I co-edit Tits and Sass, a blog by and for sex workers. Please let me know if you're a current or former sex worker interested in writing for us. Or just come check us out at titsandsass.com NOLITE TE BASTARDES CARBORUNDUM. It's socially acceptable for me to tell would-be benefactors my Paypal e-mail is [email protected] now, right? Or chat/ask me for my googlewallet if you want it to get to me faster.
Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway
URGENT NEED B/C I’M SUPER LATE FUNDRAISING AS USUAL:
Whose Corner Is It Anyway,our #harmreduction & #mutualaid group by/for low-income #sexworkers who use drugs in W MA, is raising 10 K this month to keep services going through our revisioning hiatus and set something aside for the shitty fundraising months of Jan & Feb. As we look for more sustainable funding streams to be able to see the other side of this hiatus, it's imperative for us to be able to keep paying the homegrown, neighborhood sex worker leaders who make up our subcommittees some leave pay. It's similarly critical to be able to support our outreach coordinator's continuing rounds in the community during this time, bringing supplies to our most marginalized & vulnerable members & vouching for them to Lysistrata for emergency funds.
There are many exciting possibilities coming up for us-more collab w/local allies like Wildflower Alliance & out-of-state partners like ANSWER Detroit and NC Survivors Union. We're doing a focus group this month w/Baystate Emergency Department’s Elizabeth Schoenfeld on her Talk About It Project re methadone and buprenorphine induction in hospital. That’s a resource which, made more broadly available, would really improve the quality of our members’ lives when so many of their emergency department experiences have been so negative—putting them through withdrawal while they often faced medical neglect and mistreatment which ultimately had them leaving against medical advice, untreated.
(WCIIA subc member Madeline & I serve on the Talk About It study's steering committee. We also have some $ in the hiatus budget to pay members for otherwise unpaid speaking opportunities so we can continue to do other leadership capacity building.)
Most pressingly, tho,we need to support participatory grant writing as we figure out a sustainable financial route to continue in the long term. We can't abandon our community of 250 low-income sworkers experiencing housing insecurity & criminalization.
As I wrote in my last update, it's hard to admit needing a period of restructuring like this after 4 years of constantly expanding community-led work. Unfortunately, funding for drug user and sex worker organizing is still focused on elevating individual personalities for empty "representation" rather than sustaining entire communities. We can't leave service provision to professionalized outfits who don't know what we need like we do. As I point out ad naseam, hr service provision in Holyoke still means 1-1 syringe exchange in the year of our lord 2022, in the enlightened state of MA. And we can't keep grassroots community organizing completely under-resourced while systems of power only support one or two directly impacted people who can class pass from every community-the laziest interpretation of meaningful inclusion possible.
Please help WCII steer back to a pt where we can do community-staffed & needs-based harm redux, repro health, & survival supply provision; bailouts from lockup; safer bathrooms; sw decrim organizing; community designed & assembled safer smoking kits; etc etc etc. Thank you for everything you've done for us over these four years, esp. the donations & the consistent social media cheerleading. We're appealing to our loyal team to do some of that same posting & giving today.
LAST MONTH’S UPDATE FOR CONTEXT BEHIND THE READ MORE
URGENT NEED: HELP US KEEP FAITH W/THE COMMUNITY DURING OUR HIATUS: APPEAL TO LARGE & SMALL DONORS & TO BOOST FUNDRAISING: We've gone on hiatus to raise funds to reopen more stably, but we desperately need $5 k this wk to maintain hiatus activities this month.
Hiatus activities include:
*supporting 20 + subcommittee members w/some sort of leave pay while the hiatus lasts--homegrown leaders who are struggling w/being low-income sworkers themselves.
* maintaining the weekly work of our outreach coordinator, already an informal leader within the community 5 yrs ago before WCIIA started, so she can reach our most vulnerable members & provide Lystritata vouches for emergency funds as well as supplies.
* supporting the work of our collaborative grantwriting subcommittee so while we struggle to achieve solvency, programming is still being designed by a representative group of us.
* funding a speakers' bureau--$ to support members taking on unpaid speaking opportunities, so we're able to provide messaging re our work & not be forgotten by the national community, and so we can keep doing leadership capacity building.
It's hard to speak honestly about the ebb and flow of grassroots organizing. We began Whose Corner right on the cusp of the moment when crowdfunding became a funding model many more projects used. It could only be sustainable for us for so long. When many large agencies & even grassroots orgs shuttered when COVID began, Whose Corner dramatically expanded our work into huge supply pickup events, drop-in hours, and community-designed and bulk-assembled smoking supplies. But now, crowdfunding can't sustain us long term, harm redux foundation funding has never supported us, & we can't make enough to maintain ourselves on the limited number of social justice foundation grants all the grassroots orgs we know compete for. We need a reset period to figure out new funding streams in new sectors, so we don't have to subject our community to constant uncertainty while we scrape to meet our goal every month.
***In the meantime, though, we can't break faith w/our organizers.*****
We've stopped my own paycheck of $130 net a wk from WCIIA (which at times averaged out to $3 an hour, but still). But though we're shit out of luck for now re what we can do for base membership, I'm hoping we can continue to support subcommittee members. Grassroots orgs like ours dissolve all the time, becoming a footnote in some progressive text, or fading out of memory all together, adding to the lack of continuity and history in our movements, keeping us busy reinventing that wheel. *****When this happens, while some activists might be able to move on to other orgs, many community organizers are abandoned in their neighborhoods, in the same socioeconomic situations, that much less hopeful about systemic change.****
*****That's why I feel justified asking you to invest in a reset process that will allow our subcommittee members to remain invested in our work while we achieve sustainability.*****
when it comes to consciousness raising you can spend time telling someone “crazy” is a slur or you can spend time explaining that what looks like “care” or “cure” or “mercy” to them is actually eugenics or abuse. one of these projects has to precede the other and i bet you can guess which one i would prioritize
you’re either going to build a base of clueless liberals who learn by rote to nitpick their language for anything with the remotest connection to ability, or you’re going to help them develop the alertness and critical eye necessary to recognize eugenics and abuse. i don’t think those things are mutually compatible in an immediate timeframe, because one locates both the root and branch of oppression in a disembodied cloud of language and thought, and the other locates it in the real material structures that we need to confront immediately in order to save actual lives. not saying “crazy” isn’t going to get anyone out of forced institutionalization
Every person who has ever threatened to institutionalize me has been totally able to use up-to-the-minute terminology for disability. Terminology that is way past my up-to-the-minuteness, and I’m a disabled person on disabled tumblr. And has not been shy about correcting me on the words I use for myself.
It’s a power thing. Neurotypical people, especially psych professionals, are just going to be better at navigating a maze of no-no words than most neurodivergent people, because it’s their job to be up to date. And they will absolutely use that skill difference as a tool to belittle, coerce, and institutionalize us.
“It’s your life story!” a friend texted me on April 24th along with a screenshot of Netflix’s new show Bonding. It was one of five or six texts I received that day from friends and clients making sure I’d heard about this new program that follows a dominatrix/grad student in and out of the dungeon. As a dominatrix/grad student myself, friends were sure I’d be interested in the show. I’d already heard about it on social media, where opinions were pretty starkly divided between sex workers and non-sex workers. I wasn’t exactly interested in this show so much as I was morbidly curious, because I could tell from these reviews and from the show’s own promos that Bonding was not made for someone like me.
Hell, Bonding isn’t really even about someone like me; it’s really about the dominatrix’s best friend, Pete (Brendan Scannell). An audience surrogate, Pete starts the series as a vanilla naïf knocking on a dungeon door, summoned there to be Mistress May (aka Tiff)’s (Zoe Levin) bodyguard, or, as I shrieked while watching the promo, “a FUCKING body guard!” No domme I know can afford to pay twenty percent (later in the series, *forty* percent) of her income to a bodyguard, as Mistress May inexplicably decides to do. We don’t really need to, either; we often work in incall spaces with receptionists and other dommes. But a story about two women sex workers working together for safety wouldn’t allow us an audience surrogate, and if there’s one thing a non-sex working show runner like Bonding’s Rightor Doyle wouldn’t abide, it would be throwing the audience in head-first into a world populated mostly by sex workers.
