workingitinportland:

Not IS.  But CAN be.

“Sex work doesn’t equal sex trafficking!!1″ is a popular cry among sex workers who are trying to gain legitimacy by distancing themselves (ourselves?) from those evil sex traffickers we hear so much about.  It’s a normal response to having your rights and safety removed, after all, right? to draw a distinction between yourself and the ostensible reason that you’ve lost rights and security. “You don’t mean me. Surely not me!” Especially when the popular understanding of the reason given (”sex trafficking”) is popularly understood as wicked men in white vans kidnapping innocent young white women and children. 

It’s more than a useless slogan tho, it’s outright damaging. In the same way that actual survivors of sexual exploitation are obscured when I’m thrown in there with them because I “traffic myself”, actual survivors of sexual exploitation who are doing consensual sex work find themselves made invisible and their needs unmet when we insist that they must not be doing sex work if they’re also experiencing labour exploitation. “That’s rape.”

Well… sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing: whether or not it’s rape depends on how the sex worker in the situation sees it. Many sex workers who’ve experienced sexual labour exploitation while selling at sexual labour draw a difference between the two states of sexual labour exploitation and sexual assault.  Many don’t. 

Many sex workers migrate to do sex work and only after they’ve arrived do they find out that their papers are confiscated and they have to work off an imaginary or inflated debt to the people who helped them move; that some sex workers consent to do sex work and don’t know until later that they’ll be doing it under coercive circumstances; some sex workers have partners who become abusive and demand or forcibly take a sex worker’s earnings, and while the worker is doing the work willingly, they’re not seeing all or maybe any of the profit (and we know financial abuse is a very common abuse tactic even in nonswer dv relationships).

I want to discuss it more because coerced and exploited farm and domestic workers are still understood as workers, and if we’re trying to get sexual labour understood as labour, can it still be labour under coercive or exploitative circumstances?  if we’re trying to get sexual labour understood as labour, and we’re trying to normalize replacement of the word “trafficking” for more specific descriptions like “forced labour” “exploited labour” “coerced labour”, then is there not also room for “exploited sexual labour that isn’t rape”? 

I think there is–I’m thinking of the women Agustin interviewed, for example, sex workers who migrated to do sex work, were fine with sex work, but had their papers confiscated until they worked off a fake debt imposed by some of the people who helped them migrate. The specific sexual labour they perform is consented to and acceptable, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t being exploited:  the money or a large cut of the money is being kept from them. The person doing the exploiting is not NECESSARILY the person or people they’re having sex with, although there’s always room for more exploitation in sex work like when clients try to haggle you down &c.  

In the case of the workers I know who lived thru abusive relationships with partners who took their money, the people they had sex with for money weren’t raping them.  The workers gave their consent.  The exploitation happened in a different space and manner entirely. 

Clearly, sex work and sex trafficking can and do overlap often, altho not all or even most of the time. 

The conditions that allow sexual exploitation to happen and flourish are the same, regardless of whether the person being exploited is a sex worker or not.  

The conditions are: state sanctioned cultural and societal disregard for women’s and children’s bodily autonomy and safety

prioritising white male access to the bodies and labour of other people, particularly marginalised people (women, children, lgbt people of all ages and genders) over these people’s safety

these are the driving forces behind sexual exploitation and labour exploitation of all kinds, they’re at the root of the blatant lack of attention the government is paying to the assaults and deaths endemic to our child welfare systems across the country, which is where most underage sexually exploited people both EXPERIENCE exploitation for the first time and run from to trade sexual exploitation for slightly more autonomy and even safety on the streets. 

This is what’s behind funding law enforcement for stings rather than shelters for vulnerable kids and adults so they don’t have to trade sex, this is behind SESTA, behind Brock Turner’s freedom, the new banking act, the loss of reproductive rights in Iowa, behind RHYA’s inability to pass since 2014, defunding shelters, weakening laws against domestic violence and workers rights, empowering law enforcement and men in general with access to guns and the everything else.  

sexual exploitation ends when all other exploitation ends, not before.  

thepeacockangel:

May Day became a labor holiday in 1886, when police opened fire on a peaceful picket line during a general strike for the 8 hour day. It became a labor holiday in memorial to the four anarchist labor leaders who were hung for their participation, for the one who killed himself with a dynamite blasting cap, for the countless more who spent years in prison all so that workers across the world would not have to sacrifice seeing their families in order to feed them.

On this day we commemorate all our martyrs, the lives and freedom lost in pursuit of a world free from exploitation and oppression, of a world where a worker’s value is more than merely what they produce, where humanity is valued more than productivity and where labor is entitled to all it creates.

But we are here 130 years after the Haymarket riots, not to commemorate a long dead past but to celebrate a living tradition of active resistance against the sovereignty of capital.

I am, as I believe many of us are, sick to death of passivity in the face of the tyranny of the wealthy few. I am not a student radical at a posh university looking towards a future in the democratic party or a cushy job managing an NGO. My politics will not soften with graduation. I am a highschool dropout, I am a sex worker. I am a rank and file union member. I am a simple woman and I am here with a simple message, it is time for us to organize and to fight back.

We are past the point where we can make nice with the powerful, as every right and protection won by the last great wave of the labor movement crumbles as a sand dune into the sea, we must admit that no election, no mild mannered wheedling, no woowoo good vibes bullshit will save us from the dire future we face. However in the face of these deteriorating conditions, a spark of hope remains, and that hope is the same hope that our predecessors knew in 1886. Working class rank and file organization is, as it always has been, our only hope and direct action our only possible weapon against the capitalist class who would grind us into dust if it would increase their margin of profit by a dime. So I ask you, fellow workers, to unite with me to kill what is killing us, not at some distant future “proper historical moment” but in the here and now.

Thank you.

*Simple man, but the point’s the same

machonaroja:

Yknow when people criticize the PRC and DPRK circa. 1950-1970 I think they generally forget the alternative for both Korea and China was US-backed fascist dictatorship.

Chiang Kai-shek was an admirer of Hitler and declared that fascism was what China needed, he ruled Taiwan as dictator from 1950 until his death in 1975. Syngman Rhee ruled the RoK for 12 years as a dictator, patented a unique form Korean fascism based around racial supremacy, and committed thousands of extrajudicial murders of alleged communists.

Make no mistake, if the US had won in Korea or China, Asia would have been dominated by fascists for decades, possibly even to this day. It would’ve been a nightmare of unimaginable proportions and the world would no longer remember 1936-1945 as a brief age of fascism — we would remember 1936-the present as a long era of fascist dominance in world politics.

By all means levy criticism of the PRC & DPRK if you must, but always remember what Mao Tse-tung & Kim Il-sung saved their respective nations, and indeed the world, from.

I feel like this is sort of a weird argument? Like certainly Mao and Kim Il-sung were better than the awful awful US backed alternative, but like… the existence of serial murderers doesn’t mean that the guy who gets drunk and beats someone up in front of a bar is a nice dude?