Frustrated

…with myself, a little. I read yet ANOTHER case of a cosplayer, actually a series of cosplayers, being hassled at conventions, being intimidated, bullied, and mishandled, and it just made me angry.

I wrote a post about it, and said some things that I’d been hearing cosplayers say for the last several years. Because I included sex workers awkwardly in the complaints of how NOT to treat a cosplayer, several actual sex workers took understandable issue with both what I said and what I DIDN’T say (which is that sex workers don’t deserve unwanted groping or intimidation, either).

It would have taken two minutes to say what they are saying, and what I thought didn’t need to be said, that sex workers are also people, and they don’t need to be harassed or bullied or groped, and that they don’t want to be treated like the worst example of humanity, either.

But I didn’t take the two minutes to do that.  So, I screwed up. They’re right, I was wrong. I’m sorry. I removed that reference from my post. 

I know it’s a cliche, but I do have a lot of sex worker friends and they’ve helped me understand what that means a great deal better, so that kind of makes it doubly wrong to miss taking the moment to state what should have been stated.

I’m sorry. You guys don’t need people forgetting to mention your humanity like that.