Not gonna be around much on tumblr for a while...
cos I got a job!
March 2011
48 posts
Fear strikes as temple showered in bullets →
smh.com.au
THE bullet holes can still be seen on the exterior of Auburn’s Sri Mandir Temple.
Less visible are the marks left by the shot that made its way inside Australia’s first Hindu temple, when it was peppered by about eight rounds.
The bullet ricocheted from the roof and hit the carpet - not far from a scorch mark left by a firework once thrown through the doors opened for worshippers, who are now protected from the frequently hurled bottles and eggs by a metal screen.
Two men in balaclavas were captured firing the shots on the night of March 19 by the temple’s CCTV cameras. A police spokeswoman said detectives were working closely with the community as part of investigations into the incident.
The president of the Council of Indian Australians, Yadu Singh, said the shooting was a sign that attacks on the temple were becoming more serious.
There were no worshippers in the building at the time of the shooting - unlike an incident last November when two windows were smashed by people armed with metal bars.
Security footage of the suspected gun man. Security footage of the suspected gun man.
”The bottom line is that something needs to be done, because it is not a one-off,” he said.
”We have a right to exist; we have a right to practise our religion.”
The temple’s priest, Jatinkumar Bhatt, who lives on the site, said he had been harassed by youths in the past but he was scared by the shooting. ”I have a family as well, three kids and my wife,” he said. ”Throwing eggs and bottles is an ongoing process but this bullet really put us in a panic.”
A Granville resident, Yogesh Heer, who was in the temple when it was attacked in November, said he was contacted by a concerned family in India when news of the shooting made the country’s press. Indian nationals Vijaya Patel and her husband Kanti Lal Patel, who have been attending the temple every day during their visit with Sydney relatives, said they were surprised and insulted by the attack.
The 35-year-old temple hosted an interfaith meeting attended by the Member for Auburn, Barbara Perry, as well as local Muslim and Christian groups earlier this month. The building was shot up about 10 days later.
Ms Perry said the Hindu temple was well respected in Auburn.
So, this is a thing which has happened. I kind of keep up with the Indian community press here, so I’m surprised I haven’t heard about this before.
I am: scared, dismayed, shocked.
But also apprehensive about how this could fuel racism and Islamophobia. I’ve lived and worked around Auburn. There are a lot of Lebanese and Turkish Muslim families living there. More recently, there have been Sub-Saharan African migrants moving into the area. Just like the Harris Park violence against Indian students, will this be made into another excuse for the white majority to scapegoat African and Muslim people?
US-centrism is
when you get Australians telling you about the UCLA/Alexandra Wallace anti-Asian racism palaver, and ignoring that our own government has been funding a USAmerican to do “research” (I use this term loosely) about how international students are stupid and receiving passes when they should be failed. (In actual fact, this is the opposite of the truth. It’s in universities’ interests to continually fail fee-paying students. The most efficient form of income for an education provider is a student who’s repeating a subject. You don’t have to make any effort to teach them, and you’re still milking fees from them. Double win. There’s actual evidence about this, but a whinging racist academic would never talk about it, ARC grant or no.)
Then again, in the USA there’s a huge public campaign against Wallace (and the George Mason University incident of a Somalian student being charged with abduction over a disagreement with a white USAmerican student about a study room), while here there are just crickets.
To be gay and racist is no anomaly | Jasbir Puar | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk →
guardian.co.uk
via clownyprincess on facebook
As per all articles online, don’t read the comments.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: zine: ISOLATED
this zine seeks to document the experience of activists, trans* queer folk, radicals, anarchists, environmentalists, etc. living in rural areas, suburbia, or any place where it is hard to organize and feels like there are no resources for you. it does not aim to say there is something “wrong” with living in these spaces, but if the individual submitting has a disenfranchising experience then please share how you overcome that if you do/can.
poetry, art, articles (personal, how to, etc.), and any other media submission is more than welcome.
please send submissions to libirate at riseup dot net.
feel free to reblog to share or ask any questions you may have. there is no deadline as of yet, so please check back for any updates or track #isolatedzine on your dashboard.
edit// deadline date is june 1st 11:59pm arizona time zone, 2011.
via tiaramerchgirl
I dunno if it counts, but I think my post thoughts on community might be apt? I don’t know if it’s appropriate, though. Let me know…
Tin Ear an’ Colonial Tongue
I ever got hear dat a language is a dialect wif army an’ navy. In dat case why you pick on our postcolonial one? Got de many kine of dialect in Englen isself. Got de many kine of dialect in Norf Amer’ca. Is cos de language privilege is associate wif class an’ geography. An’ if de class an’ geography at de bottom, cham lah.