At least, Pete (aka Master Carter) doesn’t start out the series as a sex worker. As it progresses, however, Mistress May coerces him into doing the work. As former pro-domme Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith writes at The Spinoff, “[Mistress May] treats [Master Carter] like a prop, and manipulates his financial need in a way that is deeply uncomfortable to watch.” Forcing Pete to play the role of Master Carter also makes no practical sense: who are all these straight male clients who want a male dom in on their sessions? The series is littered with this kind of nonsense logic, from May taking a golden shower session in a carpeted room to May claiming to be “full service” after clarifying she doesn’t have sex with clients to May showing up to work wearing a submissive’s collar. There was clearly no sex worker consultant or even a BDSM consultant on set; the actual bondage in Bonding is so bad that it’s laughable. And as dominatrix Mistress Blunt notes in her review for Vice “a nuanced understanding of power dynamics, consent and negotiation are utterly missing.” But as I said, this show clearly wasn’t made for someone like me. The target audience presumably doesn’t even notice that May’s corset is ten sizes too big.
Are such inaccuracies really such a big deal in fiction, though? Does it matter if the friend who thought my life story was on Netflix now assumes my life involves a buff house slave who pays me money to serve me coffee in the morning? When that slave also stalks Mistress May onto a vanilla date, yes, it does. Bonding isn’t just a throw-away comedy; it also attempts to depict violence against sex workers, and when it expends such little energy affording us the basic respect of an accurate depiction, the violent scenes just feel like an affront.
Emily Dall'Ora Warfield on Netflix’s Bonding this week at Tits and Sass
Please share: Presentation for 4/23 9 PM EST Urban Survivors Union sex worker organizing group conference call: Shawna Ferris and (time-permitting) Amy Lebovitch will be discussing how to protect ourselves from potentially exploitative researchers as our sex worker orgs gain visibility. Shawna Ferris wrote the groundbreaking _Street Sex Work and Canadian Cities: Resisting A Dangerous Order_, the most brilliant book I've ever read on sex work, neoliberalism, gentrification, and media tropes. Of course, most of us know Amy Lebovitch as the acclaimed sex worker activist famous for being one of the plaintiffs in Bedford v. Canada. Outdoor sex workers in particular,as well as other marginalized groups of workers, get pressure to take part in research, so it behooves outsider sex worker orgs made up of street workers, drug-using workers, trans workers, migrant workers, etc, to prepare strategies for responding to these queries. Shawna and Amy will go over how to set agendas and protect ourselves from or in research w/various kinds of academics-students, graduates, university professors, etc. They'll also outline what different kinds of researchers can offer our communities and what they can pay us as subjects. As usual, any current or ex drug-using sex workers or current or ex sex workers interested in harm reduction or drug users union work are invited to the call! Respectful harm reduction and drug users union allies who don't center themselves at our expense are also welcome. Again, this biweekly call will take place on 4/23, 9 PM EST. The info for the call is always the same--over laptop/tablet/smartphone-- https://www.gotomeet.me/LouiseVincent
On your phone in the US--+1 (786) 535-3211
Access Code--615-430-549
Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA harm reduction task force and mutual aid group led by injection-drug-using low-income and survival sex workers who are mostly street-based, many of whom are houseless or living in unstable housing . We low-income sex workers have created a weekly communi...
PLEASE SHARE: PLEASE HELP US SURVIVE POST-EASTER SUNDAY WORK DROUGHT: We’re now only $800 away from the weekly goal which we need to make by Thursday!
This week’s update--note that I wrote this before the union for Stop & Shop workers in our area tentatively agreed on a contract with management and broke their strike :
TLDR--raising $1300, need help surviving post-Easter Sunday work drought, behind $400 last week, planning presentations with Red Canary Song and others, finishing up setting up our alliance with MA Bail Fund, pleasure and consent and authenticity in the context of low-income sex work, inclusion in a book by Jill McCracken of SWOP Behind Bars, the Stop & Shop strike and Whose Corner as part of a labor movement, we need to power through this week and then we have one of our few weekly breaks from fundraising this year.]
Whose Corner Is It Anyway, W MA's fave #mutualaid/#harmreduction/political education/organizing group by and for drug-injecting low-income/street/survival #sexworkers really needs help this Easter Sunday-Thurs making $1300 for our next weekly meeting. We finished last week about $400 behind. We're coming up on one of our few weekly breaks in a year when we take off the fifth week of the month, but in the meantime we need help for our members to weather the work drought of Easter Sunday. Easter is one of the least busy times of the year for sex workers. I've written before re how holidays,storms-any break in routine-make working and copping harder for opioid-using sex workers as clients are at home w/ families while supply chains break down. For our houseless members, this is particularly perilous. They're some of the few people left out on the street during holidays, and thus become that much more vulnerable to petty criminalizing-poverty arrests standing out like that. Not only is this lonely and discouraging as fuck, as well as physically painful b/c of withdrawal, it can be deadly--lowered tolerance during these holiday droughts, put us at increased risk of overdose when we're able to cop and use opioids again. Whose Corner & the informal networks it encourages become doubly important during these times--to give ppl something to eat & $ in their pockets after a drought like this,to disseminate harm redux supplies afterhours & ensure ppl don't have to inject alone.
We have so many projects coming up this spring! Outside of formal presentations which we've been scheduling with Queens Chinese massage parlor worker organizing group Red Canary Song, Shawna Ferris, the author of _Street Sex Work and Canadian Cities_, and others, we'll be continuing our participatory grant writing process, having a discussion on being LGBTQ doing sex work, tying up loose ends figuring out our partnership w/the Mass Bail Fund, and talking abt the national safer bathroom movement as a stopgap measure until safe consumption spaces are sanctioned in this country.
We'll be reading Charlotte Shane's classic Tits and Sass piece, "Getting Away W/Hating It." (https://bit.ly/2IGC9n4 ). That'll be interesting,b/c while sex positive influence enforced middle-class sex workers "loving it", poor drug-using sex workers are conversely supposed to abjectly hate it. And what abt when the performance you're doing is one of fear and loathing rather than pleasure, a performance which clients are more likely to seek out from poorer sex workers? Or when you have less power to enforce boundaries around authenticity, your real name, and your "personal" life? The use of the term "public women" for sex workers makes sense re our street working members' lives. They don't have the luxury of privacy which even the poorest escort does-they're often known to cops, clients, & the neighborhood,esp if they're locals, as sex workers under their real names. How does the performance of authenticity and pleasure which Shane discusses in her piece change when you don't have the remove of a persona specifically assigned to the work from which to enact that performance? The upper and middle class sanitization of sex work which dominated discourse in the movement about it till quite recently created an environment in which we haven't had enough of these conversations. We're happy to be part of a growing group of orgs of marginalized workers which can broaden this discussion--like Red Canary Song, Laura LeMoon's Safe Night Access Project Seattle, Project SAFE Philly, Lysistrata, and others.
In other news--we're happy to say that after all our varied Adventures In Research lately, Dr. Jill Mccracken will be interviewing a few of us for her book on community-based participatory research and writing about Whose Corner's work in general in it. (And true to the project's description as "participatory", Dr. Mccracken will be sending us what she's written about us to look over and edit.) We're glad that our experiences w/even the most well-intentioned researchers will be chronicled.
