#also I'd love more Dutch-related stuff on the show

[diningwiththeasquiths]

I have this scenario in my head...

Robby goes into group therapy to deal with his childhood neglect and the fact that his new half-sibling is now receiving all the love and care that he missed out on.

During this group therapy he meets a boy whose father's been in jail for most of his life and is now trying to turn his own life around before he ends up in the same place as his father, or worse.

They really hit it off, and start hanging out outside of therapy as well. At some point Robby finds out that his new friend is the son of one of his dad's old buddies, Dutch.

Slowly, while supporting each other during their healing process, their friendship blossoms into something more.

[imaginebeatles]

Hi ! I discovered your work with the short story "secret" - which really made me reflect on quite a lots of things about genders , and after with "true to you" , which also opened my mind on quite a lot of subject I never thought of ... The last story I read of your and chut-je-dors's writing is "ten minutes " (I thought I'd cry, I can't wait for next chapters) , and once more, you come up with the quite uncommon subject of sex workers (✌1)

cont. (idk if strip teaser is considered as a sex job ? I didn’t found other boxes to put both those jobs into ) , and both those stories really fight against prejudices, the fact that those persons are humans with rights, and that you can’t judge people’s work or life choices. It’s not very common (at least to me ) to meet (through your writing ) someone that open mind and comfortable with those subjects, is there anything that made you realise all of this or maybe your education ?  (✌2)

I absolutely love this question!! Thank you so much for asking it! Buckle up, this might be a long answer. 

If anyone’s interested in the issue of sex work, I love watching YouTube videos on a bunch of different political and philosophical issues and I would definitely recommend watching this video (x). It’s long but worth it. 

I think part of it is the fact that I’m Dutch (prostitution is legalized here) and grew up in quite an open-minded and progressive family. Subjects like sex work (I’m gonna count stripping as “sex work” here to make things simpler, but whether people define it as sex work differs from person to person, even among strippers themselves, so please forgive me if you don’t agree) weren’t taboo in my family and are often topics of discussion in our politics, so it’s something that people tend to have quite informed but different opinions on. Of course, stereotypes and prejudices exist here as well and in recent years, the whole debate around it has grown again with religious people being mainly against it, because they see sex work as inherently immoral. 

However, because religion doesn’t play as big of a role in Dutch politics as it does in the US for example, most of the debate around prostitution specifically (not counting stripping) is more about human trafficking and the role of women in society. Some people may be against prostitution because of the human (sex) trafficking that is a (small!) part of it, and because they believe that prostitution and sex work is dehumanizing towards women. So the debate is much more about the negative consequences of sex work than the inherent moral value of sex work (the religious group who is against it just on that basis is relatively small). 

Having been interested in politics and philosophical issues for most of my life, I gave this issue a lot of thought and actually did quite a bit of research on this, listening to different voices, especially those of the women and men (!) who are sex workers themselves, as well as people who have done research on this issue and are specialized in it. This very much included what I learned during my studies at university, because I learned a lot about how debates and politics works and was introduced to a lot of feminist thought as well as philosophies on capitalism and markets, which also includes sex work. At university, I also met people who did or used to do (or people who have friends who did) different kinds of sex work, so that way I learned about their motivations and why they wanted to do it, as well as what it was actually like (something you don’t often find information on that easily!). Knowing people who did it, made me more aware that they really are just people like you and me. You can’t know who is a sex worker just by looking at them on the street, and usually they are very smart and diverse of different ages, races, sexualities, and with different reasons for doing! Lots of students like doing sex work, because of the hours and the pay, or just because they genuinely like the work. 

For me, sex work was never immoral because you sell your body for “sex”. I don’t see a difference between selling your body for that or for any other kind of job, and I’ve always been very “do what you want to do and don’t care what other people think! If you want to make money doing sex work, go do it, i don’t care!.” (if you’re gonna say sex work is immoral because selling your body for sex is exploitation, I think you have to also agree that any work for money is exploitation and I would kinda agree on that at least, but then we’re dealing with the issue of capitalism and not sex work). 

As I learned more about it, this didn’t change for me. I don’t think sex work is inherently dehumanizing towards women or men, but just a job just like any other (these businesses are very strict in how clients treat the workers and the worker, be they a prostitute or a stripper, has all the power during the exchange and gets to decide what they do, when, with whom and how, and they often curate their own clients and because people know each other, words about bad clients travel fast!). The way sex work is portrayed, especially in movies, is very different from reality, and sex work itself includes a lot of other forms of labour, such as emotional labour. I learned about people with mental issues who have problems making connections with other people who prefer seeing prostitutes who know how to deal with those issues for sex instead of a partner, or people trying to find out about their sexuality, or what they like and don’t like sexually, or just people who feel like having sex but don’t want a relationship or a hookup! I learned about women looking for sex with prostitutes and who also like going to strip shows (and getting those service from men and women). 

On top of that, because prostitution is legalized in The Netherlands, there are a lot of rules that must be followed. These don’t often work and I’m still critical about the Dutch system in relation to protecting sex workers, but it’s better than when it’s completely criminalized, which would not only make work itself much more terrible and dangerous, but would also make sex trafficking even more difficult to fight. Businesses have worker agreements and back-up checks are done often to tackle human (sex) trafficking. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing and criminalization would only make it worse for everyone. For me, we have to protect sex workers (both women and men! people always forget about the men doing sex work) and make sure no one is being made to do any kind of work that is not safe for them for too little money that they do not want to do. That is exploitation (and can flow into actual slavery) and is wrong no matter what the job is. 

But yeah, the debate around sex work is a lot… mature (?)… here than it may be in other countries like the US, so you have more open-minded people and debates around the issue. I care a lot about issues like this and about human rights and fighting injustice and am all for protecting sex workers and decriminalizing it completely, so I like pushing boundaries in fics to help this a bit. Chut agrees with me on (most, if not all, of) this too, and when we started to write Ten Minutes, we decided to actually actively tackle these prejudices and give a (hopefully) less stereotypical portrayal of it. 

The same goes for other topics in my fics, like gender. For my studies I do a lot of research on queer studies and feminism and I find it all incredibly interesting and very important issues to tackle! I want to understand people and their experiences and find it important that there is more awareness and understanding. Although I’m not trans myself, I really wanted to write “Secret” when someone requested a mclennon fic where either one of them was trans, because I wanted to learn more about it myself and hopefully help both trans people by giving them this story (I know from experience how great it is to recognize yourself in stories and how much that can mean to you) and those who were less familiar with it or didn’t know much about it by talking about it so openly in a fic. 

Again, I did a lot of research on the experiences of trans people (especially trans boys, considering that’s where I was going for) on the internet and did my best. It was nerve-wrecking to post, because I really didn’t want to insult anyone by misrepresenting them, but I still get comments on that fic from people who love it exactly because they recognize themselves in it. That makes “Secret” my favourite fic I’ve written. 

So yeah, I think it’s mainly my liberal, progressive environment, as well as my own curiosity in political and philosophical issues, and my studies at university.  I’m so glad to hear that these fics changed your mind on certain issues, or at least had you looking at them in different ways. It’s what I want to do with my fics aside from just having fun and writing about stuff that interests me :)