In the next few, I plan to visit New York for Audacia Ray and David Henry Sterry's new reading series, Sex Worker Literati.  In her blog post after the event, Audacia wrote,

The evening also made me reflect on an annoying phrase that gets thrown at sex worker activists: “the happy hooker lobby.”

In the sex work versus trafficking debates, one of the things that happens is that people who focus on trafficking (and specifically on the idea that all people in prostitution are “prostituted” and essentially being raped every day at their jobs) try to derail and discount the perspective of people who identify as sex workers by calling us the “happy hooker lobby.” But here’s the thing: most of the people who use the phrase “sex work” and address the issues in the sex industry from a labor and human rights perspective haven’t had a straight forward “empowering” or uncomplicated experience of the sex work that they’ve done. This much was certainly reflected in the stories told on Thursday night.

It's always been interesting to me - as a part of the "happy hooker lobby", I suppose - how we lobbyists seem to be the ones with the longest lists of grievances about our industries and how things could be improved.  This is because we live it, rather than putting on airs after reading an article on the internet, or having gotten offended/titillated when our crabby women's studies professor told us how degrading she imagines sex work must be.

But, informed critique requires more than theory and self-righteous outrage to even know to complain about things like strip clubs charging stage fees, or escort services taking too large a chunk for too little client screening, or a porn company spitefully reselling a model's images to sites on which she didn't want to appear.  That sort of stuff requires, you know- listening to sex workers.  And learning about how the industries really work.

The people with no stake in a given issue tend to be the ones most prone to moral absolutism.  The less they're invested - the less they're truly interested, even - the more people can project their perfect black-and-white-isms onto the lives of others.  ("Pornography is always exploitative," "no prostitute genuinely consents to the work," etc.)

So, for the ambiguous and fascinating good stuff, I encourage folk to attend (or watch videos from) Sex Worker Literati, the first Thursday of every month in Manhattan.