even worse, a lot of their stories start as children. If you can perpetuate that and still live with yourself you need to be removed from this earth.
This is it. This is the post I found months ago that opened my eyes completely. This post ripped my heart out and fucked me up for weeks. I would still probably be stuck in pro-porn “sex positive” hell if I hadn’t stumbled upon this post. This is hell. I want to make it my goal in life to make sure no one ever has to go through something like this ever. I want to help every trapped sex worker exit and find a better job, a better life. One where they don’t have to be raped and abused just to survive. I owe everything to this story.
Tinfoil hat moment but I swear this ‘omg evil SWERFs!!!” nonsense is a psy op bankrolled by the sex industry because in what world is “I think it’s okay for 60 year old men to buy sex from 18 year olds struggling to afford their next meal :)” something you can say with a goddamn straight face.
that’s not even a tinfoil hat moment tbh like ‘turn off the blue light’ was a campaign run by traffickers, the #notyourrescueproject was run by a man who posed as one of the women he trafficked under the name “molli desi”, there’s probably more examples but yeah, that’s 100% what’s going on
@feministjessicajones do you have sources for those statements? Or can you point me to where i can find them? I wanna have them for future reference but when i try to google it i get unrelated stuff in the results
here’s one, I can’t find the turn off the blue light source but a search for their company’s info said they weren’t led by ‘sex workers,’ and I remember seeing one of their campaigns going by that tried to normalize prostitution so
It’s also worth mentioning that the women in the women’s movement who focused on fighting against pornography and prostitution were nearly all prostituted women. Our arguments are the arguments of prostituted women. Some of the most outspoken feminist writers, like Andrea Dworkin, were prostituted and trafficked women who had finally found their voice. The movement was led by women who had lived pornography.
I definitely think it’s a psyop. A similar reactionary movement was born after first wave feminists started trying to fight against the practice of prostitution and brothels. The exact same arguments were made. Pimps had paid women to make the same exact arguments about agency we’re hearing today, but this was during a time when women had absolutely no agency. None. Not even arguably.
The reactionary movement came back during the second wave, and now, in the third wave, it has completely taken over the movement. It’s also telling that many of the people in the third wave who support this reactionary movement are heavily into postmodernism and adore writers like Michel Foucault, who has been proven to have been a CIA psyop to destroy the left. I think it started around the McCarthy era. There are articles on it and there are official CIA documents that are now in the public domain because of the Freedom of Information Act. I don’t have the links on me but I can probably get them if anyone really needs a source. I think I saw the sources somewhere on butchcommunist’s blog.
Another reason I think it’s a psyop is the way the movement treats prostituted and trafficked women who speak out against the sex industry and talk about their experiences, the horror they went through, the torture, the coercion, and the rape. Trafficked women who say that this experience is not individual, but systemic. They shout “Listen to sex workers!” as if their words are universal but discard the experiences and words of dissenting women as merely a fluke in the system, an abuse of the system, or a different system entirely. “That’s trafficking, not sex work!”
Reminds me of “libertarians” and fake leftists who decry regular capitalism as “crony capitalism” to silence or muffle the cries of people who have been hurt by capitalism.
Tinfoil hat moment but I swear this ‘omg evil SWERFs!!!” nonsense is a psy op bankrolled by the sex industry because in what world is “I think it’s okay for 60 year old men to buy sex from 18 year olds struggling to afford their next meal :)” something you can say with a goddamn straight face.
that’s not even a tinfoil hat moment tbh like ‘turn off the blue light’ was a campaign run by traffickers, the #notyourrescueproject was run by a man who posed as one of the women he trafficked under the name “molli desi”, there’s probably more examples but yeah, that’s 100% what’s going on
@feministjessicajones do you have sources for those statements? Or can you point me to where i can find them? I wanna have them for future reference but when i try to google it i get unrelated stuff in the results
here’s one, I can’t find the turn off the blue light source but a search for their company’s info said they weren’t led by ‘sex workers,’ and I remember seeing one of their campaigns going by that tried to normalize prostitution so
It’s also worth mentioning that the women in the women’s movement who focused on fighting against pornography and prostitution were nearly all prostituted women. Our arguments are the arguments of prostituted women. Some of the most outspoken feminist writers, like Andrea Dworkin, were prostituted and trafficked women who had finally found their voice. The movement was led by women who had lived pornography.
I definitely think it’s a psyop. A similar reactionary movement was born after first wave feminists started trying to fight against the practice of prostitution and brothels. The exact same arguments were made. Pimps had paid women to make the same exact arguments about agency we’re hearing today, but this was during a time when women had absolutely no agency. None. Not even arguably.
The reactionary movement came back during the second wave, and now, in the third wave, it has completely taken over the movement. It’s also telling that many of the people in the third wave who support this reactionary movement are heavily into postmodernism and adore writers like Michel Foucault, who has been proven to have been a CIA psyop to destroy the left. I think it started around the McCarthy era. There are articles on it and there are official CIA documents that are now in the public domain because of the Freedom of Information Act. I don’t have the links on me but I can probably get them if anyone really needs a source. I think I saw the sources somewhere on butchcommunist’s blog.
