July 2011
42 posts
How to be an ally to sex workers - SWOP Chicago →
redlightchicago.wordpress.com
How To Be an Ally To Sex Workers
1) Don’t Assume. Don’t assume you know why a person is in the sex industry. We’re not all trafficked or victims of abuse. Some people make a choice to enter this industry because they enjoy it, others may be struggling for money and have less of a choice.
2) Be Discreet and Respect Personal Boundaries. If you know a sex worker, it’s OK to engage in conversation in dialogue with them in private, but respect their privacy surrounding their work in public settings. Don’t ask personal questions such as “does your family know what you do?” If a sex worker is not “out” to their friends, family, or co-workers, it’s not your place to tell everyone what they do.
3) Don’t Judge. Know your own prejudices and realize that not everyone shares the same opinions as you. Whether you think sex work is a dangerous and exploitative profession or not is irrelevant compared to the actual experiences of the person who works in the industry. It’s not your place to pass judgment on how another person earns the money they need to survive.
4) Watch Your Language. Cracking jokes or using derogatory terms such as “hooker”, “whore”, “slut”, or “ho” is not acceptable. While some sex workers have “taken back” these words and use them among themselves, they are usually used to demean sex workers when spoken by outsiders.
5) Address Your Prejudices. If you have a deep bias or underlying fear that all sex workers are bad people and/or full of diseases, then perhaps these are issues within yourself that you need to address. In fact, the majority of sex workers practice safer sex than their peers and get tested regularly.
6) Don’t Play Rescuer. Not all sex workers are trying to get out of the industry or in need of help. Ask them what they need, but not everyone is looking for “Captain Save-A-Ho” or the “Pretty Woman” ending.
7) If you are a client or patron of sex workers, be respectful of boundaries. You’re buying a service, not a person. Don’t ask for real names, call at all hours of the day/night, or think that your favorite sex worker is going to enter into a relationship with you off the clock.
8 ) Do Your Own Research. Most mainstream media is biased against sex workers and the statistics you read in the news about the sex industry are usually inaccurate. Be critical of what you read or hear and educate yourself on who exactly is transmitting diseases or being trafficked.
9) Respect that Sex Work is Real Work. There’s a set of professional skills involved and it’s not necessarily an industry that everyone can enter into. Don’t tell someone to get a “real job” when they already have one that suits them just fine.
10) Just because someone is a sex worker doesn’t mean they will have sex with you. No matter what area of the sex industry that someone works in, don’t assume that they are promiscuous and willing to have sex with anyone at any time.
11) Be Supportive and Share Resources. If you know of someone who is new to the industry or in an abusive situation with an employer, by all means offer advice and support without being condescending. Some people do enter into the sex industry without educating themselves about what they are getting into and may need help. Despite the situation, calling the police is usually never a good option. Try to find other organizations that are sensitive to the needs of sex workers by contacting the organizations listed below.
12) As you learn the above things, stand up for sex workers when conversations happen. Share your personal stories if you so choose. Don’t let the stigma, bigotry and shame around sex work continue. Remember it’s important that sex workers be allowed to speak for themselves and for allies to not speak for sex workers but to speak with sex workers.
Realize that sex work transcends ‘visible’ notions of race, gender, class, sexuality, education, and identities; sex workers are your sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, lovers, and friends. Respect them!
Get Active! Contact your local SWOP Chapter to find out what you can do or form your own in the city you live in.
This list composed by the members and allies of Sex Workers Outreach Project-Chicago. Visit us on the web at www.swop-chicago.org
Other Resources-
www.swop-usa.orgwww.desireealliance.orgwww.boundnotgagged.com
June 2011
213 posts
“Fringe dangles off the edge of the red satin coverlet, the bed canopy, the window valance. Everything upholstered in red velvet, cut velvet. Flocked wallpaper. The scarlet walls padded and button tufted, crowded with Louis XIV mirrors. The lamps, dripping with faceted crystals , busy with sparkling thingamabobs. The fireplace carved with pink onyx and rose quartz. The entire effect, insular and silent as sleeping tucked deep inside Mae West’s vagina.”
—Chuck Palahnuik, an excerpt from “Tell All”
“People have to suffer before they can risk doing what they love.”
—Chuck Palahnuik (via totrustistolove)
“If God gives you something to do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?”
—Stephen King, on writing
“
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book(Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom(when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure.
That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this(or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
Some never awaken.
” —Anais Nin (via lookinglassgames)
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
—Anais Nin
“Every now and then I’ll run into really good writers who have nothing to say. And at that point you want to say, ‘Well, okay. Stop writing and go and get a job somewhere. Go around the world. Go do stuff. Go and get your heart broken and then come back and write some more.’”
—Neil Gaiman, Advice for Aspiring Writers
“I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.”
—Jack Gilbert (via crever)
“Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal”
—Chuck Palahnuik
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
—Anais Nin (via sheshallgofree)
“If you love something let it go, just don’t be surprised if it comes back with herpes.”
—Chuck Palahnuik (via knight-sun)
“There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.”
—Anaïs Nin
“I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.”
—Anais Nin (via susiesstone)
“These sites provide the women with a way to stay in touch with each other… They’re independent. They don’t meet guys who don’t have referrals. They don’t need pimps. It’s a good thing.”
—Earlier this week a professor from Fairleigh Dickinson University was arrested and charged with promoting prostitution for allegedly running a website where men made contact with escorts and then rated them online, “like wine or cigars.” (via cheatsheet)
“Sex is the only thing i can give away for free but i cant sell”
—
~Jenny DeMilo
(via jennydemilo)
“I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I’m a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body and doing battle with each other.”
— Paulo Coelho (via justagirltemptingfate)
“I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling, thing.”
—Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life (2007) (via twiceunexceptional)
“I don’t want to die without any scars.”
—Chuck Palahnuik (via aprilosa)
“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
—‘On Writing’ by Stephen King (via wavesofjoy)
