The connection between certain anti-trans ideas and negative views of sex workers is not necessarily clear to people who don’t intimately understand the rhetoric used against each group. Why would having an issue with trans people make someone hate sex workers too? Why would being disgusted by prostitutes make someone hate trans people? For manyContinue reading “Why “Feminist” Anti-Trans Advocates Also Hate Sex Workers”
Category Archives: Stigma
Hating Men and Hating Sex Buyers
I hear “I hate men” fairly frequently, within certain feminist communities. I once said it often. To be completely honest, I think what opened my eyes to how hating men is useless bigotry was actually selling sex.
Desirability and Insecurity
No matter how much I try not to tie my self-image to what clients think of me, I cannot help but do so. If I start to have less people interested in paying me for sex, I begin to feel as though I’m unattractive. I’m not sure how many other sex workers feel this way,Continue reading “Desirability and Insecurity”
Whoring Out Our Trauma
With the global conversation around sex work focusing on sex trafficking and the trauma many sex workers face, sex workers’ stories are subject to being weaponized to deny them the very rights which would protect them from that harm. In Whoring Out Our Trauma: Prostitution and Sexual Abuse, these issues are presented from the pointContinue reading “Whoring Out Our Trauma”
Lesbian Hookers
A lot of people struggle to get their head around the idea of a lesbian having sex with men for money. Sex workers are often either viewed as victims forced into the sex trade (“prostituted women”) or they are seen as sexual deviants choosing to profit from seducing men. The idea of a lesbian whoContinue reading “Lesbian Hookers”
(S)ex workers
We do not have good estimates regarding the total number of sex workers in the world. We cannot even obtain an accurate number of sex workers within an area as small as a city. We can, however, reasonably assume that whatever that number is that there are even more people who have done sex workContinue reading “(S)ex workers”
Trauma Fantasies about Prostitution
When people want to convince others that prostitution is inherently dangerous, and especially when they want to use their claims about the danger to argue that it should be illegal and continue to be stigmatized, they will often resort to giving long descriptions of possible traumatic scenarios for sex workers. Sometimes these scenarios are basedContinue reading “Trauma Fantasies about Prostitution”
My First Brothel Experience
I got into the car of someone I didn’t know and whom I had barely texted in response to an ad about working in a brothel. Sounds like the start of a story someone would tell as a cautionary tale where someone ends up dead, but I was fine.
Selling Unprotected Sex
Selling bareback (unprotected) sex is something sex workers have always done, in varying amounts. There’s always controversy around it within sex worker communities and then waves of disgust from outsiders looking in. Prostitutes are seen as disease vectors by many, referred to as dirty or tainted, and the idea of us selling unprotected sex isContinue reading “Selling Unprotected Sex”
The Fear of Being Found Out
One of the things that’s hard to explain about the fear of being found out to be a sex worker is why it’s so all-encompassing and terrifying when selling sex is already so dangerous in the first place. Why are we more scared of people finding out that we sell sex than we are of doing it?
Jack Talks About Sex Work 