Time for Sex Workers to Unite

Four years ago, I threw some cold water on the celebration that ensued here in California. The nation had just elected its first non-white President by a considerable margin, but the state of California voted to ban gay marriage.

Last night Americans reelected President Barack Obama and Californians raised taxes to the rich to fund schools and revise that idiotic three-strikes law. All of that sounds good, but they continued to assault the rights of sex workers in the state by passing Proposition 35 and Los Angeles County Proposition B.

I’ll give some credit to the people who wrote up Prop 35. They titled it “Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act” which upon a cursory glance sounds good and everybody should vote for that.

With the vague definitions used in this initiative, your normal run-of-the-mill sex worker could be locked up and forced to register as a sex offender. And the provisions of this initiative will force all registered sex offenders to report all of their activity on the internet.

All of this to protect human sex trafficking victims who more often than not will not testify against their traffickers, and which this initiative does nothing to help provide more support. Nothing about this initiative focuses on the victims.

The media outlets that endorsed this proposition did so with some reservations. We can all agree that human sex trafficking is bad. But the gnarly bits of this initiative is where there is a lot of problems. And if something is flawed, why vote for it? Let’s get it right from the get-go.

And in LA County, voters have now forced porn actors to wear condoms. Never mind that the porn industry has the most stringent testing requirements. But now we want to spend our tax money to force them to wear condoms?

Some people say that if people in porn wear condoms, it will spread the message of using protection. Think about how stupid that statement is especially since almost no productions that actually uses condoms show the condoms being put on. Yeah, great education potential there.

It’s easy for people to force their will on sex workers because it’s seen as degrading and is often illegal. No one is forcing all women to get mastectomies because of how bad the breast cancer crisis is. We still haven’t outlawed cigarettes even though it’s proven to cause lung cancer. No one is forcing men to have anal sex even though studies have shown that stimulation of the prostate significantly reduce the chances of prostate cancer.

This is an all out assault on sex workers, and it’s time for them to fight back.