Your so-call’ Standard English is a certain kine of English. Is an English dat kena canonise, firs’ by OED an’ den in so-call’ ‘New Worl’’ by Webste’. Is not de English of many people, e’en de ones you call native speaker.
Here we come to problem of who is consider native speaker. Many postcolonial country, we live an’ think an’ speak in many language, more’n one. Concept of monolingualism pra’tic’ly alien, not cos our society heterogenous (aldo dat is true – we not as monochrome as many privilege’ places), but cos we got tongues impose on us during colonial time.
An’ we code-switch. Sometime imperfectly – mos’ of de time in fact, cos to code-switch require fluency, and fluency is privilege of education an’ class. But we code-switch anyway an’ dat is our kine of English, wif our assent an’ our grammar influence by dyader languages in our worl’.
No such ting as ‘an English’! Got no such ting as a ‘pure language’, not even if you wan take your English an’ scrub it all de way down until you got not’ing but PIE. What for you assume all English is one kine of English, control by a serten suddern Englen way of spich? Or what you call Midwestern or Midatlantic or wadeva assent you suka-suka pick (essept for sure it will never be our kine)?
If dis make you uncomfortaber, an’ you got not’ing to do essept complain ’bout de peeper spikking it? Check your priv’lej lah. Dat’s your priv’lej showing, your priv’lej of you never need to consider dat der got many differen’ kine of English dat organic an’ spontaneous shift away from de priv’lej standded force’ on us. Dat’s your priv’lej of you never need to learn how to make your voices modulated ever so precisely to suit a tin ear and colonial tongue, indeed not… no, and dat’s your priv’lej dat nobody ever say to you, ‘You’re very articulate.’ Cos you’re esspe’ted to be articulate. Cos articulate not a word use’ to s’pak you over an’ over, bruise your tongue an’ take away your home de validity.
An’ don’t tink we use dese Englishes to rub our dusty postcolonial Commonwelltiness in your face eider. Is dis ting dat happen lots of time when we coloured folk an’ non-white folk an’ chromatic folk an’ wadeva we call ourselve are articulating ourselve. Always you frame dis as a negative, as someting oppose to you – bloody selfish hor? Why cannot it be we are positifli demonstrating who we are? Why must it be about you all de time. Again, dat is your privilege.
Why is it dat we haf a Western canon – an’ a ‘non-Western canon’ of ‘literatures in English’ dat is full of people glomped togedder from everywhere postcolonial in de worl’, but separate spaces an’ bigger spaces for your Western writers? Not cos dey own English, I can tell you dat. No way. Got not’ing wrong wif vernacular. After or, is ours, an’ not for you to define according to somebody else de standded.
thoughts on community
–we are always in community. community with our fellow human and other sentient beings. with those that we interact with. with the universe, with the stars, with the dust.
–what that means is that we have a relationship to the rest of the universe. –those relationships are not necessarily supportive or beneficial. they just are.
–when we identify certain people as our community, we are defining a border, an inside and an outside. and what are our criteria for that border? how fair are those criteria? how human are they? how steeped are they in social access and comfort? and how would those who are outsiders answer those questions about our borders?
community has moved into the background for me. in the foreground i see myself supporting individuals. and really this is how i have been an effective community organizing. i focus on one person at a time. building a relationship. it is intense work, especially for this introverted self, but it also doesnt drain me the way that working with groups does.
when i am working with groups, more than a couple of a people at a time, group think and dynamics start to play in more and more. hegemonic practices become more entrenched. group stability and cohesion become more important and flexibility and innovation become less of a priority. that border between inside and outside becomes more defined. passive aggressive behaviour begins to seep into the relating.
in part it is because our little egos, the ‘i’, always feel a bit small and partial, and want to feel whole. and being part of a group, a ‘we’, lets us feel whole, and we become addicted to the feeling of belonging, and fight bitterly to hang onto it.
but as i said before, community just is. we dont have to hang onto it tightly. we dont have to be loyal. we dont have to pledge allegiance to anyone or anything.