Finally, Stop & Shop workers have been striking all over New England since April 12th, and we've ubered a few of our members down to spell workers on picket lines, while others have done more organizational & support work for the strikers. Sex workers' rights orgs are often discounted as part of the labor movement, shunned by unions in First World contexts. In other global regions, sex workers are often a vital part of labor movements for informal workers, composed of food stand operators and streetcar drivers. We're part of a labor movement here in our local community--many group members' family members and friends are Stop & Shop workers who can't afford the cuts to health care management is proposing. We'll continue our support for the Stop & Shop strike as long as it goes on, demonstrating that sex workers are part of a community of labor, and we'll do our part for other workers.
As usual, please give if you can, and PLEASE share the fund w/non-local drug/sex work prohibitionist-free networks if you can't--we've been getting new donors b/c of our supporters' work doing this. Please keep it up, & please share the fund w/a personalized message re why you support us if you can. For our followers & supporters who are as broke as we are, just dropping a sentence or 2 re why our work deserves to be funded pays huge dividends for us-could be your good deed of the month. Please interact w/my fundraising posts to give them a boost--on twitter,on IG, and on FB (let's see if Facebook doesn't ban us this week like it's been intermittently banning sw charities all spring)--on FB, gif comments work best w/the algorithm. As per usual, yr $ goes to our materialist priorities as poor sws--Narcan, fentanyl test strips, syringe access; meals/snacks; cigarettes; bad date list, clothing/toiletries; childcare; transport; stipends-provided by and for low-income sex workers at every wkly meeting. We do really need help this week, but will be glad to have a slight fundraising break during one of the few weekly breaks between meetings all year next week. Thank you so fucking much to our supporters and sponsors for 19 months of this project. (Btw, let me add on a personal note that Pesach sucks as much as Easter does--do you know of any Jewish orgs who give material support to sw's rights? Holidays suck both b/c of the privation of work drought, which is always worse for opioid-using sw, but also b/c of being one of a group of the most arbitrarily socially estranged people out there.) Thank you so so goddamn much again for our very weekly existence and for all the wildly generous donations from donors old and new, and for all your gushing comments on the GoFundMe page. As usual, if you'd like to give us some stability in this nutty weekly crowdfunding lyfe by becoming a monthly donor, please Paypal us at [email protected] w/a note saying so and we'll set up invoices for you. Happy holidays/Easter/Pesach from our embittered selves to you--we hope you can help us keep Whose Corner Is It Anyway going into the summer!
Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA harm reduction task force and mutual aid group led by injection-drug-using low-income and survival sex workers who are mostly street-based, many of whom are houseless or living in unstable housing . We low-income sex workers have created a weekly communi...
Whose Corner Still needs about $600 by Thurs/Fri to pay for this week’s meeting--which consisted of a presentation on migrant sex work by Asian migrant sex worker org and some discussion on our partnership with the Massachusetts Bail Fund. Please give if you can, share the fundraiser with a personalized message or interact with my fundraising posts on all platforms to boost them if you can’t. Here are this week’s updates below:
Update 1 this Saturday night, 4/13: TLDR Whose Corner Is It Anyway need $1300 for next meeting--a migrant sex worker 101 with Butterfly activist and international organizer Elene Lam, life-changing new programming with allies at Massachusetts Bail Fund , help us continue through April as we inspire more orgs like us into being.]Whose Corner Is It Anyway, Western MA's fave mutual aid & harm reduction group by & for drug-injecting low-income/street/survival sex workers, is raising $1300 again for this wk's meeting--a presentation by Butterfly's Elene Lam on migrant sex work 101. Our members are 40 percent Puerto Ricana, so many of them are internal migrants, but as a group, we need to know more about the struggles of sex worker migrants crossing borders.
The year since SESTA-FOSTA passed has only made it more clear how critical it is for the most marginalized sectors of the industry to band together. As poor drug-injecting sex workers, we need to find solidarity w/migrant sex workers--as a counter for all the times both groups have been pushed aside and ignored or even viewed as a liability by the larger movement. We're pleased to welcome organizer extraordinaire Elene Lam as a speaker, Her international work with other migrant sex workers through Zi Teng, Butterfly, and the Migrant Sex Worker Project is unparalleled.
We'll also be discussing our growing partnership with MA BailFund during this meeting. Like many other street-based and outdoor sex workers globally and nationally, our members are often arrested *weekly* on charges like trespassing, loitering, and disorderly conduct as well as drug possession, solicitation, and common night walking. There are innumerable public nuisance laws making up the legal machine criminalizing poverty which members can break by simply existing in public space. Many of these charges don't even stick--common nightwalking, an absurd 19th century statute still in MA general law that I've railed about here often, is actually unconstitutional with its limitation on freedom of movement & its low burden of proof. (Not to mention against public health best practices with the way it's often paired w/using condoms as evidence, a law enforcement tactic that's been eliminated in many major cities and states since the NYPD banned its use in pros related arrests in 2014.) But for poor opioid-dependent sex workers like us, it doesn't matter if the charges don't stick--the arrest itself is the punishment, as well as a clear threat to our lives. When we're arrested, we often have no money on us. If it's a sex-work related arrest, the cops often confiscate whatever cash we do have on us as "earnings." We can't bail ourselves out. Sadistic cops often make sure to arrest us on a Friday, so we stay in lock up with no access to a bail commissioner over the weekend. While our state promises that opioid-dependent ppl in jail will have access to suboxone in the fall, the ordeal of withdrawal in lockup remains a sanctioned torture here in progressive MA and elsewhere. And while being dopesick in a cell for 72 hours for LOITERING is something most of us wouldn't wish on our worst enemies, this goes beyond trauma to life-or-death stakes---every time we ARE finally bailed out of lockup or released on our own recognizance after detoxing cold turkey at the police station for a day or three, our tolerance is lowered and we're that much more vulnerable to overdose. The faster we can get bailed out of this somehow legal lockup/cold turkey limbo, the less tolerance is lowered, and the more likely we are to survive the next time we get well on the outside. Also,our allies at Mass Bail Fund reminded us of another crucial factor--the ppl who get to go home after being arrested,who get 2 shower & change clothes and take care of what they need to before their arraignment, invariably have better outcomes in court. It's that arbitrary and that classed, and we can see that easily enough just by comparing sentences between those of us who are more or less lucky within our group. We thank the Mass Bail Fund for being willing to help us figure out ways to make sure as many of our members as possible can be the lucky ones for once, getting bailed out to avoid overdose after days dopesick in a cage.
Had our 1st grant brainstorming session last meeting, tackling a grant app question together as a group. We discovered that *half* of the ppl at this meeting were 2nd generation sex workers, & more than half started sex work before turning 18. So our participatory grantwriting process is already paying dividends early on, just by spurring us into having conversations we wouldn't have otherwise.
Thank you so much for making the beginning of April so much better for fundraising so far than the dismal returns we had in March, with FB banning us every other week like it did so many other sex worker charities. We have so many exciting presentations planned for the future, finally pinning down that one on street woundcare we've been eyeing for ages, plus one on media bias and reporting on street sex work, and one on banking access and debt. We had a bunch of new donors big and small last week, including one who left a note making me grin saying they were donating as a fuck you to an antifa comrade discriminating against a friend w/a drug user past. (The left is far from free of double stigma versus drug use and sex work, which is why we have to lean so hard on those few networks which are truly intersectional.) We hope you can continue to support us through these spring months! As usual, please give if you can, and PLEASE, share us w/a personalized message of support to non-local networks free of drug/sex work prohibitionists--twitter,tumblr, FB, IG...Please interact with my fundraising posts on Twitter and Facebook and boost their prominence in the algorithm! GIFs as comments weirdly seem to work best on Facebook for boosting purposes. If you'd like to become part of the elite team who get the bulk of our pathetic gratitude every month and become one of our monthly donors, please P**p** us at [email protected] with a note to that effect and we'll set up invoices for you.
