5 Comments »

1. I'm eventually going to get tired of telling you that you're brilliant, you know that? ;-)

   Expect a link to this in an upcoming column!

   Comment by Maggie McNeill — September 5, 2011 @ 9:34 pm

2. You're very welcome. I decided to leave this post with just the graph and not too much editorializing on my part, but damn, it's hard.

   Comment by Furry Girl — September 5, 2011 @ 9:40 pm

3. This post: I like it.

   Comment by Miss C — September 6, 2011 @ 11:54 am

4. When did the Desiree Alliance conference become the litmus test for what the US sex worker rights movement is concerned with? I think this gives the conference far too much importance as an agenda-setter.

   I would love to see a companion chart that illustrates what the attendees of Desiree do outside of Desiree -- that to me is the fairer indicator. I agree, the popular representation of the US movement is that it's dominated by academics, artists, and independent workers of means. But when I look at the work happening on the ground that actually makes a difference in sex workers' lives, it's really different. It's dominated by harm reduction, policy advocacy, and skills building. Something feels off.

   Comment by Melissa Gira Grant — September 9, 2011 @ 6:20 am

5. Melissa: I was disappointed in the content of the DA con, which I was expecting to be about half business kills and half practical activism. But I still bothered to show up, because ignoring the only national sex worker convention, even if it's not exactly what I want, is hardly helping anything. Maybe if more people showed up and took an interest in it, it could become an "agenda-setter." Or maybe a new conference could happen. But either way, I didn't just snark at it from a distance, I actually attended, presented, and participated. And I'll be at the next one, too.

   It's dominated by harm reduction, policy advocacy, and skills building.

   Harm reduction being a polite way of saying, "Spending a huge amount of time and money providing condoms and clean needles to the teeny tiny minority of drug-addicted and street-based sex workers." That group is what, maybe 1% of all sex workers, if that? And almost all of sex work nonprofit funding and effort in Western countries seems to go towards their survival and drug needs. On the one hand, I support a harm reduction approach to drug addiction, but on the other, there's something deeply depressing about a movement whose key expenditure is helping its most vulnerable members kill themselves with drugs. Only a small fraction of sex workers benefit from needle exchanges and condoms being passed out on the street. Huge numbers (including drug-using and street-based sex workers) would benefit from decriminalization efforts. Like other movements populated by leftists, though, the sex workers' advocacy world mostly ignores the big picture and things what could help the majority, in favor of fawning over the most oppressed minority.

   Comment by Furry Girl — September 9, 2011 @ 11:06 am

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