The Ungovernable Farce

Who Killed Spikey Jacket? - Never Gonna Stop EP (2026)

-there are enormous problems with exploitation in the porn industry that harm and endanger the people within it, and that harm is carried out mostly against women and minorities

-this is Bad

-however the last century of passing laws against pornography hasn't actually helped any of those problems, and what sex workers tend to advocate for is the legitimization of their labor, so that they can then access the same protections and regulations that people in other industries can access

-for instance football players, miners, roofers, and warehouse workers are also exploited and endangered by their professions, have to work long hours, and can end up traumatized and disabled by unregulated and unsafe working conditions. these people are used up and thrown away by powerful bosses they can't individually challenge.

-however because these industries are not de facto illegal to participate in, when these people form unions and demand better working conditions, they can at least fight for their rights.

-sex workers, who engage in heavily stigmatized work that's also often illegal, have little recourse to demand better treatment.

-even if you don't like porn, and especially if you don't like porn, if you care about the women who are exploited in pornography, you need to advocate for the legality of pornography.

-the more illegal the porn industry is, the less safe and fair it is, and people will still be working in it, no matter how illegal it is.

-again: the porn industry should be regulated like any other industry and subject to laws guaranteeing fair compensation for labor, safe working conditions, and legal resources for workers suffering exploitation and abuse.

-once it is legal to do sex work, then women can bring charges against the men who have broken their contracts and abused them.

Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975)

from Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac:

In the UK, the 1970s and 1980s sex workers’ rights movement was deeply entwined with the ‘wages for housework’ campaign. Marxist feminists named the value of women’s unpaid reproductive and domestic labour and demanded a radical reorganisation of society to value women’s work. Around that time, the feminist group Wages Due Lesbians linked domestic work, sex work, and the work of heterosexuality in a solidarity statement against a 1977 vice crackdown: ‘Wherever women succeed in winning some of the wages due us, it is a strength to all of us and proof that women’s services cannot be taken for granted’.

from Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Grant:

“Hookers and Housewives.” It’s hard now to conceive of these groups of women as class allies. Hookers and housewives, to speak in impossible generalities, are too often considered rivals (by those on the Left as much as by those on the Right), occupying opposite sides of one economic circle, two classes of women who earn their living from men’s waged work. Their labor, by contrast, is considered illegitimate. Caretaking and sex should be offered freely, we’re told, with genuine affection and out of love. A housewife maintains her legitimacy by not seeking a wage, and a hooker breaks with convention by demanding one. They are both diminished and confined by the same system that would keep women dependent on men for survival. And they could free themselves from that system together. As Margo St. James recalled in an interview (also from Carol Leigh’s archives), before she founded COYOTE in early 1973, there was WHO—Whores, Housewives, and Others. Others meant lesbians, “but it wasn’t being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles.” An early COYOTE supporter, anthropologist Jennifer James, coined the term “decriminalization” to express the movement’s goals of removing laws used to target prostitutes. The National Organization for Women (NOW), still very much in its Feminine Mystique era, adopted the decriminalization of prostitution as an official part of its platform later that year.

Why is June pride month?

Because of the Stonewall uprising in 1969.

Why did the Stonewall uprising have such an impact?

Because—like the George Floyd revolt in 2020—it began with a leaderless, multiracial anti-police riot that called the whole social order into question:

To our dismay, the artist and author Marjane Satrapi has passed away.

As she wrote, ordinary Americans and Iranians have more in common with each other than we do with either of our governments, which have far too much in common with each other.