ex-terfs - Tumblr blog

[ex-terfs]

I guarantee you, anyone with “x critical” wording in their blog description is either a radfem or unwittingly drinking radfem koolaid

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Self proclaimed leftists will talk about sex tourism in Asia in the context of neo colonialism while completing leaving out how the rescue industry, run by white American right wing evangelical Christians, pushes sex slavery narratives to facilitate the criminalization of sex workers that forces them into low paid garment manufacturing, which is to say nothing of how Christian propaganda is forced on them by these rescue industry NGOs.

People really, really need to understand that the rescue industry is real, it is run by American right wing evangelical Christians, and they're doing this for three major reasons.

Firstly, they believe sex work is immoral because they believe any sex outside of a heterosexual, monogamous, Christian marriage is immoral.

Secondly, they get material benefits from it, this is a business model; they capture sex workers in exploited nations with the criminalization model and push them into "diversion" programs where they are forced to work in sweatshop conditions, usually in garment manufacturing. Since these NGOs are registered as "charities" they also function as a tax dodge. Finally, they use these diversion programs to try to convert sex workers into their sick brand of right wing Christianity.

Since these are powerful US companies they are able to influence global politics including how sex work is treated in other countries. As of now they are running show throughout much of Asia and Africa specifically so they can make money off criminalizing sex workers into manufacturing cheap clothing that then goes on to be sold as "providing new opportunities for rescued sex slaves".

The sex slavery narratives is being pushed by the evangelical Christian right to dupe people who are trying to do the right thing. They even collect donations to fund their "raid and rescue" missions where they arrest and imprison sex workers.

Consider companies like Punjammies and Outland Denim who do exactly this

https://sexworkinfo.tumblr.com/post/186630380090/as-soon-as-this-appeared-in-my-ads-i-had-a-bad#notes

https://jezebel.com/buy-these-pajamas-rescue-a-prostitute-or-why-rescue-1688197906

https://youtu.be/EnXhB1XtL2o

https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/22/the-new-abolitionists-mexico-dominican-republic-human-trafficking-mormon-our/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/nov/28/global-slavery-index-walk-free-human-trafficking-anne-gallagher

Consider how evangelical Christians are shaping the global discourse on sex work

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/evangelical-women-are-shaping-public-attitudes-about-sex-work/

Here's a lot of information about sex worker activism across Asia

http://www.khaosodenglish.com/opinion/2019/08/10/opinion-the-double-denial-of-sex-work-in-thailand/

https://www.refworld.org/docid/5229b72f4.html

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/17/asia-pacific/social-issues-asia-pacific/health-insurance-time-off-empowered-sex-workers-thailand-battle-stigma/

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_58a74d70e4b045cd34c170aa?test_ad=readmo_test

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1026053/prostitution-laws-in-need-of-overhaul

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gen84/blow-jobs-are-real-jobs-v23n1

https://rewire.news/article/2012/09/23/why-sex-workers-must-be-part-global-human-rights-agenda/

http://theladiesfinger.com/meena-seshu-get-right-sex-work/

https://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/lives-sex-workers-modern-china

https://www.nationthailand.com/national/30343500

https://www.nationthailand.com/national/48-Thai-sex-workers-arrested-in-South-Korea-30279748.html

There is clearly a critique to be made about sex tourism but failing to dig deeper and consider how this discourse is being used by the US and it's capitalist neoliberal evangelical Christian churches to force Asian sex workers into garment manufacturing is missing an enormous part of the story and facilitating the very thing it claims to be critiquing

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autistic people are in no way related, nor should ever be lumped in with "kinksters" or whatever word you wana use for people who care more about sex than other people's well being. Its insulting and hurtful that you would compare people with a mental disability to nasty people who only care about sex. You should really consider everything that lead you to this point. It also brings about some questionable implications that you think autism is something to be fetishized. Theres my tea, now sip.

I love that every seething self-unaware reactionary mad about my criticisms regarding the fascism behind a culture that worships normalcy can’t come up with a single retort besides this idea of “lumping in”, with the implication I shouldn’t “lump in”, “the good, pitiable autistics” with “the sex freaks”, when the reality is, my dear stupid bastard friend, it is not me who does this lumping in, it is each and every single one of you who have decided that conforming to normalcy is some manner of virtue, you absolutely awful people who constantly shriek about how people should be more normal, and it is extremely self-evident in the enormous overlap between “kink criticals” and people who advocate for “bullying the freaks”, to the point there was specifically an extremely popular post advocating for harassing and enacting violence against “weirdo” children to stop them from turning into “greasy kink freaks” or whatever, which makes sense! the worship of normalcy is inherently about ensuring nobody deviates from what society tells you people should do and should be, and this becomes all-encompassing because there’s no other logical endpoint, you can’t advocate for normalcy as the only moral good and then pretend its still okay to be abnormal sometimes. If you don’t like reading criticisms of the society you yourself help create with your ridiculous, seething moralism about “nasty people who only care about sex”, then that’s too fucking bad, you can go off and be a detestable reactionary somewhere I don’t have to see it. You have nothing of any interest to add to this conversation whatsoever, which should’ve been entirely clear you started crying about the nasty people who only care about sex in reference specifically to gay men, which we all know was what I was referring to in the post that made you so mad.

