Listening to a segment on AM 1010 about the prostitution case coming before the supreme court next week. http://www.newstalk1010.com/
One woman starts going on about paying taxes. First, many sex workers do pay taxes. However I support those that don’t - If the government is not willing to offer us the same basic protections as every other human out there - the security of the person, etc. - then why should they pay taxes? Decriminalize sex work, treat sex workers like human beings and I’m sure they will be far more open to paying tax on the income.
Don’t even get me started on the abolitionist that came on next - I AM NOT A VICTIM!
I’m going to keep this short because our lives are short: it’s time for sex workers to do some killing of their own. We need to kill this myth of the righteously aggrieved client once and for all. It’s a myth that enables men to blackmail, rob, rape, and kill sex workers. It is a shame when you pay for a service you don’t receive, but it happens all the time in all varieties of the service industry, and it shouldn’t ever foster vengeful attempts at singlehandedly policing every worker in an entire field.
I propose that from this point forward, we don’t let the letters “TER” go uttered even once without launching into a recounting of the information above. That we support and encourage our colleagues while they explore ways to work without reviews, or at the very least with reviews on sites acting as alternatives to TER. That we create our own alternatives. That we recognize and reject vampiric pimps in all their forms. (As Melissa Gira Grant once put it, Elms successfully “jockeyed to take the abusive middleman’s place.” Jason Itzler, the man who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from famous New York escort Natalia, praised Elms as “the most influential man in the prostitution business in America.”) That we don’t let a single client bemoan the risk he takes by submitting to a screening form when escorts are, indisputably, disproportionately, and aggressively targeted for arrest, police violence, extortion by friends and family, abuse from violent men posing as clients, and life-ruining stigma when outed. They do not suffer a fraction of what we suffer. That lie ends now.
Clients sometimes lose money. Sex workers regularly lose their lives. How should we rate that reality on a scale of one to ten?
