#we too

Well then,

Bifurcation is a form of violence. It shrinks femininity in size and raises it in pitch. We are asked to be accommodating, but to raise our voices an octave or two. Sex working parents are told, Shrink your infinite unknowability for the pleasure of men or for the raising of your babies! Bifurcation asks, Does your body produce property inheritors, or does it produce pleasure? It cannot produce both. Sex workers have always produced pleasure--not pleasure for ourselves, of course, but for those who seek our services. Feminist movements have largely ignored sex workers for this reason==many assume that women who commercialize their bodies for pleasure are complicit in violence against other women. This approach assumes that sex workers are to blame for their own bifurcation. Sex working mothers are twice bifurcated, then. First as unsavory women, and then, in the eyes of other women, as administers of pain through the production of pleasure. All of that happens in theory. In practice, this looks like sex working mothers losing their children to the state or to violent partners. It looks like sex working mothers engaging in riskier sex for fewer resources. It looks like sex working mothers leaving behind children, either through death or jail time or both. It looks like the ultimate form of violence: a fleshy, mental, and metaphysical kind of violence that burrows so deep it is reborn again and again in the cells of our children's children's children.

Valiant Hero Aftermath