our survival is not based upon how tightly we hold onto community but by how open we are to understanding the community we are in.
it is not our borders that protect us, but our inner strength. and our willingness to love ourselves despite the odds.
co creating our liberation and our communities by Mai’a aka guerrillamamamedicine
The Merchants of Knowledge
The current university system treats knowledge as a commodity & self-perpetuates that. First, they have a knowledge class, a group of people who control what gets out & to whom. Secondly, they ensure that other groups don’t get to the same level. This is rather easily done, if you look at it, the library at University of Delhi is far smaller and much less well-stocked than one say, at a university in London. Subscriptions to places like JSTOR are unthinkable, because they are so expensive. & when you graduate, chances are your degree is not going to be accepted overseas because there is no medicine other than that of the Big Pharma. & thirdly, they make sure dissidents have no room to act. I walked into my International Political Economy class and was veritably shocked that everyonealready knew other countries were being exploited, but spoke about it with coldness. Even when aware of the unfairness of things, we were still treating them as theories to be ridiculed or mastered, not considering how they affect people’s lives practically. I remember writing a paper on Partition for my exam, and upon getting a low mark, I asked my teacher what I had done wrong & he said, “You took it too personally.”
But you see, the commodity knowledge is presumably objective, when we as human beings cannot truly possess objective knowledge: it is always, always filtered through our perceptions. Even when entering the social justice community, one immediately has to familiarise oneself with the hierarchy of knowledge that exists. A community that is supposed to champion the myriad of human experience where knowledge-as-commodity erases diversity and divorces us from our personhood. & you can see that, because around activists there is still a teacher-student perception when privileged people treat a marginalised person as a learning experience, or when people treat us as convenient access points, or even looking at the cult of personality that springs up around certain people. I can perhaps illustrate this best using people who are “feminists” for a living, or a particular Anti-Racist Who Never Fails to Grate Thursday’s cheese. They — either consciously or unconsciously — don’t treat social justice as a practical deconstruction that affects the lives of people, and — either consciously or unconsciously — engage in yet more erasure of marginalised experience, because they control who has it, who speaks about it, and who it filters out to.
“
lateral violence is: “the organised harmful behaviours that we do to each other collectively as part of an oppressed group, within our families, within our organisations and within our communities.”
“It’s the expression of rage and anger, fear and terror that can only be safely vented upon those closest to us when we are being oppressed,” he said.
[…]
lateral violence is endemic to oppressed minorities around the world, particularly those who have survived colonialism.
He defined the cause of lateral violence as the deflection of aggression. “Hostility is directed towards those who will not retaliate,” he said. “This means that we attack within our own group of oppressed people or we attack another minority oppressed group.
Richard said the root of lateral violence is that oppressors have instilled oppressive behaviours into oppressed communities so the oppression is perpetuated from inside the oppressed communities.
“In every facet of our lives we were told that we were sub-human so naturally we began to look at those closest to us as sub-human, as a problem, not because we’re bad people but because it was a way to survive,” he said.
“Lateral violence works to maintain power in an oppressed group when someone is seen to threaten that power in some way.”
” —The concept of lateral violence originally comes from Canadian First Nations community workers.
It’s quite a useful concept, I think, over and above “internalised oppression”. Internalising a form of oppression used against you isn’t necessarily a precursor to oppressing someone else. Although it seems like the concept of lateral violence is used quite a bit in nursing, I think it can also be applied to quite a lot of gendered situations. Bullying between girls of similar social status comes to mind, same with boys.
I think it’s also important not to confuse lateral violence with actual oppression. A man abusing a woman within his community is committing sexist violence; a cis person describing themselves as a “tr***y chaser” is committing cissexist violence. I think that sometimes the motivations and causes may be the same for lateral violence as for oppressive violence, though. Having an intersectional understanding of violence means dealing with both lateral violence and “vertical” violence, or accepting that violence can sometimes be “diagonal”.
I have never met a cis woman who perfectly passes as female.
Not by the standards trans women are held to, anyway.
