#prostitution abolition

[womenaremypriority]

Overall, even though I think the word ‘TERF’ is a silencing tactic, and although the hatred towards’TERF’s is sexist and absurd- I can understand why it’s an emotional topic for people, I can understand why people wouldn’t want to be around gender critical women and would think we don’t have similar goals on the topic. But I loathe the word SWERF and I think it’s ridiculous and dangerous. Because I really do think feminists with different opinions around the topic have similar goals, and getting anything remotely helpful done would be 10x easier if being a ‘SWERF’ wasn’t considered such a no-go in activist spaces. It genuinely helps no one. Lessening sex trafficking, making sure people can exist the industry, reducing violence and negative stereotypes, humanizing women in the industry, etc. The fact people genuinely are scared to include ‘SWERF’s in their spaces and activism is genuinely so pathetic and a real shame.

#Honestly the word is pretty good proof TERF is a silencing tactic tbh #Because the assumed proximity with TERFs really scares people #Also I do think we have common goals with TRAs especially with no related activism (like abortion) so I still think it sucks they #hate radfems SO much but #The idea of someone not even being worth considering because they’re a ‘SWERF’ is pathetic #My post #anti prostitution #radical feminism #radfem #radblr #anti sex industry #prostitution abolition

[lesbian-archives]

Sue Martin (left) and Cherry Smiley (right) in front the Supreme Court of Canada, 2013

#image #protest #prostitution abolition #anti prostitution #modern #2010s #feminism #activism

[rosalesbeausderholle]

Honestly I'm lucky to have found my girlfriend for so so so so many reasons but POLITICALLY??? I thought my best bet would be someone who tolerated us having debates on feminism because I don't fit neatly in any of the intra-feminist intra-lgbt (too feminist for one, too much of a trans ally for the other) ideological camps but no, we just agree on 95% of things. How? Like genuinely how?

#liveblogging my life #the first time she brought up prostitution and I was like oh boy here we go and then she was like oh i know it's controversial but i think #it's exploitative and i was like I'm so in love #and the first time we were watching a movie w nb and trans characters and we were talking about things about gender that didn't make #a lot of sense for us and about people making up stupid labels like demisexual #but also about the trans ppl in our lives and what we learnt from them #and i was like oh boy thorny fight abt gender roles here we go #but we just... agreed on everything! #and i was like omg marry me #like #literally the 5% part we don't agree on #has nothing to do w feminism but w like drugs prison abolition or reform policing #but my opinions on that come from my very far left parents one of whom works w prisoners #while her family is more conservative #when her mom found out that my mom worked w prisoners she almost had a heart attack lmao

[slaveryabolitionday]

Mark the anniversary of the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others.

The International Day for the Abolition of Slavery observed on December 2nd, marks the date of the adoption, by the United Nations General Assembly, of the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (resolution 317(IV) of 2 December 1949).

Slavery convention signatories

#International Day for the Abolition of Slavery #2 December #SlaveryabolitionDay #Resolutions #united nations general assembly #United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others

[magnoliamyrrh]

once again the thought that prison abolition is accepted but prostitution abolition makes me a fascist is making me want to gnaw glass. god bless

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

i have a friend from a privileged background who was roped into prostitution for 3 months under false pretense. her and a friend replied to a job ad that was looking for a secretary but when they turned up it was a brothel. they were travelling so their language was not too good either. and the worst? they were only 18 years old with little prior sexual experiences. and at the time they were smoking a lot of weed and regularly taking lsd. and you know what? she is a prostitution advocate. she is against abolition.

so when people say „listen to sex workers“ im like; i do, but i dont have to agree with the conclusion they draw from their own experiences. what they tell me does not make me want to advocate for prostitution, on the contrary, every report i hear or watch, every interview or book i read, added to my own experiences, makes me want to fight against prostitution even more.

#mine #anti prostitution

[femmesandhoney]

gyns how do i share pdfs with yall bc i need everyone to read "All roads lead to abolition? Debates about prostitution and sex work through the lens of unacceptable work" by Meagan Tyler, it's one of my favorite arguments against people who call prostitution "sex work" and i have no clue how to make shareable and open/free pdf links for everyone??

[mxjackparker]

Do you like to read historical works by weird eccentric left-wing men who go on bigoted tangents but simultaneously have an incredibly progressive view about sex work for the time period and support police abolition?

... was that way over-specific but sounds interesting anyway?

You can read about it by supporting the first ever translation of "La Prostitution Contemporaine", (1884) one of the most comprehensive works on prostitution from the 1800s that I have ever read.

Translated by a sex worker and full of letters from real sex workers as well as information about the daily lives of French prostitutes... including entire chapters on lesbian and gay sex workers!

