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Some group of researchers just sent me mail on here to invite me to participate in their study about trans peoples’ Marginalization, Mental Health, and Empowerment — offering a “1 in 25 chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card.”

I sent them quite the response.

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TW: Transmisogyny, Transphobia, Suicide

Source

No! The majority of trafficked people are working in agriculture with domestic work second. The ONLY way (and they may have done this) sex trafficking comes near is if it’s defined so broadly that I traffick myself.

Which lets be clear, it IS defined that broadly in many US states so this is totally possible but it’s much more likely that the Wikipedia page is full of shit.

Antitraffickong NGOs manipulate data anyway they can because they have a financial investment in making it seem like a bigger population than it is. Law enforcement ditto, they have quotas and they look good when they “save” people.

let’s not forget that “trafficking” doesn’t mean kidnapped children: it means people who’ve lost control of the circumstances they work under. MANY migrant sex workers are aware they’ll be doing sex work before they emigrate, they just aren’t aware they’ll be doing it under coercive circumstances; or they are aware and it’s worth it to them to get the hell out.

as if agricultural and domestic workers are INCAPABLE of being assaulted. This makes me so angry. Radfems do it deliberately for rhetorical purposes but at least they’ll admit it; there’s no excuse for the politicians and NGOs ignoring labour trafficking when trafficked workers are assaulted JUST as much as sex workers. There are cases of members of congress having trafficked maids and assaulting them and the women had NOWHERE to go, no help, when one escaped she had no recourse bc her ersatz employer still had all her documentation.

The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) recently published an open letter to Associated Press Stylebook editor David Minthorn in response to an online campaign to replace the word “prostitute” with “sex worker” in AP’s 2015 Stylebook.

CATW and its allies oppose the phrases “sex work” and “sex worker” because they feel “these terms were invented by the sex industry and its supporters in order to legitimize prostitution as an acceptable form of work and conceal its harm to those exploited in the commercial sex trade.”

CATW’s letter is signed by “over 300 human rights groups and anti-trafficking advocates.” It includes a selection of statements from its signatories, who feel the term “sex work” erases or silences the suffering of people who identify as survivors of sexual exploitation. However, CATW’s letter promotes people who identify as survivors by calling for the erasure and silencing of those who call themselves sex workers.

Survivors of violence are entitled to their voices, and it is important to listen to them carefully and sensitively. Yet, CATW and its allies seek to deny the experience of sex workers and to oppress their representation in the media by refusing to name the practices of people who earn a living from consensual sexual labor.

Both campaigns invoke a false binary by suggesting that journalists must choose between mutually exclusive notions of coerced prostitution or consensual sex work. The full spectrum of research and testimony evinces an enormous diversity of experience among people who exchange sexual services for payment. It is presumptuous to assume that just one or two labels could or should represent all of these experiences.

CATW’s letter also deploys a revealing deception. It contains a litany of unreferenced statistics, which ostensibly “demonstrate that the commercial sex industry is predicated on dehumanization, degradation, and gender violence and causes life-long physical and psychological harm.” They include one remarkably shocking statement: “The average age of mortality of a person in prostitution is 34 years old.”

This bold claim was most prominently publicized in a 2011 Newsweek feature which claims, “Prostitution has always been risky for women; the average age of death is 34.” Its source is a 2004 American Journal of Epidemiology article titled “Mortality in a Long-term Open Cohort of Prostitute Women”. It is a study of dead women: the authors “identified 117 definite or probable deaths” of “prostitute women identified by police and health department surveillance in Colorado Springs, Colorado, from 1967 to 1999.” In passing, the authors say: “few of the women died of natural causes, as would be expected for persons whose average age at death was 34 years.”

The crucial consideration here is that this study, by definition and by design, excluded the living. From the “open cohort of 1,969 women,” 117 deceased were identified. In other words, 94 per cent of those women in prostitution—1,852 living women—are parsed from the sample. “The claim that ‘the average age of death is 34’ is badly misstated from the actual finding,” Maggie McNeill observed in 2011. “This is exactly the same as concluding ‘the average soldier dies at 21’ by the simple expedient of excluding from the 'average’ all those who survived!”

CATW’s claim is unwittingly misleading if not intentionally deceptive. It gives readers the impression that the average woman doing prostitution or sex work can expect to die in her thirties. This implication is sensationalizing, stigmatizing, and false.

This mistaken mortality claim is a metaphor for CATW’s argument, which suggests that the representation of the whole should be overwritten by the experiences of a select group: they misrepresent statistics about dead women in prostitution to suggest sex workers should not be represented at all.

This macabre move sets up the rhetorical power play in the letter’s conclusion, where CATW calls for survivors’ voices to be privileged in media representations:

“Attached are the words of survivors addressing the harm of the terms 'sex work,’ 'sex worker’ and 'prostitute.’ These courageous individuals are leading a global movement to end commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. We urge the AP to engage with these survivors as policy experts.”

Why must conversations about prostitution and sex work be a zero-sum game? Representing the experiences of sex workers need not silence the experiences of survivors, the latter being amply represented in recent debates about prostitution law in Canada, France, and the UK, for example. Sex workers are crucial stakeholders in these conversations, and their experiences also deserve fair representation.

