12th
I did an interview (from bed and between workshops at CLPP this weekend) for Jezebel. What I wish I had the time to go and reply to every commenter is:
The cool thing about this moment politically is that we don’t ever actually need to debate, as feminists, whether or not sex work is a good thing or bad thing. We can stop that. If we want to keep people from going into sex work (which I don’t, but again, what we feel about sex work is secondary here), or if we want to make sure everyone in sex work is as happy as Ashley Dupre (again, also don’t, and also doesn’t matter), all we have to do is work to improve economic opportunity for young women, queer people, transgender and gender non-conforming people, and people of color. If we redirected the energy we spend questioning whether or not the act of selling sex or sexual fantasy is feminist or not, healthy or not, towards education justice, economic justice, and bringing some justice to the criminal/legal system, folks would have so many more options available to them, that what we all did for a living would feel like that much more of a choice. What we feel about sex work actually really doesn’t have an impact on the folks who sell sex — our opinions are largely academic. But when we start advocating for policy based around those feelings, then we start doing way more harm than good if we don’t listen to sex workers.
And they won’t always be talking about blow jobs and husbands.