Privilege at work. I found it quite well described by Julia Serano:
[I]t becomes quite obvious that the concept of “passing” is steeped in cissexual privilege, as it’s only ever applied to trans people. For instance, if a store clerk were to say to, “Thank you, sir,” to a cissexual woman, nobody would say that she “passed” as a man or failed to “pass” as a woman; instead, we would say she is a woman and was mistaken for a man. Further, we never use the word “passing” to describe cissexual men who lift weights every day in order to achieve a more masculine appearance, or cissexual women who put on makeup, skirts, and heels to achieve a more feminine appearance. Yet, because I’m a transsexual woman, if I roll out of bed, throw on a T-shirt and jeans, and walk down the street and am generally recognized by others as female (despite my lack of concern for my appearance), I can still be dismissed as passing.
(…)
Thus, the active role played by those who compulsively distinguish between women and men (and who discriminate between transsexuals and cissexuals) is made invisible by the concept of “passing.”
(…)
[T]he one thing that remains consistent [having provided examples about a gay man “passing” as straight or a fair-skinned person of color “passing” for white] is that the word “pass” is used to shift the blame away from the majority group’s prejudice and toward the minority person’s presumed motives and actions.
— Julia Serano in Whipping Girl (pp. 176-177)
Emphasis mine. This difference in perception is also why TERFs are so sexist: they give different values to exactly the same behaviour based on the chromosomes (etc) a person was born with.
(Quote lives at http://abigq.tumblr.com/post/3627990587/i-t-becomes-quite-obvious-that-the-concept-of )
via kiriamaya
“
Do you share the observation that queers of colour sometimes find it easier to enter into alliances with non-trans heterosexuals of colour rather than white queer/trans organizations?
I definitely share this observation (laughs). From a perspective critical of racism it would be interesting to ask: Why is this so? What is it about racism that is still so specific? It seems that experiencing racism in today’s context in Germany unites people much more than commonalities based on sexual identity. I can’t give you a conclusive analysis of the reasons for this. Maybe it’s also to do with picking up threads from a historical tradition of anti-racist movements, which by the way have always been more diverse than white feminism, gay organizing and most recently the queer movement. But of course I am really happy to see that straight/queer/trans people of colour ally themselves to do anti-racist work together.
Do you see any parallels between the majority white queer scene and the white mainstream gay scene?
There are parallels but also differences. One tends to produce openly racist exclusions, while the other (which calls itself explicitly antifascist and antiracist) tends to do this in a hypocritical and coded form, often even as part of a so-called antiracist politics. This has become very clear with anti-Muslim racism, which in Berlin manifests itself in indirect and even direct connection with processes of gentrification. These days I would rather live in Charlottenburg or Dahlem (white middle-class suburbs) where power is out in the open. Where I know where I stand in relation to bourgeois whites as a man of colour. Without any pretense. Sometimes those people can handle this better than the ‘supercool‘ queers who come here, appropriate our neighbourhoods and then go to Prinzenbad (a popular outdoors swimming pool in Kreuzberg) and make fun of the teenagers there or get scared of them. Another factor is class (laughs). Most of them are probably middle class. Finally there’s another thing that’s struck me: Most queers are young and the mainstream gays are often older. This is my question: Why are queers – and this also goes for many antifascist activists – mostly young? Where do they go when they’re older? It’s strange, they disappear when they’re older (laughs).
” —Interview by SUSPECT with a straight-identified activist of colour | NO HOMONATIONALISMHi, new followers
Got a bunch of new followers recently. How did you come across my blog? What do you like about it? Say hi and answer in my ask box (if you want to).
Sex Worker Characters in Comics: What NOT To Do
Been meaning to reblog this for a while. clownyprincess lays out the common (inaccurate) stereotypes and cliches about sex workers in comics (and in society!). Very informative about a number of aspects of sex work. A good guide if you wanna write sex worker characters in other kinds of media too.
This list is not intended to be exhaustive, more a crash-course in the simplest things you can do to avoid coming across as a vile whorephobe in your work.
What this list deals with is overused tropes and cliches that contribute to widespread misinformation and pathologisation of sex workers.
It’s not that these things never happen or are beyond the scope of possibility.
It’s that these things are depicted to the exclusion of all other experiences and that has a negative overall effect on society’s perceptions and understanding of sex workers and the sex industry.
When you come from a marginalised group of people who are discriminated against and oppressed within society, depicting them in a very limited and narrow range ultimately has a hugely detrimental impact because people begin to overwhelmingly believe this is the default experience.
