Audacia Ray's Blog, page 50
July 2, 2011
Hype, Hustle, Harm: Why Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, and the DNA Foundation Need To Stand Down
Kutcher, Moore, and the organizations the DNA Foundation supports don't give us ways to confront systemic poverty and racism, lack of access to education, or strict immigration policies and community policing practices that make people reluctant to engage with the systems that might support them. Instead, their campaigns focus hype and hustle on one target — the market for commercial sex. They don't address the fact that this market does not exist in isolation of these other political and economic factors. When they do attempt to address human rights or misogyny, they do so only in rhetoric. They still place men in the paternalistic role of savior, and people in the sex trade as innocents to be protected. Then they ask us to pay them to perform the role of savior — a role they created, and a role people in the sex trade do not benefit from. In this way, the money that Kutcher, Moore, and the DNA Foundation raise will do nothing to address the real harms in the lives of people in the sex trade.
Harm. In insisting that "sex slavery" (not poverty, racism, violence, etc.) is the problem, and that stopping men from buying sex (not working for economic well-being, social justice, and safe communities) is the solution, Kutcher, Moore, and the DNA Foundation not only miss any opportunity to meaningfully support people in the sex trade — they actually do harm. They hype up the "epidemic" of "sex slavery" in order to secure the support of politicians, tech entrepreneurs, and NGOs, and they hustle the public into supporting solutions that do not address real problems. In so doing, they drain resources from the kinds of solutions to poverty and violence that might make a real difference in the lives of people in the sex trade. They support organizations in the extreme anti-prostitution arm of the anti-trafficking movement that refuse to work with the very people they claim to want to protect. They do not respond to criticism. They act as if they are on a moral crusade that is above reproach.
For these reasons, I ask that Kutcher, Moore, and the DNA Foundation stand down. Stop using the issue of real violence in the sex trade to get your names in the media. Stop fundraising for organizations that refuse to work with the people they claim to want to protect. Stop using bogus science to support these aims. Stop allying yourselves with politicians who would rather see people in the sex trade behind bars and are only using your celebrity to prop up their own moral campaigns. Stop bullying the few business who will still accept sex workers' advertisements. Stop backpedaling when called out for all of the above. Stop claiming the moral high ground. Stop insisting you know what's best for people in the sex trade and creating ways to profit from your work to "save" us.
July 1, 2011
There are about a million things I need to say about the issue...
There are about a million things I need to say about the issue of sex trafficking statistics with regards to the most recent round, Village Voice vs Ashton Kutcher. And I'll get to that.
But let me say this, for starters - words are important. Specifically, the word "girls."
If you're an adult working in the sex industry and you work with women, its likely that at some point you've referred to your coworkers, women you know, and women you can't stand as "girls" - it's a word in pretty common usage in many different areas of the sex industry. But I just want to insert a reality check here: when we say "girls" to the civilian world and when the rescue industry hears that word coming out of our mouths, they may think/read/understand us to be saying "under 18." And that's a problem, because it feeds the ill-informed machine.
I'm not a promoter of censorship, but I do think its important to know your audience or potential audiences. Think about this the next time you are about to say or write "girls" when you mean adult women.
June 29, 2011
"Louisiana's era of forcing certain convicted sex workers to register as sex offenders appears to be..."
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Justice Roars: Sex Offender Registration for Sex Workers Ends in Louisiana
amazing news—so wonderful to read!!!
(via radicallyhottoff)
uprisingradio.org » Discriminatory Laws Complicate Reentry for the Formerly Incarcerated
A report published in the New York Times in April 2008 stated that while The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population, it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences. The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London. China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics almost 7.3 million people at yearend 2009 were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole — about 3.1% of adults in the U.S. resident population out of which almost 2.3 million were incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails. The rate of female incarceration increased fivefold to 93,031 in a two decade span ending in 2001; estimated number of women held in custody in state or federal prison, or in local jails by June 2009 rose to 201,200. So how are women coping with these new realities. In a society that prefers incarceration and brutal punishment over rehabilitation how are current or formerly incarcerated women fighting back to maintain and preserve their dignity and creating networks of mutual support and solidarity.
GUEST: Susan Burton, Founder and Executive Director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project
Find out more at: www.anewwayoflife.org
June 28, 2011
Seven years ago, when I met the $preadsters, I didn't imagine...
Seven years ago, when I met the $preadsters, I didn't imagine that I'd go to their weddings, hold their babies, or have the back catalog of the magazine taking up space in my dining room come 2011. And yet, here we are. Yesterday I did my part to archive $pread and moved somewhere between 40 and 50 boxes of magazines into my place. I'm working on getting them organized this afternoon.
I am happy to disperse mags into the world - more specifically, into the hands of sex workers. If you're interested, hit me up (though I'm still cataloguing the inventory).
June 23, 2011
Why sex worker rights advocates should care about the "pimping professor"
Tons of stories cropping up about this right now, here's Gawker and Gothamist. In short, a professor at Farleigh Dickinson got busted for 40 counts of promoting prostitution for running a message board for hobbyists and escorts (as an aside - wow, it really makes you realize how ridiculous the word "hobby" is as a insider term when you see it in a headline).
Though I could be wrong, it is unlikely that this is a "prostitution ring" - message boards aren't agencies, and this man was probably not a pimp.
He's quoted as saying that he wanted "to create a safe place for prostitutes and johns to get together." In this case, "safe" mostly means safe from law enforcement, but it probably also means - for the johns - a safe space to to review escorts and protect themselves from being ripped off, etc. It probably wasn't explicitly an advertising site.
This case is worrisome because of the charges of "promoting prostitution" could very well be applied to other forms of communication about the sex industry, like sex worker activism and especially sharing information about best practices, screening procedures, and the like.
This is what criminalization looks like, and its not good.
June 18, 2011
June 15, 2011
Consumption of all the CSA foods plan, week 1: grill the...
Consumption of all the CSA foods plan, week 1: grill the motherfuckers! (radishes, bok choy, carrots)
"But it bugs me so fucking much when a customer tries to turn me on at work. Wanna know what really..."
"Sustainable progress towards a fairer world requires people working together to change what is wrong..."
Sustainable progress towards a fairer world requires people working together to change what is wrong with their society. International aid can help when donor organisations are prepared to support locally generated, sometimes messy and frequently unpredictable processes of positive change.
But today, many donors only want to fund projects for which the exact outcome of their support can be attributed to the donor and determined in advance. This ties the hands of aid recipient organisations. It takes away their ability to consult with their members in response to a local context always in flux. It stops that process of empowerment that happens when individuals and organised groups are able to imagine their world differently and to realise that vision by tackling the injustices in their society.
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Contestations / Dialogues on Women's Empowerment
THIS, a thousand times.
International aid is broken in so many different ways. It's refreshing to see this aspect of it being written about.
