productofyourtwistedimagination:
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The fuck would you switch from john to client. Are feminists supposed to give a fuck about pimps and johns now? Is this where are effort should be going?
Also really, changing “trafficking victim” to migrant worker?lmao what do you want to bet the person who thinks it’s an awesome idea to call trafficking victims “migrant workers” is white
look, the majority of trafficked people are actually poc being moved across international boundaries for all kinds of labour, not just sex work. Agriculture is fueled by migrants, some of them kept in slave conditions unable to leave or seek help, some of them not. But no part of trafficking can be addressed without being looked at in the greater context of global poverty and migration patterns to escape poverty at home in countries that the rich western world has exploited and stripped of their resources. So yeah, migrant worker works. Many people collude with traffickers because it’s a way of getting out and getting employment and they have no idea what the conditions are going to be like or if they will be screwed over, deprived of papers and or human rights, or treated as regular—if under the table, workers.
This goes for domestic, agricultural, and sex workers. Whatever your feelings re: the sex industry, it’s not like all (or even most, in the context of agriculture and domestic workers) trafficked people are generally kidnapped and shipped over boarders, they usually start out intending to be migrant workers and get fucked over in the process.
To just be like LOL misguided white people ignores the fact that there are real economic conditions forcing people to cross international boundaries for work. We can’t address trafficking if we ignore that.
Right, I agree. The problem, I think, is that she’s suggesting “migrant worker” as a replacement for “trafficking victim.” I don’t think that she’s advocating for looking complexly at why immigrants often become trafficked, she thinks that “no, she’s a migrant worker” is an okay response to “that woman is being trafficked.” In her article she downplays trafficking a lot.
I mean, okay, if migrant worker were the only option she’s offering. But she’s offering others as well.
This is where it comes down to having to pick sides because unless you have actual first hand experience with the sex industry in the places (mostly white) people write about, you’re just going to have to take what’s being said on faith. So, for example, I’m willing to cut this woman slack because I’ve read articles by sex workers (Indian and Thai, for example) about how they’ve been branded pimps and traffickers because they were handing out sexual/reproductive health info and condoms and their peer to peer education and safety efforts were stopped. I’ve also read articles from anti-sw feminists claiming that these women are in fact pimps and traffickers but in this instance I’m going to side with the local women on the ground; despite their being woc sex workers I’m going to trust their version of events; after all, it’s not like sex workers here and across the world don’t make these efforts to take care of themselves when no one else will.
Which brings up her point about pimps: if women trying to take care of themselves are pimps, how the fuck can we trust the language of these articles? Pimps as historically defined suck, but ever more people are being thrown under that umbrella and punished and some of them, like the women in india, genuinely don’t deserve to be there. So yeah it could use a fresh look, especially legislatively.
(I consider the owner of the club I work at to be a pimp, for example, at least, if I can call someone not profiting off specifically sexual services a pimp. we don’t do explicitly sexual services yet he profits off of and exploits our sexualized labour to a shameful degree. So do the bouncers and dj)
I also think “rescue” is a loaded term and will continue to be until rescue looks like something else besides detention or jail. Maybe sex workers would want to be rescued if they were being offered well-paying jobs with good hours, but that isn’t what is being offered to them so I think it’s probably true that the ones who aren’t actively being trafficked and held against their will reject rescue. It’s not disingenuous to say that, it’s just a probable fact.
So I’m more willing to cut this woman and her attempt to create a broadened language some slack. I want to help actual trafficking victims (of sex trafficking and the rest) but there has to be a way to do it without throwing bystanders, people just trying to make a living, and people trying to take care of themselves and their community under the bus.
"Rescue" is a loaded term and it is acknowledged to be in the comments here. The article itself, however, uses the fact that women don’t want to be detained to imply that this is proof that these women don’t want out of sex work, when in reality it is that they want a viable alternative, not jail. This should tell you more than enough about the tone of the article. It is not out to more accurately represent sex workers, its very reason to exist is to downplay sex trafficking and coercion. The way it gives no option to describe a pimp as a pimp is further evidence of that. Even though it acknowledges some are exploitative, you’re still left with ‘manager’ as the best option to describe power differential. Promoting euphemisms to emphasize uncoerced individuals at the expense of the victims of coercion is not activism.
ok that’s a valid criticism. I also overlooked the absence of pimp as a category which is BS.
I reckon no need to conced anything. It’s not a valid criticism.
Pimp only exists as a racialised category in the. United States and Canada. No where else has the same category. No one else uses the word except abolitionists. No other place has the same set of charges. Stop being so fucking imperialistic. The author is not American. She’s not talking about you! You don’t have a fucking right to decide what sex workers in the rest of the fucking world call people in various relationships to them or their work. Under the Swedish model a landlord renting an apartment to a sex worker is charged with living off the earnings. In India children are charged with it. In the US transgender sex workers are fucking charged as pimps cause the “feminist” policing sees them as male. In Australia while working as a sex worker I was charged with living off the earnings for drinking a fucking cup of coffee my best friend bought me while I was talking to her after she’d just been fucking raped. The cops preferred to charge her and me rather than go to the fucking armed rapists house and arrest him.
And that’s how it goes….. So fucking feminist.