And when that perceived default experience is also overwhelmingly NEGATIVE, it enables society to continue to marginalise and oppress, to pathologise and VICTIMISE.
And this plays into an overall culture that perpetuates the discrimination far beyond Law & Order: SVU - but into the very laws and governings that impact the daily lives of sex workers. The laws that create unsafe environments for sex workers to work in. The laws that mean sex workers have to be terrified of being outed as it may uproot their entire life. The laws that mean sex workers have no legal recourse if something bad DOES happen.
What NOT To Do When Writing Sex Workers
1. Give them a childhood filled with sexual abuse
No really, this is paint-by-numbers pathology. Not everyone who works in the sex industry was abused as a child and not every person who was abused as a child goes onto become a sex worker. By giving your sex worker characters an abused childhood you are basically saying you believe that sex is so broken, ugly and wrong a thing that only damaged and broken people can do it commercially. This is bullshit.
Were some sex workers abused as children?
Sure.
But so were some lawyers and some doctors and some psychologists and some hairdressers and some salespeople and some jewellery makers and so on and so on.
The idea that abused people become so denigrated that they end up ‘selling themselves’ is offensive on a couple of levels - it demonstrates the most superficial understanding of what is a very complex reality which is dealt with in myriad ways AND it demonstrates that you believe sex work is the last refuge of the degraded, which means you have no respect for sex workers.
So how the fuck do you expect to write about them in any sort of real and sensitive way?
It also means you have some pretty fucked up ideas about sex.
No, really. If you believe sex is inherently corrupting and degrading simply because an exchange of money is involved you have some really fucked up paranoid, phobic ideas around sex. And guess what? That’s about YOU, NOT sex workers. So. Stop projecting, okay?
Either way, you clearly don’t regard sex workers as human beings enough to give them anything but a lazy and cliche background in lieu of actual character development. -Insert tragic childhood here- is just as sloppy and unconvincing a way to build character as we have all discussed ad nauseum that having a female character be raped to give her an agenda is.
2. Have them raped by a client and/or a pimp
Believe it or not, hookers and strippers do not get raped on a nightly basis. What happens between a client and a worker is negotiated beforehand and the entire process usually involves an ongoing negotiation if necessary (just like recreational sex generally does!). Sex workers develop methods of communication with clients in order to maintain boundaries. If drunk or disrespectful clients are pushing boundaries, sex workers have ways of distracting them and their attention in other ways to maintain control of the situation. Flirtation and coyness is a tactic, not a default state of being. Sex workers are not obligated or forced to see clients. Sex workers can walk out of a booking without giving a refund if the client is disrespectful.
More sex workers work without pimps than do. Pimps are largely an overblown media fantasy. They exist, but they are nowhere near as prevalent as media would have you believe NOR are the relationships between hookers and pimps always as simplistically abusive as is ALWAYS portrayed.
But once again it is reinforcing dangerous, harmful and bluntly insulting preconceptions about sex workers because it is placing us into the fixed state of perpetual ‘victim’. And we’re NOT. Okay? We’re REAL people, with agency, with complexity, with diversity, with varied lives and experiences. Stop imagining our lives as this grotesque excursion into endlessly-violated depravity for your own sheer VOYEURISTIC satisfaction. Because that’s what it is. You like to imagine us as constantly raped because rape culture has characterised sexual abuse as something almost fucking *sexy*, something *juicy* and it’s easier to imagine it happening to sex workers because you don’t think of us as truly human, not really.
The other reason not to do these things, apart from the fact this ‘plot’ device once again forces sex workers into a permanent victim position, is that it demonises clients and pimps.
Now, MOST clients are just average people who want a service.
No, really. It’s really as simple as that.
They’re not base, grotesque, anti-social, disgusting perverts who just want to degrade women, trans* folk and other ‘cast-offs’ of society.
They’re just regular shmoes who want to get their rocks off. Or who want to talk. Or who want to be taught something. Or who want to experiment with something they have no one else to ask about. Or who just need a goddamn hug.
No. REALLY.
3. Give them a stalker
This also reflects the ‘permanent victim’ fixation and again demonises clients.
Stalkers, it has been proven time and time again, do not simply fixate on ‘loose’ women. Anyone at all for any reason at all can become the target of a stalker.
Do sex workers get stalkers? Sure. And yes, they’re often clients who have become obsessed.
BUT once again, it’s about BALANCE.