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The rhetoric of evangelical anti-trafficking activists, like Hughes and Caine, is sensationalist. Yet it works to incite fear, prurient interest, and a sense of moral righteousness. It is, explains scholar and sex worker rights advocate, Jo Doezma, evocative of the fabricated “white slave panic” of the 19th century that in its own day facilitated draconian measures against prostitutes and other working class women. 

[…]

One historic reason that drew evangelicals generally to the cause of anti-trafficking occurred during the Bush administration (2001-2009). Bush established the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, giving conservative Christian organizations new access to federal funds for their charitable work. Under Bush, however, anti-trafficking initiatives also became government policy. The Trump administration, too, may be investing in the issue.

In the last two decades, the fight against human trafficking has become something of an evangelical mission. One now finds fundraising walks , prayer weekends, Bible studies, self-help books and even praise songs devoted to ending global slavery.

Political factors alone did not draw evangelical women to anti-sex-trafficking crusades, however. So did the crusades’ rhetoric, which is grounded in values that resonate deeply with conservative Protestant sexual morality.

A traditional script of sexual and gender roles is foundational to anti-trafficking activism. Girls are rehabilitated so that they can occupy their true positions as women, that is, as married women and mothers.

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The most baffling thing to me about the ‘q*eer is not a community’ types is, well, what else do you call it when a large group of people gather together under one particular label?

Because whether or not you like the fact they’re doing so is irrelevant, they still are gonna do it…?

⁷

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Anyway male rape victims exist and women absolutely can be monsters who rape in every sense of the word. I care about you all and your experiences are valid. Stay strong.

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TERF Tips #117

Trans people are less than 1% of the population while women are 51% yet we still need to find this community a complete and total threat

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The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) recently published an open letter to Associated Press Stylebook editor David Minthorn in response to an online campaign to replace the word “prostitute” with “sex worker” in AP’s 2015 Stylebook.

CATW and its allies oppose the phrases “sex work” and “sex worker” because they feel “these terms were invented by the sex industry and its supporters in order to legitimize prostitution as an acceptable form of work and conceal its harm to those exploited in the commercial sex trade.”

CATW’s letter is signed by “over 300 human rights groups and anti-trafficking advocates.” It includes a selection of statements from its signatories, who feel the term “sex work” erases or silences the suffering of people who identify as survivors of sexual exploitation. However, CATW’s letter promotes people who identify as survivors by calling for the erasure and silencing of those who call themselves sex workers.

Survivors of violence are entitled to their voices, and it is important to listen to them carefully and sensitively. Yet, CATW and its allies seek to deny the experience of sex workers and to oppress their representation in the media by refusing to name the practices of people who earn a living from consensual sexual labor.

Both campaigns invoke a false binary by suggesting that journalists must choose between mutually exclusive notions of coerced prostitution or consensual sex work. The full spectrum of research and testimony evinces an enormous diversity of experience among people who exchange sexual services for payment. It is presumptuous to assume that just one or two labels could or should represent all of these experiences.

CATW’s letter also deploys a revealing deception. It contains a litany of unreferenced statistics, which ostensibly “demonstrate that the commercial sex industry is predicated on dehumanization, degradation, and gender violence and causes life-long physical and psychological harm.” They include one remarkably shocking statement: “The average age of mortality of a person in prostitution is 34 years old.”

This bold claim was most prominently publicized in a 2011 Newsweek feature which claims, “Prostitution has always been risky for women; the average age of death is 34.” Its source is a 2004 American Journal of Epidemiology article titled “Mortality in a Long-term Open Cohort of Prostitute Women”. It is a study of dead women: the authors “identified 117 definite or probable deaths” of “prostitute women identified by police and health department surveillance in Colorado Springs, Colorado, from 1967 to 1999.” In passing, the authors say: “few of the women died of natural causes, as would be expected for persons whose average age at death was 34 years.”

The crucial consideration here is that this study, by definition and by design, excluded the living. From the “open cohort of 1,969 women,” 117 deceased were identified. In other words, 94 per cent of those women in prostitution—1,852 living women—are parsed from the sample. “The claim that ‘the average age of death is 34’ is badly misstated from the actual finding,” Maggie McNeill observed in 2011. “This is exactly the same as concluding 'the average soldier dies at 21’ by the simple expedient of excluding from the 'average’ all those who survived!”