As usual, your $ goes towards our materialist priorities--syringe access/Narcan/fentanyl test strips, meals/snacks, cigarettes, bad date list, childcare, transport, clothing/toiletries, presentations, &stipends for organizing every week, provided by & for low-income sworkers. Thank you so fucking much as per usual for letting us exist. We get more and more inquiries every week from people who'd like to do what we're doing, or people already starting burgeoning projects led by street sex workers and drug-using sex workers. The very existence of Whose Corner Is It Anyway these past 18 months has allowed for the existence of more projects like it, mutual aid, harm reduction, & activist projects and services led by the most marginalized sex workers--projects which recognize that organizing needs to be accessible to people, that drug user and low-income sex worker activist labor needs to be compensated and supported. Thank you so much to all our donors and supporters for not only allowing us to thrive, but also for helping create this larger phenomenon. Please help us continue into this week and these next few months.
Update 2 on Sunday night, 4/14: Still need help at Whose Corner Is It Anyway--$900 by Thurs for a meeting including Asian migrant sex worker org Butterfly organizer Elene Lam presenting and a discussion on our partnership with Massachusetts Bail Fund. I'm going to let someone else speak for me this time on why you should give to support this meeting--our weekly donor and supporter Shielding wrote a thread on twitter ( https://twitter.com/ShieldingC/status/1117283531821080576) which I'll reproduce here:
"1) Funding the Butterfly Project presentation means supporting migrant sex-workers - paying the people whose stakes in immigration reform are life-and-death or -indefinite-detetention.
"2) Whose Corner and Butterfly Project are both solid investments in prison reform and decarceration; members of both groups in surviving so many arrests are pushing back every day against these systems. Collectively both groups are forces of resistance we can't afford to lose.
"3) Enabling a collaboration between both groups means information, skills, and human connections can be shared. Both can expand and both can better support and amplify the resisters of both communities.
"4) Supporting a workshop with Mass Bail Fund means supporting yet another organization devoted to decrimalizing poverty, making their research, funding and experience available to resisters on the front lines.
"5) Whose Corner members can use these resources to survive and avoid incarceration. The families and communities that rely on these members every day can also survive and continue to benefit from their presence and experience in our lives.
"6) Supporting Whose Corner means supporting a restorative justice model of conflict resolution, because this is what they did with the information from the restorative justice presentation. Integrated it, used it, and made it part of their work.
"7) The overall pattern: this group is nurturing the roots of peace in the middle of life-taking violence. Each week they come together, planting connections and finding each other, is a week when something good comes to life.
"8-I give because I want to be part of the stand against violence and abuse in my community.
“9)I give because the resisters on the front lines of decarceration deserve a few hours each week where they know their needs will be met, to share a hot meal and make some friends and know they aren't alone.”
Anyway, I also wrote a long megilah yesterday about why it's important for drug-using/survival sex workers to ally with migrant sex workers, and why our growing alliance with Mass Bail Fund will save members' lives...why our work with the Bail Fund may ultimately provide a model for bail work w/populations, esp opioid-dependent ones, which are controlled and punished by numerous small arrests criminalizing their poverty and their right to be in public space......about all the presentations we plan in the future on the safer bathroom movement, banking and debt, street woundcare, SESTA/FOSTA and the national sex workers' rights movement, media bias in reporting on street sex workers, and more...and about how Whose Corner is inspiring many nascent and incubating new projects led by street-based and poor sex workers for them, projects which understand that activism has to be accessible to truly be led by those most directly impacted. So today I'm just gonna repeat my weekly plea to pls give, SHARE,& interact w/this fund! Again, I know I court what I euphemize as donor fatigue-truly donor disgust-but there's no stability in an almost exclusively crowdfund dependent project like this one!
And as usual, if you'd like to become one of our monthly donors, pls Paypal us at [email protected] w/a note saying so, and we'll set up invoices for you. SO many new donors lately,tho,w/both large gifts and small.Thank u for helping us grow this community of supporters--it's so tough not 2 just keep hassling the same networks, as it's difficult 2 find ppl receptive 2 giving to drug-using street sex workers. As usual, yr $ goes towards our materialist priorities-syringe access/Narcan/fentanyl test strips,meals/snacks,cigs,bad date list,childcare, transport,clothing/toiletries,presentations,&stipends for organizing every wk, provided by & 4 low-income sworkers. Anyway, thank you thank you thank you for your patience w/my promotional noise, your *considerable* material support, your testimonials to us, your recruitment of new donors--for everything you do which allows us to survive.
Update #3, 4/16: Brief update to say that we still need $650 by Thurs/Fri! The presentation went beautifully, btw--I'd forgotten what a truly magnetizing speaker Toront Asian migrant sex worker org Butterfly's Elene Lam was! (For more of her brilliance, see this transcribed Tits and Sass interview ( https://bit.ly/1WgF1bQ ) I did w/her, Kate Zen, & Chanelle Gallant in 2015 on their work in the Migrant Sex Worker Project.) She connected the racism Asian sex workers experience when they're cast as passive victims to the racism our group members experience as Black and Latina sex workers when they're cast as criminals--all tropes that justify police control of our bodies. We identified many of our Puerto Ricana group members' experience as one of internal migration, too. We also learned some of Butterfly's story as an organization--from their humble beginnings asking for a space with a photocopier from a labor org to their art projects to the way they recently massed 100 strong appearing at Toronto City Hall. I was particularly interested in Elene's explanation of how Butterfly uses shelters as sponsees for migrant sex workers, b/c often immigration will assume male individual sponsees are clients and female sponsees are massage parlor managers/traffickers. So, yeah, awesome presentation on migrant sex work, and it'd be great if this meeting didn't put us behind for next week--if you can't give to the fundraiser, please share it along w/a message of support or interact with my fundraising posts on any platform. As usual, P**p** [email protected] if you'd like to be a monthly donor and we'll set up invoices for you. Thank you thank you thank you for being there for us and even just tolerating these updates! ;)
[Chinese migrant massage parlor work is] an incredibly global network, connected through newly possible digital networks. Elene [Lam] has literally met the same workers she has done outreach with in Canton, then Hong Kong, and then Toronto. This sequence of migration is driven by government policies that restrict the labor rights of Chinese workers who are made illegal in their own country, due to an internal caste system of rural vs. urban workers. Yet these migrant sex workers also do much to support Chinese economic development by sending a large portion of their money home.
It’s ironic and laughable in the darkest sense when Christian charities in “international development” work travel to countries like Cambodia and Thailand to convert sex workers into garment workers. Do they recognize how much “international development” these sex workers are already doing? Much more than a charity promoting the sale of handmade trinkets could ever manage.
...The media is quick to call out “signs of trafficking” when it comes to Chinese spas. Police in the Kraft case report finding refrigerators inside the targeted parlors. They are calling this a sign of trafficking, because people were eating and living out of these workplaces. As one of our organizers put it: "There are also refrigerators in the midtown machine learning startup where I’ve worked as a software engineer, often staying very late nights on the couch to meet deadlines, but there, the provision of these office amenities would never be seen as signs of exploitation."
The police departments involved in this case have tweeted about the care packages of shampoo and mouthwash that they’ve sent these massage worker "victims" to demonstrate their good will, including English religious literature entitled “What on Earth am I here for?” Many of these demonstrations seem more geared for the public than for the Chinese workers themselves, who would probably prefer not being deported to a religious text they can’t read. .
...Fear of the police drives the owners of these Chinese massage establishments to take a lot of extra precautions when it comes to communication and transportation, sometimes even initially hiding the addresses of workplaces when they pick up new workers from airports who have answered ads on Chinese chat platforms. The workers who answer ads in these community channels travel from city to city, working short-term contracts to make as much money as possible in a small amount of time, without other plans for living accommodations while they are there. Some Chinese workers are indeed spending up to six or seven days a week working in the same rooms where they await customers, sometimes sleeping in the same beds where they are working because it is not practical for them to rent out another space. Under current employment laws, their bosses are not required to provide other living accommodations for their employees. Long working hours in isolation jeopardize parlor workers’ mental and physical health.
