Sex workers are the original nasty women. I love this piece by Jacq The Stripper.
Jacq covers many of the main points I’ve been wanting to say since experiencing the Women’s March this past weekend.
I know how much privilege I hold in general, and how those privileges buffer me from the risks in working in the sex industry: I’m white, cis, able bodied, middle class, and I work in a legal part of the industry, with relatively supportive staff. Geographically, stripping in Oregon is another huge privilege. As best I can, I want to use that privilege to speak up for the rights of all workers in the sex industry.
I was stunned at the conflation of sex and gender at the Women’s March. Anatomy does not equal gender identity. Equating having vaginas and vulvas to womanhood leaves our trans sisters and brothers out of the conversation, and is harmful and exclusionary to trans folks working in the industry.
Reading about the back and forth that the March organizers went through about the inclusion of the statement on sex workers’ rights was both inspiring and disheartening. Like Jacq says, thank goddess for Janet Mock:
“I know sex work to be work. It’s not something I need to tiptoe around. It’s not a radical statement. It’s a fact. My work and my feminism rejects respectability politics, whorephobia, slut-shaming and the misconception that sex workers, or folks engaged in the sex trades by choice or circumstance, need to be saved, that they are colluding with the patriarchy by “selling their bodies.””
If you want to support nasty women, be sure to support sex workers. They are, we are, the original nasty women.