From The Rumpus:
"…I worked at a project for sex workers in Edinburgh for six and a half years. I didn’t focus on just one area of the industry: I spent two nights a week with women working the streets, one or two days a week visiting flats, saunas and massage parlours around the city, and whatever remaining time I had on internet outreach with escorts across Scotland and beyond. I’ve read Belle de Jour’s blog only a handful of times. I didn’t find it massively interesting, and I didn’t see the TV show. I was never in any doubt, however, that she was a real person, and it’s always been mind-numbingly tedious to sit through pontifications from people who are outraged that an empowered sex worker could stick her head above the parapet.
The abolitionist agenda seems to be to propagate the myth that all sex work is 100% awful, all of the time; rather than lobbying to address actual abuses within the industry, they’ve prioritized the Sisyphean task of getting rid of the whole damn thing. This is especially convenient when the laws that they have campaigned for put sex workers in greater danger: any rise in violence, or, god forbid, murders, can be blamed on the inherent risks of the job and be recycled as further evidence that the sex industry as a whole needs to be eradicated…”