Chinese massage parlor managers, who are usually former or current massage workers themselves, often partner with their favorite worker, the most senior or competent of the workers, to manage operations. Often times, the parlor is a tight-knit community, and the women working in it treat each other as friends as well as business partners. Most of the time, the relationships in these massage parlors are very collegial and respectful, as women are often providing employment to other people from their hometowns in China whom they think of as good friends and whom they depend on in a country that is foreign to them.
The majority of anti-trafficking organizations spread public disinformation, warning people that anyone speaking with a foreign accent and showing “signs of emotional distress” might be a trafficking victim. They contribute to public ignorance and xenophobia, without providing real insight into the lives of immigrant workers, and these workers’ justified fear of law enforcement and immigration officers.
The way to tackle these labor issues is not to use police raids, or law enforcement intervention of any sort, to impose more terror on these immigrant businesses—which in spite of these crackdowns, continue to pop up resiliently to meet society’s demands. Rather, as a society, we must stop erasing these workers, and instead, recognize that that all sex workers, both immigrants and documented citizens alike, deserve labor rights and protections. Communities, cities, and states need to divest from police and invest in social resources that materially support our most marginalized workers.
Anti-trafficking movement “leaders” (those executive directors whose salaries could fix a lot of immediate problems for people experiencing exploitative situations) need to be ousted. Harmful “perfect victim” narratives need to be abandoned. Instead, we need to embrace people’s complicated stories of survival. We must stop using anti-trafficking monies to fund the police. Instead, we should prioritize the funding of affordable housing, affirming healthcare, and food and cash assistance. If these fights are not won, we will be funding the same mutual aid and care efforts internally within our movement, with the same threatened cash flow, forever.
Red Canary Song, a group of migrant massage parlor workers and comrades in Flushing, Queens, collectively wrote a piece which appears in Tits and Sass today on Robert Kraft, the Chinese hukou system driving internal and external migration, the anti-trafficking industrial complex, and massage parlor life--”The Massage Parlor Means Survival Here: Red Canary Song on Robert Kraft”
As we gathered on the busy street corner in front of the Queens Public Library in Flushing on Friday March 29th, over one hundred community members heard our cry: “性工作是真工作!” Sex work is work! The p…
Red Canary Song, a group of migrant massage workers and comrades in Flushing, Queens, with a piece at Tits and Sass today on the Robert Kraft case, the Chinese hukou system driving internal and external migration, massage parlor life, and the anti-trafficking industrial complex:
The police departments involved in this case have tweeted about the care packages of shampoo and mouthwash that they’ve sent these massage worker “victims” to demonstrate their good will, including English religious literature entitled “What on Earth am I here for?” Many of these demonstrations seem more geared for the public than for the Chinese workers themselves, who would probably prefer not being deported to a religious text they can’t read. .
Urban Survivors Union sex worker organizing call tonight at 9 PM EST! The next one after this will be 4/23 at 9 PM EST. Info always the same:
Over laptop/tablet/smartphone: https://www.gotomeet.me/LouiseVincent
On your phone in the US--+1 (786) 535-3211
Access Code: 615-430-549
All current or ex sex workers interested in harm reduction, particularly current or ex-drug-using sex workers, are welcome, as well as respectful harm reduction or drug users union allies.
What we'll be discussing on the call tonight:
1) Strategizing to have all call members attend the International Drug Policy Reform Conference in St Louis in November, either via DPA scholarship or through USU-created scholarships, so that we can meet as a nascent group in person.
2) What I can do to represent us at some coming harm reduction events
3) What presenters do you want on the call in the future?
4) What do you want to do with any funding we acquire? Does anyone want to volunteer to help with grant writing or grant editing?
5) What can we do to link up the Urban Survivors Union #reframetheblamecampaign against drug-induced homicide laws to sex workers' rights and women's issues? (Not to say those are the same thing.) http://ncurbansurvivorunion.org/sex-work-and-reframethebla…/
6) What would you like to do with the free reign we've been given with the sex work section of the USU site? With USU server space?
7) What is the best way to utilize a national call like this in general? How can we use it to help with the regional work we're all doing separately?
If you're interested in the calls in general, PM me your email and I can add you to the regular calendar alerts,
Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA harm reduction task force and mutual aid group led by injection-drug-using low-income and survival sex workers who are mostly street-based, many of whom are houseless or living in unstable housing . We low-income sex workers have created a weekly communi...
Whose Corner Is It Anyway--W MA's #mutualaid/ #harmreduction group by & for drug-injecting low-income/street/survival #sexworkers--really needs help this week! Still need $1130 by Weds/Thurs after the WORST fundraising month we've ever had. One of our subcommittee heads was arrested, leaving us further off-kilter--in this organizing, any one of our leaders can be arrested at any time. (We'll be revisiting her plight with you as a community after her bail reduction hearing, with her family's help and permission.) Facebook is still intermittently blocking the fundraiser as "against community standards," in a pattern that's been popping up with other sex worker activism funds and charities. If you like your donating tinged with desperation--or even if you don't--there's never been a better time to give. Or you can SHARE this fundraiser in a personalized manner which shows your followers it means something to you--on twitter, FB, IG, tumblr, etc, in non-local networks where we're safe from drug/sex work prohibitionists. If you'd like to become a monthly donor, you can Paypal us at [email protected] with a note to that effect, and we'll set up invoices for you. 35-50 mostly houseless or unstably housed, poor, street-based, and survival sex workers depend on this meeting every week for something to eat, afterhours syringe/Narcan/fentanyl test strip access, a stipend, clothing and toiletries, bad date list access, and a restorative justice and trauma counselor to help deal with conflict. AND members depend on the meeting as a place to share information, organize, lead, and see presentations of interest to us as a community--a space exclusive to low-income sex-working women, most of whom are people who inject drugs.
Yesterday’s update on all our various doings:
Adventures in fundraising--we ended last wk $625 short. But feminist sex store Good Vibrations' GiVe charity program emailed us to say they'll be sending us the $5500 they earned for us throughout our seasonal partnership! Now we just have to stay solvent till we get that money! We're ecstatic about this funding b/c it will allow us to further secure our cushion against ever having to short stipends and we can now pay those of our sex worker activist presenters who aren't otherwise funded for their outreach by an organization or university.
Most importantly, the money will allow us to fund a grantwriting subcommittee of women of color leader members, to compensate them and provide childcare and transport for a day-long session each month plotting out collective answers to grant app questions. We've been planning a more democratic and participatory grantwriting process for a long time, and we're finally starting on it this month. Not only will this process include a subcommittee, but also regular brainstorming sessions with the entire group. It's not sexy and we didn't know how exactly we were going to meta-fund this democratic grantwriting process through other grants--we didn't know who would award us $ to help us make more $! But innovating participatory & democratic grantwriting may be the most important thing we can do for ourselves as a group of poor women/non-men & drug-injecting sex workers. Whoever controls grants in an emerging non-profit has the keys to the organization's kingdom. If the ability to write grants stayed lodged in the hands of the few of us low-income sex workers in group who had previous organizing experience, the most marginalized among us would always be tokenized and never have true decision making power. That's why leadership development, leadership capacity, etc.--all that condescending-sounding grantwriting jargon--is so important to us as a group. Orgs may say they are led by directly impacted people, but what does that really mean when ppl don't have access to the skills that run all this non-profit machinery? We've created a calendar of grants and will be starting prep for the first one on it 2 months ahead at this very meeting! We'll be having a brainstorming session on how our group functions multi-generationally, to address one of this foundation's funding priorities.