Another reason I think it’s a psyop is the way the movement treats prostituted and trafficked women who speak out against the sex industry and talk about their experiences, the horror they went through, the torture, the coercion, and the rape. Trafficked women who say that this experience is not individual, but systemic. They shout “Listen to sex workers!” as if their words are universal but discard the experiences and words of dissenting women as merely a fluke in the system, an abuse of the system, or a different system entirely. “That’s trafficking, not sex work!”
Reminds me of “libertarians” and fake leftists who decry regular capitalism as “crony capitalism” to silence or muffle the cries of people who have been hurt by capitalism.
The post below is made by text from UK feminist organization Nordic Model Now and images from all over the world. I am a Swedish feminist and it moves me immensely that we are part of this global movement to stop men’s violence against women and children. I love you all. If you come to Sweden, please visit! sorensen.isabel@gmail.com /Isabel
The Nordic Model approach to prostitution (sometimes also known as the Sex Buyer Law, or the Swedish, Abolitionist, or Equality Model) decriminalises all those who are prostituted, provides support services to help them exit, and makes buying people for sex a criminal offence, in order to reduce the demand that drives sex trafficking. This approach has now been adopted in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, and most recently, Ireland.
How did this approach come about?
The Nordic Model was pioneered in Sweden after extensive research. One of the researchers was Cecilie Høigård. Here she describes what happened (translated by Daisy Elizabeth Sjursø and edited slightly for length):
“We spent several years doing fieldwork and we developed close relationships with the prostituted women. We heard about their experiences of past abuse, extreme poverty and violence. We were prepared for these stories, because of our previous studies on outcasts and marginalized people. But what the women told us of their concrete experiences of prostitution was unexpected and shocking.
They told us what it was like to use their bodies and vaginas as rental apartments for unknown men to invade, and how this made it necessary to separate their body from their self: ‘Me and my body are two separate parts. It is not me, my feelings or my soul he fucks. I am not for sale.’
The women had numerous strategies to maintain this separation. To be agents in their own lives they showed great ingenuity and vigour within the little space for manoeuvre they had. However, over time it became more difficult for them to maintain the separation between their body and self. After the punter was done, it became increasingly difficult to bring the self back. Eventually the women came to feel worthless, dirty and disgusting. These stories were very similar to accounts we’d heard from victims of other sexual violence, such as incest, rape and domestic violence.
The research group disagreed about many things, but we shared the same feelings of despair about the women’s pain and the punters’ lack of understanding of the consequences of their actions. Then the idea of one-sided criminalisation of the punter struck me like lightning. The idea increased my heart rate, and gave me a sense of everything falling into place.
There was huge opposition to the proposal at first but after some years opponents in the working group changed their point of view. The debate that followed served as a large-scale educational campaign.
In Sweden, the attitudes towards the law changed rapidly in a positive direction, and the proportion of Swedish men buying women’s bodies has decreased.”
What is the aim of the Nordic Model?
Criminal legislation has the primary purpose of making it clear what we as a society consider unacceptable and discouraging people from doing those things.
The Nordic Model makes it clear that buying people for sex is wrong and it has sanctions that discourage people from doing it.
Society’s values do change over time and some things that used to be considered acceptable are now considered unacceptable, and vice versa.
Prostitution causes damage to those in it and it can never be made safe and its existence makes women’s human right to equality with men a distant pipe dream. Vast sums of money are made from the heinous trade in (mostly) women’s and children’s bodies and this leads inexorably to sex trafficking.
It is time to make it clear that buying human beings for sex is unacceptable and to create criminal sanctions that discourage people from doing it.
We do not want to criminalise people. We want to change behaviour. And for those who are in it, we want to provide support to help them make a new life outside it.
What we are campaigning for in the UK
Each country that has introduced the Nordic Model approach has implemented it a little differently. It has been most successful in Sweden where it was introduced as part of a raft of legislative measures to tackle male violence against women and girls and to address sex inequality.
The post below is made by text from UK feminist organization Nordic Model Now and images from all over the world. I am a Swedish feminist and it moves me immensely that we are part of this global movement to stop men’s violence against women and children. I love you all. If you come to Sweden, please visit! sorensen.isabel@gmail.com /Isabel
The Nordic Model approach to prostitution (sometimes also known as the Sex Buyer Law, or the Swedish, Abolitionist, or Equality Model) decriminalises all those who are prostituted, provides support services to help them exit, and makes buying people for sex a criminal offence, in order to reduce the demand that drives sex trafficking. This approach has now been adopted in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, and most recently, Ireland.
How did this approach come about?
The Nordic Model was pioneered in Sweden after extensive research. One of the researchers was Cecilie Høigård. Here she describes what happened (translated by Daisy Elizabeth Sjursø and edited slightly for length):
“We spent several years doing fieldwork and we developed close relationships with the prostituted women. We heard about their experiences of past abuse, extreme poverty and violence. We were prepared for these stories, because of our previous studies on outcasts and marginalized people. But what the women told us of their concrete experiences of prostitution was unexpected and shocking.
