Post by Deleted on May 27, 2015 6:58:23 GMT 8
BY RACHEL HAYWIRE
This will be leaked for a short period.
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Some women graduate college and cannot find a job that pays them a living wage. They are exceptionally good at reading body language and understanding social cues. Many of these women become empowered sex workers, describing sex work as the new feminism. They view the sex industry as a thriving place for activism, social justice, and economic growth.
Other women never go to college, or maybe they do. They cannot find jobs that pay them a living wage. On the other hand, they are terrible at reading body language and understanding social cues. Perhaps they are neurodiverse. These women often become sex workers as a last resort. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
I was once one of those women.
It was over a decade ago, but I still remember it like it was yesterday. I was kicked out of my home, so I became your typical underage stripper. It was all the glory in the movies, even back then. I had a fake ID so I figured why not, right? I would be so badass that I’d be gaming the system, working a job that I wasn’t even old enough to work. That was empowerment!
Or so I thought.
Needless to say, my job as a stripper did not last long. Besides the sexual assault that I consistently faced, I was unable to read the social cues that were required for this profession. Turning my back on stripping, I knew that I could become something more. Perhaps a writer or a musician or even an entrepreneur. Someone who was known for something besides my body.
I still hear stories of my old friends being locked up behind bars for prostitution. Struggling mothers with drug addictions being thrown in cages for their desperate lifestyle choices. While I could never work in the sex industry again, it makes me sick to know that these women are now behind bars. I would never condemn them.
Yet I recently condemned someone the other day, and it cost me a lot more than I even knew that I had. Her name was Melissa Gira Grant, and the truth is that we have never gotten along. She has made a consistent effort to keep me out of the market, for reasons which are more petty than an episode of Girls. I came across a post in which she said that sex trafficking literally did not exist.
“There is no trafficking,” she boasted.
“Just some people with Green Dot cards and burner phones.”
I took issue with this and made it clear. After all, there is a third type of woman who becomes a sex worker for reasons I did not mention above. I met a few of these women when I was locked up in that juvenile behavioral center as a teenager. Many of them were forced into prostitution by their parents when they were children. Their fathers were literally their pimps. Others were severely disabled with their abusive boyfriends running the show.
“I was afraid that he would kill me and my daughter if I stopped having sex with his friends,” a young woman of about 17 told me.
“So I called the police and they brought me here.”
This third type of woman = victims of sex trafficking. If you are having sex for money against your own will, you are being sex trafficked. There is nothing fake about sex trafficking. It is not a conspiracy to bring empowerment sex work feminism down. Yet people like Melissa Gira Grant will claim otherwise, doing everything they can to silence dissent.
A few days ago, Grant went as far as to report me to Twitter for “harassment.” My crime was taking issue with her denial of sex trafficking. I could not understand how someone with so much media power could so blatantly claim that sex trafficking did not exist. My words were considered a bit harsh, but they were certainly not harassment. Perhaps she simply could not admit that poor people existed. Perhaps that would have interfered with her ability to prosper.
Let’s just call these people what they are: Sex Trafficking Deniers.
This new branch of feminism is a lot scarier than typical social justice authoritarianism. They deny reality in a way that is reminiscent of Stalinist Russia, and they seem to be growing quite rapidly. This new branch of “even saying something nice about me will cost you money” is becoming very popular, and anyone who dares to challenge it is being run off.
They hate it when people ask them for interviews. They hate it when people mention their names. They hate it when people promote their work. They hate it when anyone dares to take up their more-valuable-than-time-itself-time without giving them lots and lots of money. They honestly believe themselves to be that special.
Sex Trafficking Deniers are very concerned about the public relations aspect of the sex industry. They want the public to believe that the entire sex industry is now some ultra-progressive feminist joyride without any problems whatsoever.
They want to keep the appearance of their industry clean, even if this means publicly telling the world that the dirty parts do not exist. Either they are so sheltered that they have never seen the dirty parts, or they think that ignoring the dirty parts will bring them out of existence via the reverse law of attraction.
“If we stop thinking about sex trafficking we stop giving it power. Therefore it will vanish because our minds aren’t giving it any energy.”
Or even worse, they know that sex trafficking exists, but cover it up because they are afraid it will interfere with their ability to be wealthy cosmopolitan sex activists.
"We must keep our industry polished and clean, ignoring those who are still being trafficked. They will hurt business for us.”
Sex work does not always = feminism. Sometimes sex work is anything but empowering. Sometimes feminists don’t want to be sex workers. Sometimes sex workers don’t consider themselves feminists. These things happen. In many states, it is considered “degenerate” to be a sex worker. Yet in several, it is glorified as the next big thing. Many women are now being told that if they are not sex workers themselves, they might as well exit feminism entirely.
Since I am no longer a sex worker, I suppose this means I am no longer a feminist. No, I am considered a harasser now. I said that sex trafficking did indeed exist, and hurt the reputation of the empowerment sex work industry in the process of doing so. I am not sorry for this, but I’m not going to act like the social consequences haven’t been extremely negative. I recently deleted my Twitter account to avoid receiving even more accusations of being a harasser. Could it be that telling the truth wasn’t worth it? I lost a lot more than I gained here. My posts will be private from this point on.
What I did gain was the desire for more privacy than ever, and I hope that this will pay off in the end. I could never write a post like this for the public, and it was one that I really needed to make.