But until we get this GiVe money, which will give us a slight boost but which we'd like to earmark for new programming like the grantwriting subcommittee & paying presenters, Whose Corner is kinda screwed--March was a v shitty month for us fundraising-wise. But let's not forget to emphasize how grateful we are for Good Vibrations! The $ they raised is 10 times what we expected from the partnership, & will make a significant difference in the opportunities available to us as an org of drug-using low-income sex workers!
We also recently discovered that we'll be receiving the Swop-usa needle exchange mini-grant, for a total of $1200 over the year to be spent entirely on harm reduction supplies. We're ecstatic to be able to supplement the exchange supplies we receive from our allies at the local harm reduction org. Tapestry has always been so generous w/us, but for example, now we'll be able to offer snorting kits and crack pipe kits!
We have very specific needs as a group of drug-injecting sex working women & non-men that now we'll be able to meet through our afterhours syringe/harm reduction supply access. For example, our local harm reduction org was recently out of lube for 6 weeks. For the community at large, that's an inconvenience, but for a group of drug-using sex workers, that's a calamity. Stimulant drugs dry up the body, and without lube use during our work, we're more likely to get genital abrasions which increase our risk of STI transmission. In general, lube use also makes condoms less likely to break.
There are other specific needs we have as drug-using sex-working women that our local harm reduction org can't fulfill. We often need finer gauges of syringes b/c as women/non-men and long time drug users, our veins are harder to find/smaller. Needs come up that ppl don't even associate w/syringe access. Our members need compact mirrors, b/c we're often forced to do dangerous injections in our necks when all our other veins have worn out, and our houseless and/or street working members don't always have access to bathrooms. Our local state-subsidized harm reduction org still can't distribute fentanyl test strips b/c MA considers directly testing drugs w/them "offlabel use" of the urinalysis strips, even though CA and MD are subsidizing this use of the strips by drug users. Our Whose Corner harm reduction consultant, Jess Tilley of Hrh413 and the New England Users Union, is one of the only sources of fentanyl test strips in the Northeast! She's generously provided them to us, but this SWOP-USA mini-grant will let us buy more.
We're excited to apply to more needle exchange grants and distros, so that we can eventually independently distribute all our supplies 4 our afterhours syringe access & tailor them to our specific hr needs as women/non-men & poor/street/survival sex workers.
What else is new? At last week's doubledecker presentation by international sw activist Ryan Cole and then harm reductionist researcher Traci Green, our members innovated a new translation program for our Spanish speakers. Our group is 40 percent Puerto Ricana, and we've gotten a new contingent of members recently who are ESL, so a translation system for presentations is a godsend. We thank our member S for doing translating through 2 exhausting half hour sessions!
Ryan spoke movingly to us about the stigma she experienced from the sex workers' right movement after she came out as an injecting drug user, even though she was a globally respected activist at that point. She also spoke about how the key to successful sex worker activism is alliances with other movements.
Researcher Traci Green pitched her wide-ranging RACK study of regions of MA drug users to us last week, and one of our members already came in to participate as a subject later this week. It's integral for a study like that to have sex worker specific data on drug use in this region, like how weekly common nightwalking arrests expose us to more overdose risk when we come out of lockup with lowered tolerance & how hospitals in this region are full of vile double stigma vs drug-using sex workers, such that members can't get proper treatment for endocarditis & pneumonia b/c healthcare staff verbally abuse them and leave them in withdrawal during hospital stays.
Plenty of exciting presentations in our future--I've been talking to Shawna Ferris about presenting to us on media bias vs street sex workers (a topic explored in her brilliant book, _Street Sex Work And Canadian Cities_) Shawna and I were also talking about possibly having her present with Amy Lebovitch, the famous Canadian sex worker leader who was one the plaintiffs in the groundbreaking Bedford v. Canada case, w/whom she's writing a new book! I've also been talking with Elene Lam& Zen Kate of Butterfly, the Migrant Sex Workers Project and Red Canary Song to ask them or members of their orgs to give a Migrant Sex Work In North America 101 presentation to our group. Since our members are almost all Puerto Ricana, white, or black, we don't have a lot of (im)migrant experience in our group, and that's an integral part of sex worker movement organizing we need to know more about.
So, again, although we have a little money coming our way in the future, at the moment Whose Corner Is It Anyway is STUPIDLY behind b/c of us falling short of fundraising goal all but ONE week of March. Before this March, we'd only fallen short of goal 3-4 times in our 17 months of weekly fundraising, and in Jan and Feb, we'd actually averaged $100 above goal weekly! PLEASE HELP us make up for consistently horrible fundraising in March--it's THE BEST time to give to us if you've had even the most fleeting thought of doing so. If you can't give, SHARE this fundraiser, in a personalized manner which shows your followers it means something to you--on twitter, FB, IG, tumblr, etc, in non-local networks where we're safe from drug/sex work prohibitionists. If you'd like to become one of our patron saints/monthly donors, please P**p** us at [email protected] indicating you'd like to do so in the notes, and we'll set up invoices for you. As usual,yr $ goes 2 our mutual aid/materialist priorities-Narcan/fentanyl test strips/syringe access,bad date list,clothing/toiletries,cigs,chilldcare,transport, stipends,harm reduction presentations at every weekly meeting, by and for poor drug-injecting sex workers.
As a community of donors, you've kept us afloat now for 17 months, even as the cost of our weekly meetings ballooned. We promised you we'd work on other funding sources, and now we're finally getting mini-grants and financial support from community partners. As an organization led by drug-injecting low-income sex workers, it's tough for us to get support from traditional funding sources. But we've innovated a rigorous new grantwriting process and we'll keep working on it to get more $ for general operations and lower our weekly ask so we can stop asking you for a fucking princely sum every week. Thank u for giving us this weekly haven where 35-50 sex workers can talk to each other;eat a meal;share info&organize;get clothing,toiletries,a cig,syringe access,Narcan, & test strips;access a bad date list;take in presentations,& get paid fairly for our activist labor.
Oh, I almost forgot! If nothing else, if you can interact with my fundraising posts and boost them on the Facebook and Instagram, that always really helps--for some quirky reason, posting GIFs in comments on FB is best for the algorithm, btw?
I firmly believe that robbing men is just taking reparations for the unending misogynistic and patriarchal bullshit we’re subjected to on a regular basis. I also believe that sex workers should be compensated for their time at all times if you’re asking them to provide labor of any kind. So I don’t care about her lightening the pockets of these men. If we’re being pedantic and dumb, we can acknowledge that drugging and robbing men, either as separate acts or in concert, is illegal. It’s 'objectively' wrong. But I still don’t care. To quote MsGizelleMarie, 'There’s no rules to survival sex work.' Encouraging clients to drink a little bit more or do another line, taking an extra $20 for cab fare when a john is in the bathroom, calling the police when a client gets too aggressive—we all do what we have to do to stay safe, pay rent, feed our kids, buy our meds, and take care of our parents. Cardi B became a stripper after the loss of her civilian job forced her to live with an abusive ex and drop out of college. That is survival sex work.
"When your literal life is on the line, the boundaries between the available options and the acceptable options start to blur. If you have never had to choose between food and paying a bill, this is not the place for you to clutch your pearls. This conversation is not the place for you to make yourself heard at the expense of poor, survival sex workers. If you can leave sex work today and find employment tomorrow without having to explain the gaps in your CV because of your education or connections, this is not the time for you to talk about your anecdotal experiences. You don’t have the range or the right to derail this discussion. If you can call the police when a client gets out of line without worrying about being railroaded by ICE, I don’t care about your opinion. I don’t want to know what you women who can openly talk about your sex work careers without losing jobs, respect, or your lives would do in Cardi’s place. Because you have never been in Cardi’s place.