I SHOULDN’T have to be afraid of admitting that sometimes, now and again, some sex workers (out of the millions worldwide) will get a stalker. I shouldn’t have to be afraid of admitting that, but I am because I KNOW a whorephobic audience is going to pounce on that one concession and conflate it with reality.
And when you are CONSTANTLY depicting sex workers with inherently negative lives - lives that are constantly violated in one way or another by boogeymen like stalkers and pimps and drugs - and associating those lives with our work, YOU ARE contributing to the ingrained societal mindset that sex work itself is inherently negative and that is really, really dangerous. Because it allows people to continue to justify their pathologising, victimising attitudes to sex workers, allows unfair laws and discrimination to remain intact and protected, allows the continued popularisation of false information and allows fantasy to stand in the way of fact.
And this allows the world to continue to not think of us as really human.
AND it ALSO is just another facet of the old virgin/whore dichotomy - of rape culture. The patently FALSE notion that if you lead a certain kind of life, you will naturally attract violation and assault. That such terrible things can be avoided if only you toe the line like a good virtuous, well-behaved, complacent little virgin - but is only to be EXPECTED if you are ‘loose’, ‘slutty’, ‘trampy’ - indeed, if you’re any of the latter, well, you just DESERVE it, don’t you? Not only is this dehumanising of sex workers and permitting people to hold discriminatory and prejudicial attitudes towards us, it creates a false perception of reality, a blame-the-victim mentality that deceives people. The truth is, predators like stalkers and rapists are not exclusively ‘attracted’ to sex workers. Anyone could be targeted by them at any time. It just allows society to ignore the real problem - that BEHAVIOUR by predators and how it is nurtured and perpetuated by society - which just loves to blame the victim.
How hard is it to really imagine a sex worker without some constantly horrible thing happening to them, just leading an average life, working hard to pay the mortgage and the bills and the kid’s school tuition. Truth? That’s the most common reality. Oh, but that lacks drama, right?
You know, if you REALLY want to violate your sex worker character over and over, how about you examine how that is done LEGALLY, within the very infrastructure of the law? How about you look at the laws and institutionalised statutes that make a sex workers life and work harder for them, the stupid rules and obstructions we have to navigate just to make a living? That’s a violation too! A violation of human rights and freedom to work. But I guess that’s just not as sexy as a crying woman in her underwear tied to a bed whilst getting threatened with a knife. Vomit.
4. Have your hero save them from a stalker/rapist/serial killer/pimp
To put your sex worker character in a horribly abusive situation just to have your hero be more heroic is one of the more petty, grotesque, lazy and discriminatory plot devices you can come up with.
It’s become colloquially known as ‘fridging’. For fuck’s sake, don’t do it.
5. Kill them
Another dehumanising technique, used with rash abandon over the years on promiscuous women, queers, trans* people and sex workers alike. Even in ‘sympathetic’ stories, these ‘underdogs’ must die tragically and preferably horribly for their cause - to make a point. And that point is? To atone for their sinful lives by being scrubbed out of existence.
GOD, IT’S SO FUCKING BORING, TRITE, ARCHAIC AND UNCREATIVE!!!!
6. Do not have your non-sex worker characters use words like ‘whore’, ‘ho’, ‘hooker’, etc
I know it tends to invite ridicule to say things like ‘don’t use those words! Those are our words!’ but - well - how else to say it?
Like racial or homophobic or ableist slurs, or any other slurs focused on a particular aspect that is the direct reason for discrimination against a marginalised group, the ownership of those words with the purpose to reclaim is exclusively that of the group they are used against.
This is not your language. It’s OURS. You don’t get to use it. No, not even through your characters unless your point is to draw attention to the fact your character is a whorephobic douchebag.
And THAT has to be very clear.
Words like ‘ho’ and ‘whore’ are offlimits. We use them amongst ourselves (though, like any reclaimed slur, there is debate around this), but it’s really not okay for people outside the community to adopt them, certainly not in the grotesquely casual way that so rarely goes challenged.
And no, don’t go telling me that will make your character’s dialogue ‘unrealistic’.Comics are unrealistic!!! By nature!! In intent! No one reads comics for realism!