CATW’s claim is unwittingly misleading if not intentionally deceptive. It gives readers the impression that the average woman doing prostitution or sex work can expect to die in her thirties. This implication is sensationalizing, stigmatizing, and false.

This mistaken mortality claim is a metaphor for CATW’s argument, which suggests that the representation of the whole should be overwritten by the experiences of a select group: they misrepresent statistics about dead women in prostitution to suggest sex workers should not be represented at all.

This macabre move sets up the rhetorical power play in the letter’s conclusion, where CATW calls for survivors’ voices to be privileged in media representations:

“Attached are the words of survivors addressing the harm of the terms 'sex work,’ 'sex worker’ and 'prostitute.’ These courageous individuals are leading a global movement to end commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. We urge the AP to engage with these survivors as policy experts.”

Why must conversations about prostitution and sex work be a zero-sum game? Representing the experiences of sex workers need not silence the experiences of survivors, the latter being amply represented in recent debates about prostitution law in Canada, France, and the UK, for example. Sex workers are crucial stakeholders in these conversations, and their experiences also deserve fair representation.

Sex workers do not deny that exploitation can occur in relation to the exchange of sex and money, though some sex workers question extreme claims about the pervasiveness of these wrongs. CATW’s attempt to claim expertise and representation exclusively for survivors reflects a deep rift between the discourse of prostitution and the discourse of sex work, while refusing to recognize the vast diversity of experience that underlies this divide.

We need better language for describing the experiences we currently depict as trafficking, prostitution, and sex work. Meanwhile, CATW’s promotion of survivors as experts on sexual exploitation and trafficking would seem much more fair if they would recognize the experience and expertise of sex workers, too.

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“1,020 charged in national sex trafficking sting” blared the headline in the Chicago Sun Times earlier this month. The news story was essentially a rewrite of a press release issued by the Cook County Sheriff’s office with a very similar headline trumpeting arrests in the sex trafficking sting. There’s just one problem: most of the people arrested in this month-long operation spearheaded by Cook County were not traffickers or trafficking victims. They were people attempting to engage in adult consensual prostitution.

The way police involved in this nationwide sting chose to spin their costly efforts to entrap the buyers and sellers of sex is just one more example of how law enforcement and others routinely conflate consensual prostitution with far rarer instances of actual sex trafficking. According to federal law, trafficking victims are defined as women and men who have been forced or coerced into selling sex. In addition, anyone under the age of 18 who is selling sex is automatically considered a trafficking victim since they have not reached the age of consent.

But in this national sting operation, which cost taxpayers millions of dollars, only six underage prostitutes were found out of a total 85 prostitutes. And as the Cook County release itself acknowledges, only 14 “pimps” were arrested and there is no evidence that any of them actually engaged in trafficking according to the legal definition.

It’s not just law enforcement that makes the mistake of conflating victimless sex work with trafficking. Many politicians do it as well. Just recently, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) was quoted in a Minnesota paper as saying that the trucking industry is uniquely positioned to prevent human trafficking. Yet while some underage prostitutes are no doubt trafficked at truck stops across the nation, most of what goes at these rest areas involve consensual arrangements between adult women and truckers, not trafficking. Yet Klobuchar and others persist in conflating the two for their own political benefit.

At least in this year’s sting operation, law enforcement agencies made a point of saying they did not charge any sex workers detained with a crime as long as they agreed to go into rehabilitation. (If they didn’t avail themselves of  “recovery” services they did face arrest.) Instead, the police in 37 agencies across the country, ranging from California to Maryland, arrested the buyers of sex, 1,020 men. Most of these arrests occurred after police placed an ad for sex online and then set up liaisons with callers at hotels around town. When the men showed up and offered the undercover female officers in the hotel room money for sex, they were arrested. Police also raided brothels and massage parlors as part of the operation.

All of the men arrested were only charged with a misdemeanor (solicitation of sex) and slapped with a fine. And that’s the crux of it. These annual stings have become a lucrative money-making operation for law enforcement agencies. Last year, Cook County collected $132,000 in fines from men who were busted for soliciting sex, according to Sam Randall, director of communications for the Sheriff’s office there.

Now you may have no problem with law enforcement making money off of men who are desperate for sex. But the problem here is that police are diverting a number of their best officers from pursuing more violent crimes to entrapping people who are mostly engaged in what many (including the sex workers themselves) say is a victimless crime. So instead of solving armed robberies or homicides or burglaries — crimes that the public really does care about — law enforcement agencies are spending their public dollars (which often includes overtime) arresting mostly adult sex workers and their hapless clients.