They told us what it was like to use their bodies and vaginas as rental apartments for unknown men to invade, and how this made it necessary to separate their body from their self: ‘Me and my body are two separate parts. It is not me, my feelings or my soul he fucks. I am not for sale.’
The women had numerous strategies to maintain this separation. To be agents in their own lives they showed great ingenuity and vigour within the little space for manoeuvre they had. However, over time it became more difficult for them to maintain the separation between their body and self. After the punter was done, it became increasingly difficult to bring the self back. Eventually the women came to feel worthless, dirty and disgusting. These stories were very similar to accounts we’d heard from victims of other sexual violence, such as incest, rape and domestic violence.
The research group disagreed about many things, but we shared the same feelings of despair about the women’s pain and the punters’ lack of understanding of the consequences of their actions. Then the idea of one-sided criminalisation of the punter struck me like lightning. The idea increased my heart rate, and gave me a sense of everything falling into place.
There was huge opposition to the proposal at first but after some years opponents in the working group changed their point of view. The debate that followed served as a large-scale educational campaign.
In Sweden, the attitudes towards the law changed rapidly in a positive direction, and the proportion of Swedish men buying women’s bodies has decreased.”
What is the aim of the Nordic Model?
Criminal legislation has the primary purpose of making it clear what we as a society consider unacceptable and discouraging people from doing those things.
The Nordic Model makes it clear that buying people for sex is wrong and it has sanctions that discourage people from doing it.
Society’s values do change over time and some things that used to be considered acceptable are now considered unacceptable, and vice versa.
Prostitution causes damage to those in it and it can never be made safe and its existence makes women’s human right to equality with men a distant pipe dream. Vast sums of money are made from the heinous trade in (mostly) women’s and children’s bodies and this leads inexorably to sex trafficking.
It is time to make it clear that buying human beings for sex is unacceptable and to create criminal sanctions that discourage people from doing it.
We do not want to criminalise people. We want to change behaviour. And for those who are in it, we want to provide support to help them make a new life outside it.
What we are campaigning for in the UK
Each country that has introduced the Nordic Model approach has implemented it a little differently. It has been most successful in Sweden where it was introduced as part of a raft of legislative measures to tackle male violence against women and girls and to address sex inequality.
Comfort women was the name given to those who became sex slaves to the Japanese military between 1932 and 1945. The Japanese set up brothels to serve the soldiers. It is estimated that between eighty thousand to two hundred thousand women were forced into sexual slavery. The vast majority (approximately 80 percent) were Korean, but the ethnicities varied. Some women were Japanese, some Taiwanese, Filipino, Indonesian, or from other Pacific Islands (Soh, 1997; Yoshimi, 2000). Some Dutch women living in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) were also forced to become “comfort women.” It is estimated that 80 percent of the women were between fourteen and eighteen years of age when they were forced into sexual slavery (Hicks, 1994). “Comfort women” were intended to improve the morale of the Japanese troops and promote military discipline. The justification for the brothels was that by providing free sexual release, the soldiers would then not sexually abuse women in occupied territories. During the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 it was estimated that twenty thousand women were raped. In a ludicrous attempt to avoid similar publicity, the Japanese also believed that by “providing” sexual activity, they could control the transmission of sexual diseases by regulating the brothels (Hicks, 1994; Yoshimi, 2000). The more bizarre argument from sanctioning and organizing sexual slavery of women was that the organization of comfort stations would prevent rape in public by the soldiers. The Japanese soldiers who abused the enslaved women did not use the term “comfort women.” Instead the women were called “pii” (pronounced “pea”). The word is from the Chinese meaning goods or articles. In slang terms, it refers to the vagina and is considered disparaging (Yoshimi, 2000). Many of the women and girls taken to comfort stations were deceived and lured into service by promises of money, easy work, and education. Comfort stations were organized to efficiently “serve” the troops as well as the officers, ignoring the inhumane conditions and torture endured…Women who worked in the stations reserved for officers were sexually assaulted frequently than those in stations used by enlisted men. In most cases, Korean women were sent to be raped by the enlisted, while Japanese women were used by the officers (Pyong Gap, 2003). Korean women reportedly averaged twenty to thirty men a day, with one report citing as many as sixty men in one day (Yoshimi, 2000). If a woman refused the sexual overtures, she was beaten savagely. Additional forms of violence were not uncommon in the comfort stations. Soldiers, fueled by alcohol, often went on violent rampages, beating the women, brutalizing them during rapes and destroying the little property the women had with them.
Parrot, Andrea & Cummings, Nina. Forsaken Females: The Gobal Brutalization of Women. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2006, (p. 8 – 9)
So the justifications were:
-if the men had open access to legal prostitution they wouldn’t rape
-if the men had open access to legal prostitution, STI rates would go down
-if the men had open access to legal prostitution, they’d be happier/have better morale
Isn’t that exactly the rhetoric used now to make a case for legalized prostitution ala Dutch model?
Celtyradfem 