Bits && Pieces. Jo.

I’m a trafficking survivor, I’ve ‘worked’ (read: been raped and tortured) for longer than half of you have been alive, mostly because I was being sold from the age of four-five.  I’m not the only one.  The reason why most of us are so strongly advocating for the dismantling of the pornography and prostitution ‘industries’ is because we’ve been there and done that, because some of us are still there.  We’ve seen and lived the violence and the rapes and the torture.

You can convince yourself all you like that your porn is ethical and that ‘sex work’ is empowering and amazing, you can carry on insisting that the precious white cam-girls you trust so much are the majority and that we’re the minority. 

But 1 - I fucking assure you that we’re not the minority

and 2 - are you really going to fucking justify your porn on the basis that only a few women and children are being trafficked, raped and tortured, really?

Your porn isn’t ethical, it’s still relying on the rape and torture of and the dehumanisation and objectification of women and children.

You’re talking about a minority of 8%; you’re talking about equally prioritising the ‘empowerment’, the ‘enjoyment’ and the ‘choice’ of 8% to the rape, trauma, pain and suffering of 92%.  Which, yes, is admittedly better than the general view of silencing the 92% in favour of that 8% but it’s still not OK.

The entire sex (rape, abuse and trauma) ‘industry’ is based on manipulation and exploitation.  It is an ‘industry’ built on a culture of objectifying, sexualising, fetishising and infantalising women’s and children’s bodies.  It is an ‘industry’ that is built on the idea that consent can be bought; it is an ‘industry’ where consent can be negotiated.  This is manipulation and coercion; consent cannot be bought, consent cannot be negotiated.  Consent can never be freely given when money is involved.  This is rape.  This is not a feminist ‘industry’.  It is not empowering and it has serious consequences on all women as a class and specifically women of colour, working class and underclass women and other women who are incredibly vulnerable to the rape culture perpetuated and supported by prostitution, trafficking and pornography (i.e. childhood sexual abuse and incest survivors, domestic abuse survivors without the finances to survive after leaving their abusive partners, the mentally ill and those living with addiction.)

You’re also forgetting the role that cognitive dissonance plays.  Not that long ago, I would have counted myself as part of that 8%, despite the fact that I was trafficked.  Surviving the sex ‘industry’, whether you’re trafficked or not, requires severe dissociation, a severe disconnect to the violent and humiliating traumas we have to live through on a daily basis.  It eventually reaches a point where, yes, you will say that you love it, that you want it, that it’s the best job you’ve ever had, that it makes you feel ‘sexy’, that it’s ‘empowering’, that it’s something you chose and you enjoy.  Because the reality is the pain and the trauma and the only way you can survive, in the moment, without your brain completely breaking is to convince yourself and everyone around you that it’s what you want; it gives you some semblance of power and control over what is happening to you and your body.  This, of course, doesn’t take into account trafficking survivors or those working for violent pimps who don’t have the freedom or the safety to freely admit the pain and trauma and their lack of ‘choice’ and also the increased need for cognitive dissonance to survive that sense of being trapped and feeling unable to ever escape.  For the majority of us, that all comes crashing down eventually, but I would very freely wager that there’s a good number within that 8% who do have a severe cognitive dissonance and thus their being counted in that 8% may not be completely accurate.

Even, even, if 100% of the people involved in the sex ‘industry’ were empowered, happy and had made that ‘choice’, then there would still be issues that we should be very concerned about.  Once again, I repeat the fact that consent cannot be bought.  Once again, I repeat the fact that it is an industry based on the objectification, the sexualisation, the fetishising and the initialising of women’s and children’s bodes.  It is an industry run for and by misogynistic and violent men who are commodifying the female body, who are profiting off of the rape and abuse of women.

And the consequences of the sex ‘industry’ are not directly limited to the women and children involved.  It is a cornerstone of rape culture.  When our young men consume pornography; they consistently take those views and perceptions of sex, womanhood and consent into their lives.  Young women are coercively raped and manipulated by their peers (and older men) so as to ‘perform’ as the women in pornography do.  Young women (and older women) feel the need to shave their pubic hair, to get vaginoplasty (to tighten the vaginal canal and improve sensitivity) and labiaplasty (to change the size and shape of either the labia minora or labia majoria to get that ‘perfect porn p*ssy’), to get breast augmentation, to lose weight, to make their bodies more child like.  Young women (and older women) are ‘encouraged’ and manipulated into consenting to increasingly dangerous and harmful sex acts (i.e. anal sex and BDSM), which lead to injury, some of which is long-lasting, and a ‘consensual’ way of beating, abusing and harming women and there is nothing, nothing, that any pro-kink, sex-pozi person can say to me that will make me believe that the beating of women under the guise of kink is acceptable and not based on the violent and misogynist urges of men.  Young women are able to buy clothes that deem them pornstars, s*uts, sexy; they are able to buy clothes and fancy dress costumes that are designed purely to sexualise them.  Young women are coerced into sending nudes and videos to men, which are then often used in revenge pornography or shared with other men.  Men are left believing that with just the right persuasion, women will do anything for them, especially if they are women of colour, mentally ill or addicts.  With the increase in BDSM pornography, pornography where the woman is sleeping or intoxicated, pornography where the woman is in a school uniform and severely infantalised, pornography where consent is negotiated, pornography where two lesbians suddenly decide that they want to sleep with a man, pornography where… do I really need to go on?  This affects all of us, every single woman is impacted by the sex ‘industry’, every single woman and girl, no exceptions.