#feminism #feminist #anti swerf #sex work is work #lgbt #lgbtq+ #lgbtq #gay #lesbian #sapphic #wlw #intersectional feminism #queer #history #victorian era #langblr #translation #19th century #1800s

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. But you Communists would introduce community of women*, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

-The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels

*meaning, women held as common property

#the communist manifesto #communist manifesto #family abolition #bookblr #quotes #thatdiabolicalfeminist

[gatheringbones]

[“The history of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery looms large in contemporary trafficking conversations – often in the form of claims, subtle or not, that modern trafficking is worse than chattel slavery. Politicians and police officers meet to tell each other that ‘there are more slaves now than at any previous point in human history’; a UK former government minister insists that ‘we are facing a new slave trade, whose victims are tortured, terrified East European girls rather than Africans’. Matteo Renzi, then prime minister of Italy, wrote in 2015 that ‘human traffickers are the slave traders of the twenty-first century’. The Vatican claimed that ‘modern slavery’, specifically prostitution, is ‘worse than the slavery of those … who were taken from Africa’. A senior British police officer remarked that ‘the cotton plantations and sugar plantations of the eighteenth and nineteenth century … wouldn’t be as bad as what some victims [today] go through’.

A 2012 anti-trafficking ‘documentary’ that was screened for politicians and policymakers around the world, including in Washington, London, Edinburgh, and at the UN buildings in New York, proclaims: ‘In 1809 the cost of a slave was thirty thousand dollars. In 2009, the cost of a slave is ninety dollars.’ White people co-opting the history of chattel slavery as rhetoric is grim, not least because the term slavery names a specific legal institution created, enforced and protected by the state, which is nowhere near synonymous with contemporary ideas of trafficking. Indeed, the direct modern descendant of chattel slavery in the US is not prostitution but the prison system. Slavery was not abolished but explicitly retained in the US Constitution as punishment for crime in the Thirteenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which states that ‘neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction’ (emphasis ours).

The Thirteenth Amendment isn’t just a vestigial hangover. In 2016, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee released a statement condemning inmates’ treatment in the prison work system:

Overseers watch over our every move, and if we do not perform our appointed tasks to their liking, we are punished. They may have replaced the whip with pepper spray, but many of the other torments remain: isolation, restraint positions, stripping off our clothes and investigating our bodies as though we are animals.

There are more Black men in the US prison system now than were enslaved in 1850. Seeking to ‘end slavery’ through increased policing and incarceration is a bitterly ironic proposition.

White people in Britain and North America have been very successful at ducking any real reckoning with the legacies of the slave trade. Historian Nick Draper writes, ‘We privilege abolition … If you say to somebody ‘tell me about Britain and slavery’, the instinctive response of most people is Wilberforce and abolition. Those 200 years of slavery beforehand have been elided – we just haven’t wanted to think about it.’ By rhetorically intertwining modern trafficking with chattel slavery, governments and campaigners have been able to hide punitive policies targeting irregular migration behind seemingly uncomplicated righteous outrage.

Men of colour become ‘modern enslavers’ who deserve prosecution or worse. Their ‘human cargo’, figured as being transported against their will, are owed nothing more than ‘humanitarian return’, and the racist trope of border invasion is given a progressive sheen through collective shared horror at the villainy of the perpetrators. Meanwhile, in crackdowns and deportations, European governments position themselves as re-enacting and re-writing the history of anti-slavery movements to make themselves both victims and heroes. Of course, these actions by European governments do harm. For example, their policy of confiscating or destroying smuggling boats has not ‘rescued’ anyone, only induced smugglers to send migrants in less valuable – and less seaworthy – boats, leading to many more deaths. This policy continued for years, despite clear evidence that it was causing deaths. But, faced with twenty-first century ‘enslavers’, there is little need for white reflection. Instead, Renzi later wrote that European nations ‘need to free ourselves from a sense of guilt’ and reject any notion of a ‘moral duty’ to welcome arrivals. At the time of writing, the Italian government’s ‘solution’ to the migrant crisis is to pay for migrants to be incarcerated, stranded in dangerous, disease-ridden detention centres in Libya. As Robyn Maynard writes,

By hijacking the terminology of slavery, even widely referring to themselves as ‘abolitionists’, anti–sex work campaigners … in pushing for criminalization … are often undermining those most harmed by the legacy of slavery. As Black persons across the Americas are literally fighting for our lives, it is urgent to examine the actions and goals of any mostly white and conservative movement who [claim] to be the rightful inheritors of an ‘anti-slavery’ mission which aims to abolish prostitution but both ignores and indirectly facilitates brutalities waged against Black communities.

What does the fight to save people from ‘modern slavery’ look like on the ground? In 2017, police in North Yorkshire told journalists that they were fighting to rescue ‘sex slaves’ and asked members of the public to call in with tips, adding that the ‘sex slaves’ themselves ‘are prepared to do it [sell sex], they believe there is nothing wrong in it … We have just got to … educate them that they are victims of human trafficking.’ It seems fairly obvious that women who are ‘prepared to do it’ and ‘believe there is nothing wrong with it’ will not particularly benefit from being ‘educated’ about the fact that they are victims of trafficking – which in England and Wales means a forty-five-day ‘respite period’ (frequently disregarded) followed by a ‘humanitarian’ deportation.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

#molly smith #juno mac #history stuff #currently reading #cw racism

[partialbirthabortion]

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

Karl Marx, from The Communist Manifesto

Anyway, haha you're not funny and Marx himself would despise you

#this is the actual material state of millions of LIVING women the world over you absolute reprobates