Sex workers rights don’t bring you votes

Conner Habib, “occult philosopher and sexual liberationist”, last week answered to Bernie Sanders after he started following him:

Will ever Bernie Sanders or any other high level politician talk about sex workers rights?

There is a social stigma against the sex workers, and at the same time most of people consume porn daily. I mean billions of people. Porn embodies the contradictions and the major hypocrisies of our times. And the consequence is that nobody wants to talk about it. Especially politicians, because every time you mention sex workers or porn you lose votes.

Socially speaking, sex work is the hottest place: a pile of work exploitation, violence, money, pleasure, consumers, stories of slavery and emancipation. The difference between the two outcomes depends heavily on the environment, and politics have real power, but nobody wants to use it.

According to the Cupcake Girls, 25% of sex workers do it under coercion.

They’re a lot.

Free online porn, in the meantime, confused the situation, putting workers in a worse position. Less money, more needs to work outside the set. What Mike South, porn producer from 1992 said in an interview should make us reflect: “When I came into the business in 1992, we were very tight-knit. Nobody in the industry was prostituting and if they were, they were keeping it way, way under the radar. Nowadays, I can actually count the number of girls who don’t prostitute on one hand.”

If the CupcakeGirls data and the Mike South statement are correct, this is a very bad signal of how the porn industry is moving. Sex work could have a higher meaning when it’s the will of performers who express theirselves with their job, and a lower meaning when they’re involved to prostitution for survive.

This is why talking about sex work and porn is a priority to drive a cultural approach to the issue. What politics should do is to give resources and protection to who’s trafficked and forced, that means also resources and protection to the groups and associations that act in the territories.

Nobody in the public debate want to treat sex workers as workers.

Nobody in the in society think at them as “real” workers.

That’s where our efforts should go: fight the stigma, listen to your sex workers. Or even better, ask them to talk.