Sex workers do not deny that exploitation can occur in relation to the exchange of sex and money, though some sex workers question extreme claims about the pervasiveness of these wrongs. CATW’s attempt to claim expertise and representation exclusively for survivors reflects a deep rift between the discourse of prostitution and the discourse of sex work, while refusing to recognize the vast diversity of experience that underlies this divide.

The rhetoric of evangelical anti-trafficking activists, like Hughes and Caine, is sensationalist. Yet it works to incite fear, prurient interest, and a sense of moral righteousness. It is, explains scholar and sex worker rights advocate, Jo Doezma, evocative of the fabricated “white slave panic” of the 19th century that in its own day facilitated draconian measures against prostitutes and other working class women. 

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One historic reason that drew evangelicals generally to the cause of anti-trafficking occurred during the Bush administration (2001-2009). Bush established the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, giving conservative Christian organizations new access to federal funds for their charitable work. Under Bush, however, anti-trafficking initiatives also became government policy. The Trump administration, too, may be investing in the issue.

In the last two decades, the fight against human trafficking has become something of an evangelical mission. One now finds fundraising walks , prayer weekends, Bible studies, self-help books and even praise songs devoted to ending global slavery.

Political factors alone did not draw evangelical women to anti-sex-trafficking crusades, however. So did the crusades’ rhetoric, which is grounded in values that resonate deeply with conservative Protestant sexual morality.

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Gail Dines’ former assistant/protégé speaks out against her ex-mentor

Can we PLEASE stop quoting Gail Dines all over the place now?? She’s a fucking radfem and I’ve seen so many people just fall over her for her critiques of porn without bothering to dig any deeper.

(via hauntistic)

this is all valid an important stuff and i definitely don’t want to diminish it but can we please stop throwing the baby out with the bath water?!  Dines has said some incredibly important stuff in her critiques of porn and that stuff doesn’t deserve to be diminished or dismissed because of her being an asshole anymore than her being an asshole doesn’t deserve to be diminished or dismissed because of her having created some excellent analyses.  both are equally important.  there are a lot of people with shitty stuff going on who also do and create positive things. she does NOT deserve to be excused for being an asshole and absolutely should have her assholery critiqued and called out but that doesn’t mean her valuable analyses can’t be used in positive ways at the same time.

(via rapeculturerealities)

What the hell. No. What Dines is doing is regulating a woman’s behavior and appearance. That is not a feminist thing to do; it is, in fact, patriarchal at its core.

(via mscoolcat)

i’ve always had weird feelings about dines and this confirms it

(via homoarigato)

Gail Dines has no analysis. I spoke on a panel with her at Yale University in 2012. Panels are done on the fly and it’s funny how she avoids labor issues as a ‘Marxist Feminist.’ Let’s take the argument that sex work is the domain of the desperate. How does removing a last resort help to empower women? What is being offered as the economic alternative right now? Job training for a minimum wage job is not enough to live on and Dines and her ilk are nowhere to be seen when an ex-sex worker is hounded off their non-adult industry job for having worked it in the past. In the Dines strategy, those who have done sex work are to be cast out as dissents. This is crucial when examining sex work from a class analysis. Attacking porn solely, calling women who work to change the workplace experiences of porn ‘traitors to feminism’ or the ‘pimp lobby’ as she is apt to do to feminist pornographers who point is a chilling silencing tactic. One of the most important words is ‘and’ because there isn’t a single banner we can wave that’s going to lead to liberation. It’s going to be a string of and’s until there’s enough people to topple the bullshit. It’s fascinating the sheer amount of class analysis and prison system abolition theorists and scholars, the best of whom were women of color involved in revolutionary tactics outside the safety of the ivory tower, to come up with the theory that it’s pornography that is causing the greatest harm to women today.

I say this because Dines in particular identifies as a Marxist feminist. To posit pornography as the thing causing the greatest harm to women today is to be out of touch as fuck. For every porn image you’ve ever seen as an American, you probably engaged with this other category composed of every other piece of non-porn media more than you did graphic explicit sex. People IN PORN ITSELF who edit it still consume tons of other media from Disney to action films to advertisements that are everywhere from the side of the road to inside subway cars and on buses and the radio. Not only do I disagree, I think it’s an outright problem to teach students that if you remove pornography or sex work in general from the (legal) equation, that the rights of women will improve. If porn could be outlawed tomorrow, what would happen to the women who are too stigmatized to be more or less allowed to do any other form of labor? Marxism does apply to porn and there is an analysis to be made. She isn’t doing that. She makes a long list of emotional reactions she had to watching porn backed up with statistics that ignore the problem of capitalism as a whole, especially when she’s doing so as a tenured professor.

(via moremaggiemayhem)

Reblogging for all of this, but esp. for the mentions of Dines’ transphobia (unsurprising!) and Maggie Mayhem’s commentary.

I’m so bloody sick of seeing Dines’ work pop up on my tumblr dash (usually from people I like & respect, who just don’t know any better).

Also, I would hope that it is obvious that I do not believe that porn or the sex industry in general are above critique or are without problems (um, duh). But Dines’ critiques are just sloppy. Also, to my knowledge, she has never been involved in the sex industry herself (as a porn performer, or anything else).

I think that because Dines is a woman, maybe people don’t see her as having a Savior Complex? But that is basically what is going on, y’all. And I have always been and will always be highly suspicious of “saviors” of sex workers. I don’t care that she’s a lady — she’s still a fucking Captain Save-A-Ho.