New contributor (and avowed non Cardi B fan) Adrie at Tits and Sass today in “Leave Cardi Alone”
Like, I had to go strip. I had to go, ‘Oh yeah, you want to fuck me? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s go to this hotel,’ and I’d drug ni**as up, and I’d rob them. That’s what I used to do! Nothing was m…
New Tits and Sass contributor and avowed non Cardi B fan Adrie references great sex worker minds like suprihmbe and Gizelle Marie while talking survival sex work, whorearchy, rape apologism, and the “unfortunate trend of using the bad acts of marginalized people to excuse the harm caused by those in positions of power.” She also gives us a Black sex working woman’s perspective on misogynoir in hip hop:
According to the lyrics and the apparent mindsets of men in hip-hop, women like Cardi B and Megan thee Stallion should be ideal. They’re attractive, financially solvent, sexually direct, and fully invested in the capitalist system. But their misogyny is just that deep and their attraction to these unobtainable women is just that terrifying that the opposite is the case.
Cardi B in particular represents the archetype of the perfect “hood” woman, with her gang affiliated past and her open affinity for popping off on anyone that steps out of line. (I must admit that a small part of me admires that. I work very hard to temper it, but I love a good scrap.) But Cardi is also the personification of every whorephobic lyric and characterization of sex workers. She’s loud, brash, money-hungry, and so far out of most men’s league as to be on another planet. No wonder they hate her.
But it’s deeper and more vicious than that. In hip-hop, sex workers are the worst kind of woman. Oh sure, they’re fun to gawk at, but you would never take one home. If they’re so lacking in morals as to “sell their bodies”, what’s to stop them from taking your money, drugging you, and raping you? In short, what’s stopping sex workers from treating men the way men have been treating women in general since the beginning of time?
The answer is nothing. Sex workers frighten men because we’re largely divorced from the bounds of the patriarchal and puritanical bullshit that’s kept women in their place for so long. (I say “*largely* divorced” because internalized misogyny is a bitch to defeat, even at the best of times.) There’s absolutely nothing stopping a sex worker, especially a survival sex worker, from taking a man’s money without a second thought because men are disposable to us—a means to an end. Once you’ve served your purpose, you’re no longer necessary. There’s no need to care about a trick when they’re a dime a dozen.
If there’s one thing that everyone can learn from this story, it’s to stop. Stop harassing sex workers. Stop approaching sex workers and making unsolicited offers for casual, unpaid sex. Stop talking sex workers into going home with you when you have nothing to offer them but mediocre dick and bottom shelf liquor. Stop expecting sex workers to give you their time when you have nothing of value to exchange. Because we will take every bit of what we’re owed. We know exactly what we’re worth, with and without tax, and we have no problem taking it from you.
Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA harm reduction task force and mutual aid group led by injection-drug-using low-income and survival sex workers who are mostly street-based, many of whom are houseless or living in unstable housing . We low-income sex workers have created a weekly communi...
[TLDR: Still a bit behind/scant donations tonight--pls GIVE SHARE INTERACT, details in last para/doubleheader presentation this week w/Ryan Cole and Traci Green, why activism is inaccessible to poor drug-using sex workers, etc, no idea whether FB will censor the fundraiser this week] Raising $1300 for a doubleheader presentation meeting of Whose Corner Is It Anyway, W MA's #mutual aid group/harm reduction task force by and for drug-injecting low-income/street/survival sex workers-w/acclaimed sw/drug user activist Ryan Cole & harm reduction researcher Traci Green. Psyched to have Ryan present to WCIIA after her and Elena Adriana Jeffreys' powerful presentation the other month for the Urban Survivors Union sex worker call on the shortcomings of Australian safe injection sites' treatment of Aboriginal sws and other more vulnerable drug users. For this presentation, I've asked Ryan to speak very generally about being an internationally acclaimed activist, a sex worker, and an injecting drug user. Our members have been told time and time again--in brutally coercive environments like jail, court-ordered treatment,& psych wards they're section-12'd into--that they can't make anything of themselves until they're abstinent and have a straight job. Ryan's trajectory as an activist--all the way up to presidency of her national sw rights organization Scarlet Alliance as well as regional consultant for global sex workers' rights org NSWP--proves that actively drug-using sw are accomplished leaders, no matter what we're told about ourselves, or how we're sometimes tokenized even by sympathetic movements into dog & pony shows with no real decision-making power/respect for our expertise. Of course, privilege and whiteness play a huge role in WHICH drug-using sex workers get to be activist leaders, and it'll be interesting to ask Ryan about what resources were available to her which allowed her to climb the ranks.
At WCIIA, we take what is too often just a grantwriting buzzword-"leadership capacity building"-very seriously. We know it requires material resources-you can't do activism if you don't have someone to watch the kids, or you can't take time away from survival sw. It's hard to do activism when you're houseless, hard to impossible--if you don't have consistent access to a phone or the internet, and you can't create relationships or get any context on the movement you're in. It's hard to do activism when every time,we're forced to re-invent the wheel & blunder through things other ppl have learned how to do through experience--when you don't know how to interact with the media or you don't know how your city council works. The leadership of the most directly impacted people has to be more than lip service--it needs to be a priority which we pour resources into, providing the huge amounts of support it actually takes to make it a reality. We've made a start on that at WCIIA by providing stipends for organizing labor so ppl can afford to come, by providing meals & childcare & transportation, and providing harm reduction supplies so ppl can go get well safely after meetings. We're trying to build on it thru media training & discussions on the place of research in activism,by planning workshops on writing mini-grants--by making provisions to teach activism as a skill that some ppl are lucky to have cultural context for &many don't. But SO much more needs to be done to make activism accessible to poor and racialized drug-using sex workers. For example, only a few orgs & conferences make provisions for methadone dosing & sterile syringes at events. (Kudos, Drug Policy Alliance, btw. Oh, and kudos to Harm Reduction Coalition as well--last year's HRC conference was the first I'd ever been to which provided transportation to and from the nearest methadone clinic and reimbursed ppl for guest dosing fees.) In the meantime, just having Ryan speak to our org and prove through her story that you don't have to be abstinent or leave the industry to be a leader to reckon with has incredible aspirational value.
We also voted unanimously as a group at our last meeting to have harm reductionist researcher Traci Green pitch us on participating in her RAC study in our region. Though the Dunkin Donuts gift cards her institutional funder limited her to for compensation were a disappointment, our members were impressed by the study's record of influencing those in power. In other regions, the study directly contributed to the creation of SSPs, In Lowell, the police dept retrained all its officers to implement Sec 35 holds (coercive warehousing for "treatment") much more sparingly based on data Traci's team presented. Members were excited to see what kind of helpful data Traci and her team could present to the Department of Public Health and local gov officials on drug-using & sex-working populations like ours, leading to changes which could directly improve our lives. Traci also impressed us w/her offer 2 give us a co-author or consultation credit as a group--as I wrote in my fundraising thread last week, researchers too often profit from the intellectual labor of drug users and sex workers w/o crediting us for it. And finally, Traci went even further to ensure that her research would directly benefit us by offering to give us what harm reduction and hygiene supplies she could from the project. So, she seems like one of the few researchers who don't need to read seminal Tits and Sass piece "Why You Shouldn't Study Sex Workers" by the incomparable Lime Jello (which you can apply to some extent to drug users or any other marginalized population): http://titsandsass.com/why-you-shouldnt-study-sex-work/
Despite FB's continuing nefariousness last week (it blocked me from sharing the fundraiser in groups and Facebook-jailed me for trying last Sat),we're pathetically grateful to our donor community for pulling through and helping us finish at slightly above goal! However, we're still a bit behind b/c of expenditures for our new continuing transformative justice project, and I'm a little freaked out that there have been only two donations today, so now would be a great time to give to and/or SHARE the fundraiser! Best thing you can do for Whose Corner Is It Anyway besides giving is to SHARE us in non-local networks safe from drug/sw prohibitionists. SHARE us share us SHARE us w/heartfelt songs of praise for our work, esp since I have no idea what Facebook will do to the fundraiser today when I try it in a sec. The OTHER best thing you can do for us besides giving is to interact with & boost my fundraising posts on twitter, FB, IG, and tumblr--comment on FB and leave gifs (which are weirdly good for the algorithm?), reblog, comment, retweet, fave, etc! If you'd like to become one of our blessed choir of angels, otherwise known as our monthly donors, please Paypal us at [email protected] with a note to that effect & we'll set up invoices for you. AS USUAL, your money goes to our materialist priorities as poor sworkers-syringe access, Narcan,fentanyl test strips; clothing/toiletries; meals/snacks; childcare; transport; cigarettes; bad date list;stipends for organizing, &harm reduction presentations, all provided by and for low-income sex workers. And maybe I'm just spoiled by fundraising weekly for an org lucky enough to have such a wildly generous community of donors behind it, but it's weirdly quiet out there tonight, Give so I can stop fretting. Thank you so so fucking much for that wild generosity, for the money which allows a tenuously crowdfunded group of stigmatized and criminalized ppl like us to be able to meet and organize weekly.
