#crispyravioli

I appreciate the invitation to check out more of your writing. I assume you are referring to the post entitled “Let’s Discuss:”?  I’m going to respond to it here, rather than reblog it, since it’s a very broad set of arguments and I’m only up to addressing just the stuff we were talking about at the moment. 

First of all, I understand how frustrating it is to feel like the people you’re advocating for are angrier at you than they are the obviously greater evil (in this case, violent and exploitative clients). I get that that does not feel good, and that, from the outside, it can feel really nonsensical and bewildering.  So I’m going to try to explain why I (and apparently other people) are reacting the way we are:

First of all, the reason that the voices of ex sex workers have to take a back seat (not be absent from the discussion, but take a back seat) to current workers is that…well, it doesn’t affect them in the same way anymore. Ex sex workers have a luxury to decide that getting theoretical “vengeance” on clients is worth the tradeoff of being able to work safely, and avoid poverty because… they’re not working anymore. They aren’t the ones who have to suffer the statist violence of end demand models, they aren’t the ones who will lose their ability to screen, to work in groups for safety, they aren’t the ones who will be told to testify against their clients or have other criminal charges pressed against them. And — this is really important to remember: the best, fastest and most effective way for an ex sex worker to shed the stigma of whorephobia once they leave the industry is to fall in line with the narrative of rescued victim.  Ex workers who talk about how terrible the industry was for them, and how they wish the industry would be abolished have access to way more societal capital — whether in the form of actual capital from abolitionist non profits, or simply as distance from the stigma of having once been a sex worker.  This is something that is pretty common across many axes of oppression — a certain portion of marginalized people will decide  (or feel they have no option but) to grab for second-tier privileged gained by siding with their oppressors (see also: Serena Joy). If you would like to hear from ex sex workers who had a variety of positive and negative experiences in the industry and who pretty uniformly support decriminalization, may I suggest any issue of Prose and Lore? I would also really, really strongly recommend this article on the intersection of trafficking/coercion and decriminalization.    As I criticized in my earlier responses to your writing — you can not frame the debate over decriminalization as one that has “Stoya” (or whatever stand in for “happy fun glamorous sex worker” you’d like to use) on one side, and downtrodden victims on the other again. Again — the spectrum is much more complex than that, and the entirety of it is benefited by decriminalization, and actively harmed by end demand models.  And the people you describe yourself as most concerned with it — the most exploited, most endangered people are the ones who are most at risk  in regions that criminalize clients and/or workers (who’s more likely to be arrested, after all? Hypothetical-Stoya or someone who is being forced to work and therefore has less say in their screening process? I keep putting Stoya in quotes and saying Hypothetical Stoya, btw, because I think a lot of your confusion may be stemming from not drawing a distinction between client-facing marketing blogs, and personal journals/spaces for communication about the realities of sex work. And you would probably be considerably less confused if you took a critical look at your reading material that way.) 

Are lots of men disgusting pieces of shit who treat their providers poorly? Absolutely — even now, when I work with a lot of privilege, a sizeable portion of my clientele could be described that way.  But supporting any model other than total decrim only increases their ability to do so — if you really must center the thoughts and feelings of Dudes Who Buy Sex and you are primarily focused on making them less gross and less violent, then you need to strengthen the agency of the workers who have to choose between putting up with their shit and facing the consequences of both poverty and policing.