It is not the majority of the consumer base that is misogynistic, it is every single man that pays to rape women and children, that consumes pornography where women and children are being raped.  There is not an exception.  The entire industry is based on the sexualisation of women’s bodies, based on the profiting and consumption and violence perpetuated on women’s bodies and that is inherently misogynistic.

I go back to my last point -

Like…the job description is literally “I am so hot that you could never get me in real life so you’re going to have to pay me to dance for you.”

The majority of your money comes from private dances and from tips. If you are in the industry you know that the best way to ensure your income is to gather regular clients. There are two ways to do this: you can either give them sexual favors or you can play along with their fantasy that you are their girlfriend/will meet them outside the club. Both are objectifying and degrading, not fun. Not sexy.

Aside from having to deal with regular clients, stripping means swimming in a sea of misogynistic assholes. Some men get off on hurting women physically, some men get off on making women cry. You could be a 10/10 and you will still be subjected to abusive treatment by men. No matter how hot you are, there is always some man who feels entitled to list all the “flaws” he sees in your body to put you in your place. Stripping means existing every day in an atmosphere of violence and sexual aggression and having to constantly fend off men who repeatedly try to violate your boundaries.

As rude and entitled as the customers might be, they are nowhere near as bad as club owners/managers can be. Coerced sex is as ubiquitous as you’d expect it to be. Managers can force you to work back to back shifts until you drop or develop a coke habit (so you can buy from them), they can force you to give dances to men that smell like piss and they can retaliate against you if you piss off the wrong client by refusing to fuck. I’ve been called a cunt, a bitch, a whore, literally any insult you can think of - and I was Top Earner for almost a year straight. And I put up with it because I couldn’t afford to stand up for myself and lose my job.

And when i’m saying this, keep in mind I worked in the most expensive, “high-end” club in a major metropolitan city for years. I was one of the hot, “lucky” ones. This is the high end. On the low end you’ve got clubs that are actual no-bones-about-it-lube-in-the-goddamn-sanitizer-bottles brothels filled with trafficked women from Eastern Europe and Asia.

I’m sure some strippers are gonna say it’s not degrading yadda yadda, “I’m empowered!” But I’ve never met a stripper who hasn’t had some sort of emotional breakdown on a shift at least once, and that kind of says something.

The privileged sex worker tourists looking to gain some sort of dangerous mystique/male validation/”self-discovery”/whatever the fuck supplemental identity might never experience this, but who cares about them anyway, they are a joke to the rest of us.

I assure you, everything she said above is true. The owner/manager is an abusive pimp, the girls are doped up just to get through the night, men try to take advantage of you at every turn, it’s a nightmare.

You know what my appeal was? That I had just turned 18 and was a virgin (I wasn’t a virgin, but that was my gimmick). You know who all of my regular clients were? Men old enough to be my dad or, more often, grandfather, trying to get me to suck their dick for extra cash. They’d try to get my drunk enough to do it, but all my “rum and coke"s were just soda.

Girls who needed more cash or drugs could fuck the boss for it. He would pay us to get a tattoo of the club’s name and logo. There all still girls out there with it permanently on them even though now the club is gone, always reminding them of what went on in there.

I recently read a study where men considered women’s beauty peaked at age 18. I actually believe they would have gone for a younger age if it the age of consent was lower. A woman does not even stop developing until around age 24.

click on the image to see it clearer

Ok so I was a bit worried about the way my own biological father looks at me and I thought it was so bazar that I always even end up crying and it seems I’m really not the only one. and then after searching for so long, this is how they put it, “she is like my wife but 25 years younger, ofcourse it’s normal” 

men are terrifying, like I wish I could say this is so completely un normal, but how many times do you hear about fathers and step fathers sexually abuse their daughters. like I can’t help but wonder how many just simply don’t act on their thoughts like this guy but still have it in their heads.

and he worst part is, this doesn’t happen when the girl is like an adult, it happens when she is begining or is hitting puberty. 

this post has currently 4,300 notes, over half of these notes are full of responses like this. this isn’t even ¼th of the hate I’ve been getting

I’m just shocked but this is why pedophilia and incest within families happens. people care more about the reputation of men than the traumatizing experiences little girls face, while also telling girls who experience this and want to raise awareness to fuck off.

EDIT: again this was not meant to demonize men but you have to absolutely be living under a rock if you think this is not gendered. this is the average first age girls notice men looking at them sexually. can 11 year old boys really say the same from old women old enough to be their grandfathers? like men really out here thinking that their attraction to 5th graders is natural. stop trying to dismiss issues women little girls face and start let men take accountability

Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (US)

United Food & Commercial Workers Union (US/Canada)

Union of Shop, Distributive, and Allied Workers (UK)

Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (Australia)

FIRST Union (NZ)

“The control of women and babies has been a part of every repressive regime in history. This has been happening all along.”

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk – about half my annual professor’s salary – all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology”.

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, Crispr. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

And I don’t mean that as in “All other countries are perfect”

There are tons of countries that are horrifying dictatorships that do evil and horrible things

There are countries with vile and evil bigoted laws that brutalise gods know how many

There are tons of countries that are just generally shitty

But I have never in my life

Heard of a country putting a one year old baby on trial to “Defend” its right to exist in that country

This isn’t an “Embarassment”

This should be a fucking wake up call to any who think that there is any “Reasoning” any “Compromise” with the CANCER that is the Republican party

This should be the fucking alarm bell that tells even the most deluded that the Republican party and its politics are a DISEASE upon America

Land of the free?? No, land of the new nazi regime.