And don’t try and flip THAT around by arguing that ‘if comics are unrealistic, you have no obligation to not write seedy, gross & exploitative stories about sex workers’. Both the issue of language and of plot choices comes back to the fact that they reinforce negative stereotypes which feeds into a broader attitude of active discrimination that has real negative impacts on sex workers’ lives. And that’s not acceptable.
7. Don’t give them HIV/AIDS
The rate of transmission of HIV/AIDS between sex workers and clients is so miniscule it doesn’t even register.
That’s not to say there are no sex workers with HIV/AIDS, but the likelihood of them having contracted it on the job is extremely low, as is the likelihood of them contracting Hep C or STIs.
Why?
Because a sex worker’s body is literally OUR BUSINESS in most forms of sex work, excepting phone sex. Without our health, we cannot work. And we live in a capitalist society. We gotta be able to work.
Furthermore, because of the pervasiveness of discriminatory laws against us, we are obliged to take measures on our own initiative to protect ourselves.
This means that sex workers aggressively and consistently practice safe sex. We are educated, informed and aware about the risks, we supply our own condoms and other PPEs (personal protective equipment) such as gloves and dams, and we use them in our work with our clients, often times educating them along the way as well.
Sure, accidents happen, as they can do to anyone. But, overwhelmingly, sex workers have better sexual health than the rest of the population.
(Incidentally, in places where this isn’t true, there is also a marked lack of condoms & safe sex education available to access - which is the fault of archaic law and governments, not sex workers)
So once again this trope is perpetuating false information and actively contributing to the ongoing negative stereotypes about sex workers and sex work.
8. Write them with respect
All of the above are crucial factors in depicting sex worker characters with respect, but considering how you place them within a story and how they interact with other characters all contributes to the sense of respect shown for the sex worker character - by the other characters and by YOU.
If you have your other characters- particularly your leading characters, the ones the audience is meant to empathise/symapthise with - making snide/discriminatory/abusive remarks to the sex worker character about their ‘sluttiness’, about their work, about their lifestyle - without those remarks being corrected/chided/called-out/slammed and without that character facing any sort of censure or exile for their whorephobia you are sending a pretty fucking strong message to your reader and that is that it’s totally okay to debase and degrade a sex worker because of their work.
So WHAT if some stripper did topless movies? So. Fucking. What? If you have to write a character being evidently offended by that, rather than pass it off as comic relief - or worse, as righteous moralising - why not have another character ask them what their fucking issue is? Point out how fucking ridiculous they are being.
Like any marginalised group, sex workers simply need more balance in the way we are depicted. Overwhelmingly, our depiction is done in the most negative, fetishising and trivialising way possible, preventing any understanding of the true diversity of our experience and reducing it to one exoticised, voyeuristic cliche, used mainly to satiate some perverse ‘normal*’ person need to see horrible things happen to those they conceptualise as sub-human as well as reassure their own smug and complacent sense of self-satisfaction in what they believe to be their superior lifestyles.
If you want to ring the bell for anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, anti-misogyny, anti-ableism, anti-classism and anti-fatphobia, then know this: SEX WORKERS ARE OVERWHELMINGLY OF COLOUR, QUEER, TRANS*, FEMALE, DIFFERENTLY-ABLED, POOR AND WITH A WIDE VARIETY OF BODY TYPES.
Sex work offers a flexibility and income for people with varying intersections of marginalisation that many other industries simply do NOT. In the sex industry, people can make a good income for being ‘different’ compared to other industries where that ‘difference’ will see them discriminated against. It is VERY complex and not at all perfect but part of the solution is TO NOT:
- demonise
- pathologise
- victimise
us, not to reduce our existence to the easiest and simplest trope to write.
And all you tumbloggers out there, the ones who are sharp enough to see the subtlest discrimination in comics when it comes in form of homophobia, racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, classism and fatphobia then I am, as of right now, calling on you TO SEE THE WHOREPHOBIA AS WELL. If you are really serious with this anti-discrimination, struggle-for-equality objective, then you need to broaden your gaze still further and that may involve taking a really hard look at some of your own preconceptions and ideas. I am sick of feeling like I am the only person to see this stuff. It is just as important and just as relevant and just as intersectional.
And you know what? It’s great to like this but… reblog it. This issue gets nowhere near the exposure that other issues do and it SHOULD because it intersects with all of them AND deals with humans being treated as sub-human in a variety of ways. Get it out there and try and participate. Put your politics where your mouths are.