And this is not just a waste of taxpayer dollars, as I showed in much greater detail in my book, Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law. It’s also an enormous drain on the state and district attorney’s offices who have to prosecute these men, especially since many of them are not even convicted in the end.

I’m all in favor of law enforcement throwing the book at true traffickers — men and women who prey on underage youth, most of whom have run away from homes where they have been abused and are selling sex for survival. But that’s not what’s happening here. Most of the buyers arrested in these stings are arrested for soliciting adult undercover officers or adult women who are selling sex by choice.

As the head of an outreach center for sex workers in Washington, D.C. told me when I interviewed her for my book:

“It’s a massive waste of resources,” said Cyndee Clay, executive director of Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS). “I would rather use that money stopping violent crime and arresting people who actually hurt others.”

The unfortunate truth is that it’s easier for law enforcement to place an ad online and sit back and wait for the phones to ring than it is to go after real traffickers who operate in the shadows. Or try to crack an unsolved homicide. These stings bring in money and makes the police look good. What’s not for them to like?

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an excellent example of how members of cultlike groups (such as radfem circles infested with TERFs/SWERFs) can’t properly interact with or comprehend arguments that challenge the beliefs of their in-group.

I say: ‘we are all influenced by patriarchal social standards, but that influence doesn’t mean we are incapable of informed consent to sex.’

they hear: ‘women aren’t directly influenced by patriarchal society standards.’

because interacting with radfem-critical content beyond a cursory glance & black&white retake requires considering their own beliefs more closely, and most cultlike group members are unwilling to do that for fear it will lead to self-doubt & doubt of their fellow believers.

(and that’s an understandable fear, considering how cultlike groups will inevitably treat anyone who leaves the inner circle.)

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TERFs: men should NEVER enter a women's bathroom! Well, except for the one guy who will beat the living shit out of the transwoman who entered the women's bathroom in my daily snuff like fantasies, btw did you knew porn makes you a terrible sadist with no empathy? crazy stuff huh?!?

Lül

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just so we’re clear when i say things like “sexuality is fluid” what i mean is “sexuality can be a confusing thing to navigate and nobody should feel any shame in realizing that a label they’ve used for any amount of time isn’t accurate anymore and begins using a new one because phases are not inherently a bad thing and nobody should feel guilty for learning new things about themselves”

what i DONT mean is “a girl who says she’s a lesbian might actually be bisexual and this straight man’s dick can help her figure that out if he hits on her long enough”

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I really hate the argument of “If you have to offer money or pay someone to do it, it’s coercion” cause that’s just… 

It’s just so fundamentally stupid. Not everyone does everything for free, whether it is a sexual service or not. And being paid for a service that you can willingly consent to ain’t coercion in any sense of the word… because coercion is based around a lack of consent because you are threatening or forcing them to do it. 

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The thing with “male gaze” is that it completely ignores women who enjoy fanservice and/or says women who enjoy fanservice only do so because they’re “conditioned”. 

Meanwhile… My boyfriend gets tired of games that have a lot of fanservice / has no interest in them while my ass, on the other hand, is like 👀👀👀👀👀👀

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“Diagnostic manuals such as the DSM were created to provide a common diagnostic language for mental health professionals and attempt to provide a definitive list of mental health problems, including their symptoms.

The main findings of the research were:

• Psychiatric diagnoses all use different decision-making rules

• There is a huge amount of overlap in symptoms between diagnoses

• Almost all diagnoses mask the role of trauma and adverse events

• Diagnoses tell us little about the individual patient and what treatment they need

The authors conclude that diagnostic labelling represents ‘a disingenuous categorical system’.

Lead researcher Dr Kate Allsopp, University of Liverpool, said: “Although diagnostic labels create the illusion of an explanation they are scientifically meaningless and can create stigma and prejudice. I hope these findings will encourage mental health professionals to think beyond diagnoses and consider other explanations of mental distress, such as trauma and other adverse life experiences.”

Professor Peter Kinderman, University of Liverpool, said: “This study provides yet more evidence that the biomedical diagnostic approach in psychiatry is not fit for purpose. Diagnoses frequently and uncritically reported as ‘real illnesses’ are in fact made on the basis of internally inconsistent, confused and contradictory patterns of largely arbitrary criteria. The diagnostic system wrongly assumes that all distress results from disorder, and relies heavily on subjective judgments about what is normal.””

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“Hey so don’t be mean to girls with body hair. They don’t have to shave. Let girls be in their natural state if they want to.”

“Any woman who shaves is controlled and brainwashed by men. Oh and if you sexually prefer a woman who shaves, you’re a pedophile.”