Since I began writing this piece, both Scarlet Alliance and SWOP NSW have issued an apology to migrant sex workers for their part in the SEXHUM research. This is an unprecedented move in the right …
PLEASE SHARE–TITS AND SASS, THE ONLY US MEDIA SITE BY AND FOR SEX WORKERS, HAS RELAUNCHED!
Now that decriminalization of sex work is being considered seriously in several states in the US, we need to ask: whose decriminalization is it? For Tits and Sass’ relaunch, we’re proud to have new contributor but longtime friend of ours Nada Zenith DeCat point out the exclusion of migrants baked into the much-lauded New Zealand model, which falls far short of “full decriminalization”:
The global sex workers’ rights movement heralds decriminalization at all costs, while often overlooking the racism involved in its partial implementation. The argument is that decriminalization of sex work will end stigma and benefit *all* workers equally. However, POC migrant sex workers (PMSW) still experience stigma, raids, and racism within the purported decriminalized sex worker heavens of New South Wales, Australia and New Zealand.
…The sex worker activists’ rallying call “nothing about us without us” currently applies only to white workers.
…Under the leadership of Catherine Healy, The Prostitutes Collective accepted criminalizing migrant workers as a condition of partial decriminalization of sex work in New Zealand. Nothing in the subsequent review of the legislation, publicly available on the Collective’s website, shows that any effort have been made to reform this section of the law. In a news article, Healy is quoted minimizing the problem by stating,”We’re not talking about significant numbers of people in this situation [migrant sex workers].” And yet while Healy was accepting the neo-colonial “honor” of damehood from the British queen, the raids, arrests, and deportations of migrant workers in New Zealand continued. Our numbers aside, the mistreatment of migrant sex workers in New Zealand is an issue when this model of decriminalization is promoted throughout the world, especially at a time when trafficking hysteria and racist anti-migrant panic are still on the rise. Rather than being held accountable for advocating for this flawed model, Healy enjoys the uncritical acceptance of her stance by most of the sex worker community. In a recent video recorded at a UN discussion on sex work, Healy again fails to correct a description of the NZ model as “full decriminalization”. Although she mentions that migrants are “discriminated” against, she does not explicitly explain that it is her Collective’s model which criminalizes us.
Under the leadership of Catherine Healy, The Prostitutes Collective accepted criminalizing migrant workers as a condition of partial decriminalization of sex work in New Zealand. Nothing in the subsequent review of the legislation, publicly available on the Collective’s website, shows that any effort has been made to reform this section of the law. In a news article, Healy is quoted minimizing the problem by stating,”We’re not talking about significant numbers of people in this situation [migrant sex workers].” And yet while Healy was accepting the neo-colonial “honor” of damehood from the British queen, the raids, arrests, and deportations of migrant workers in New Zealand continued. Our numbers aside, the mistreatment of migrant sex workers in New Zealand is an issue when this model of decriminalization is promoted throughout the world, especially at a time when trafficking hysteria and racist anti-migrant panic are still on the rise. Rather than being held accountable for advocating for this flawed model, Healy enjoys the uncritical acceptance of her stance by most of the sex worker community. In a recent video recorded at a UN discussion on sex work, Healy again fails to correct a description of the NZ model as “full decriminalization”. Although she mentions that migrants are “discriminated” against, she does not explicitly explain that it is her Collective’s model which criminalizes us.
When we argue against radical feminists and other anti-sex work crusaders for their misuse of the word “decriminalization” to describe and advocate for the Swedish model of criminalization of clients, we should be aware that our own movement has also advocated for only partial decriminalization as the best model for sex workers. If decriminalization of sex work includes criminalization of migrant workers, why shouldn’t decriminalization also include the criminalization of clients? It is our own racist movement which has sharpened this weapon against us for our enemies to use, enemies who seek to oppress us through the use of police state violence by criminalizing our clients.
...We may assume that NZ sex worker activists accepted partial criminalization in a “my rights first”/trickle down approach to human rights. But there is precedent for a more noble political strategy in the South Australian sex worker collective, SIN (Sex Industry Network) in Adelaide, who have persistently rejected decriminalization which still prohibits street-based sex work. Instead, they continue to wait for legislation that will fully decriminalize all sex work and not leave anyone behind.
Tits and Sass contributor Nada DeCat in the piece we’re relaunching the site with--”The Racism of Decriminalization.” The much lauded New Zealand model falls far short of full decriminalization, and we as a global movement need to face that.
Since I began writing this piece, both Scarlet Alliance and SWOP NSW have issued an apology to migrant sex workers for their part in the SEXHUM research. This is an unprecedented move in the right …
PLEASE SHARE--TITS AND SASS, THE ONLY US MEDIA SITE BY AND FOR SEX WORKERS, HAS RELAUNCHED!
Now that decriminalization of sex work is being considered seriously in several states in the US, we need to ask: whose decriminalization is it? For Tits and Sass' relaunch, we're proud to have new contributor but longtime friend of ours Nada Zenith DeCat point out the exclusion of migrants baked into the much-lauded New Zealand model, which falls far short of "full decriminalization":
The global sex workers’ rights movement heralds decriminalization at all costs, while often overlooking the racism involved in its partial implementation. The argument is that decriminalization of sex work will end stigma and benefit *all* workers equally. However, POC migrant sex workers (PMSW) still experience stigma, raids, and racism within the purported decriminalized sex worker heavens of New South Wales, Australia and New Zealand.
...The sex worker activists’ rallying call “nothing about us without us” currently applies only to white workers.
...Under the leadership of Catherine Healy, The Prostitutes Collective accepted criminalizing migrant workers as a condition of partial decriminalization of sex work in New Zealand. Nothing in the subsequent review of the legislation, publicly available on the Collective’s website, shows that any effort has been made to reform this section of the law. In a news article, Healy is quoted minimizing the problem by stating,”We’re not talking about significant numbers of people in this situation [migrant sex workers].” And yet while Healy was accepting the neo-colonial “honor” of damehood from the British queen, the raids, arrests, and deportations of migrant workers in New Zealand continued. Our numbers aside, the mistreatment of migrant sex workers in New Zealand is an issue when this model of decriminalization is promoted throughout the world, especially at a time when trafficking hysteria and racist anti-migrant panic are still on the rise. Rather than being held accountable for advocating for this flawed model, Healy enjoys the uncritical acceptance of her stance by most of the sex worker community. In a recent video recorded at a UN discussion on sex work, Healy again fails to correct a description of the NZ model as “full decriminalization”. Although she mentions that migrants are “discriminated” against, she does not explicitly explain that it is her Collective’s model which criminalizes us.
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