December 17: The International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers
Your words, jokes, memes, and media consumption directly contribute to violence against sex workers. Here’s how.
Look, we all want to find things that are funny. Humor lightens the load of our grief, stress, struggles, and mistakes. But when you make or laugh at jokes at the expense of sex workers, you - yes, you - normalize that violence. Dead h**ker jokes, the ol’ “rape or theft” question, and comparing someone to a cheap wh*re are absolutely offensive at the expense of a seriously marginalized group. Not only are they just not funny, violence is so prevalent in the industry that everyone(!) I know in the industry has experienced it. Perhaps to varying extents, but these impact our ability to feel and be safe at work. When you normalize violence against sex workers and laugh, YOU tell other people: I think that hurting, raping, robbing, and murdering sex workers is funny. Go ahead, I won’t stop you.
Here’s a six-page list of names collected by Sex Worker’s Outreach Project of sex workers who, like in your jokes, DID die in 2019. Fortunately, they removed the cause of death section of this list recently, because it was explicit and difficult to read: stabbed dozens of times, strangled in a hotel, suicide, overdose, etc. Note how many of these names are members of the trans* community. How many are racial minorities. Part of caring about racial and sexual minorities is caring about sex workers.
In fact, violence against sex workers is so often disregarded by law enforcement that it came to be known colloquially by San Diego police - and others - as No Human Involved (also refers to crimes against other vulnerable people: the homeless, gang members, drug users). Remember that, will you? No Human Involved. People don’t even see us as human beings. Crimes not worth investigating, because the punchline of the joke isn’t worth caring about. Your jokes. Your memes.
We are human beings. Yeah, man, we can hear you when you yell out the window, or make violent comments at the tip rail in the club, or make fun of us at a restaurant in the next booth over, or speculate at the bar whether a girl is a wh*re because of her clothing. We hear you. And while we’re tough as nails, at the end of the day, it adds up. It sucks. Internalizing your stigma contributes to addiction and mental health issues. Fucking stop it.
Have you ever noticed that the massive majority of television and movie depiction of sex workers is...of them dead? Arrested? Raped? Robbed? Hurting? Abused? Unintelligent, shallow caricatures? This, too, normalizes that we aren’t worth caring about. That the state in which you’ll finally see us is killed by clients and not, say, in the grocery store or at yoga class or in school. If consuming these shows and movies (or those parts of them) doesn’t make you angry now, you seriously have no empathy after reading this far.
Our laws in the US perpetuate violence against sex workers under the guise of “ending the demand” for trafficking (they don’t do that, either). SESTA/FOSTA shut down workers’ websites and online ads which greatly decreased or eliminated many workers’ ability to sufficiently check out their clients via reviews from other SWers, background checks, and validating that their clients were, in fact, probably not murderers. Many SWers were forced to return to higher-risk street-based work, risking dealing with police, violent clients, coercive and abusive pimps, and being unable to vet their clients on the spot. When someone tells you that a new law is supposed to stop trafficking, ask yourself if it really puts sex workers at risk. The answer is always yes.
Decriminalization - not legalization, not criminalization - is the answer to safer working conditions for sex workers. Legalization of sex work (if I have to hear ONE MORE TIME “just legalize and tax pr*stitition like everything else!~!” I’m gonna rip my ears off...) creates working conditions that criminalize the most marginalized and at-risk workers that may include suggestions such as imposing licensing fees, instating public registries of where we live that stalker clients may access, permitting only expensive businesses to operate that may increase exploitation and fear of losing a job, and increased penalties for those unable to access or afford to work under a “legalized” system. Where the fuck do you think someone who is poor is going to find money for a $500 license? Legalization is criminalization with a pink fake-feministy bow on it.
This isn’t about whether you think sex work is “right” or “wrong” or should be abolished or is an excellent service. Not at all. This is about causing the least amount of harm - that includes violent crime and murder - to sex workers simply because we ARE human beings who deserve to live and feel safe.
I’m just gonna wrap this up by saying it again:
When you normalize violence against sex workers and laugh, YOU tell other people: I think that hurting, raping, robbing, and murdering sex workers is funny. Go ahead, I won’t stop you.
Watch your words, because being the punchline is killing us.
