ONLY POSSESSED GIRLS DIDDLE
toad stool. work in progress. fake concept art for a fake game.
roughly 2.5 feet by 3 feet. graphite, acrylics, pastels, spray paint, ink, gouache on paper.without verity one can see only the usable item in all her intoxicated glory.
it takes truer eyes to know that, beneath the pinkened skin, there’s something with a newness, a vulnerability, that you should never, ever use.
International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers
Trigger Warning for violence against sex workers, including but not limited to sexual violence and police violence
Today, December 17, is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. The International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers is a day to remember sex workers who have been murdered, and to acknowledge and spread the word about the ways in which sex workers are uniquely vulnerable to all forms of violence. This year, the list of those who have been killed is forty entries long (pdf); several entries contain more than one victim, and many of the victims’ identities are unknown. It should be noted that these murders are only the ones that are known of. Undoubtedly, they make up only a fraction of the real death toll.
But today is not just about those who have died; it’s also about those who live with violence, or the threat of it, every day. While victims of violence span all social markers, some are more vulnerable than others. The vast majority of victims are women. Women of color are more vulnerable than white women. Trans sex workers are more vulnerable than cis sex workers. Queer sex workers are more vulnerable than straight sex workers. Sex workers are already deeply devalued and dehumanized by society as a class; the more they are additionally devalued and dehumanized along other axes of oppression, the more likely they are to be subjected to violence.
Violence against sex workers is an international concern which plays out on a daily basis, in all countries around the globe.
- A study conducted by the New York City-based Sex Workers Project reported that 80% of participants had reported experiencing violence, including 27% at the hands of police.
- In a report on violence against sex workers in India, 70% had reported abuse by police, and 80% had been arrested without evidence.
- During a meeting of sex workers and advocates from Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa, participants described “routine police violence including sexual violence, beatings, rubber bullets, and spraying sex workers’ genitals with pepper-spray guns.”
It’s these notes about police violence that I want to address specifically. Because as the fabulous Audacia Ray puts it, it’s not just violent clients who hurt sex workers. It’s police. It’s the law. It’s the government.
State violence is wielded against sex workers in many ways. Individual cops certainly pose a part of the problem, as listed above. Beating sex workers, threatening them with weapons, and raping them either through force or coercion. Police officers certainly have a history, like clients, of seeing sex workers as easy victims of violence, victims who they believe no one will care about.
But it’s also the law itself that both promotes abuse and acts as a direct form of violence against sex workers. With many forms of sex work being illegal throughout most of the world, sex workers are placed in a position even more vulnerable than that created by the extraordinary social stigma alone. It’s the oppressive nature of the law that lets police officers rape sex workers, by giving them the option of “having sex” or going to jail. It’s the oppressive nature of the law that puts sex workers at risk of HIV and other STDs by making them afraid to carry condoms and denying them access to HIV prevention funding. It’s the oppressive nature of the law that makes sex workers afraid to report violence when it is committed against them, not only because they may be subjected to further violence at the hands of police, but because they may also be arrested themselves.
It’s the law which puts sex workers in prisons for doing nothing more than using their own bodies as they saw fit, subjecting them to state violence and control on a daily basis. It’s the law which places them in prisons, where it’s possible that they will be denied health care; where they will be compelled to undergo strip searches and cavity searches; where they may be beaten or locked in solitary confinement; where they may be raped by guards or other inmates; where, if they are trans, they may be placed as women in prisons with men. It’s the law which may force them to submit to public floggings while crowds and authorities laugh. Or worse.
The law doesn’t just “fail to protect” sex workers. Far worse, it is an active danger to them. Criminalization of sex work causes violence against sex workers just as much as personal misogyny, racism, transphobia, classism, and homophobia do, and it’s all of these -isms in which such laws are based. These laws are framed in terms of paternalism — we must protect women from their choices, even when we don’t bother to work on why they probably don’t have any better ones available — but they’re really about a much more vitriolic form of oppression. They’re about outright hate. And even if you want to quibble about intentions and motivations, the fact remains that they do just as much if not more violence against sex workers than direct beatings.
Decriminalization of sex work will not magically erase anti-sex worker stigma, or magically make police take violence against sex workers seriously, or magically cause them to stop raping or otherwise abusing sex workers themselves. But that’s no reason for the state, for countless states all over the world, to continue having direct authorization to commit violence against sex workers itself. It’s no reason for the state to have the right to enact violence against vulnerable and marginalized persons precisely because of their vulnerable and marginalized status. And it’s no reason to act as though, when we’re talking about violence against sex workers, we’re somehow not largely talking about state violence.
Sex workers deserve safety. Sex workers deserve freedom. Sex workers deserve human rights. That needs to be remembered and spoken today and every day.
I made this stencil for a t-shirt! Yay transfeminism!
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Cool! I was thinking of making one for myself aswell! = )
This is a nice stencil.
Women who are too sexual aren’t taken seriously, and women who aren’t sexual enough aren’t taken seriously. Women who are conventionally attractive get valued solely for their sexual appeal; women who aren’t conventionally attractive get dismissed for their lack of it. Women who are conventionally attractive are assumed to be dumb bimbos; women who aren’t conventionally attractive are assumed to be either bitter or desperate. Women who are conventionally attractive get trivialized; women who aren’t conventionally attractive get treated with pity and contempt. We can’t win.
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(via thecryingame) Yay horribly crippling societal standards of femininity! (via private-revolution) I’d like to see the day where we no longer care about winning the stupid game. The sooner we (women) do as we please without having to take heed of others opinion, the sooner we just start supporting each others choices to be slutty or prudish the sooner we will see these ridiculous standards fade away. I hope. (via thewhore) (Source: zesticola) |
Heads up to all your pro choicers out there. This sunday is Pro - Life Cupcake Day.
Yeah, I had to look up what that was as well.
Here is the description that was written by the pro lifers themselves:
Bring in a tray of cupcakes for any group of people and you will find that they will flock to get them. As soon as they take a bite they will probably ask, “Who’s birthday is it?”
Then you answer. “It’s no ones birthday. These cupcakes represent the 50,000,000 children who weren’t allowed to be born, who never had a birthday.” The cake in their mouth will become dry and the moment will hopefully become quite somber. Then you say, “If you and I were aborted we wouldn’t have a birthday party either.”
I’ll be interested to see if anyone encounters this on sunday!lmfao
are you serious
wait
seriously though
Well that’s the most ridiculous thing ever. What a waste of 50,000,000 cupcakes.
No, this is great for anyone who likes cupcakes. It runs on the false premise that we “know abortion is wrong,” which is just… not the case on multiple levels. Eat a cupcake and be apathetic towards their cause! Bring a bunch of homeless people in and have them eat the cupcakes and be apathetic towards their cause! There’s no such thing as food that’s too political to eat.
Anyone who dismisses the importance of seeing oneself represented honestly in mass media is someone who has spent so much time enjoying the privilege that they’ve never bothered to notice it. If I can provide a generation of girls with role models that aren’t “mommy,” “dead prostitute,” or “dead mommy,” I’ll consider my career a resounding success, and the sniveling scorn of a bunch of hateful do-nothing internet posters won’t trouble me a bit.
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| — | To My Someday Daughter [an exhaustive critique of nerd misogyny] - wddp.org - Page 18 (via 3liza) |
(Source: 3liza)
It is personified in the Nice Guy™ Gamer, one of our number who considers himself an ideal romantic partner because of his ability to offer emotional support under false pretenses, characterizes friendships that don’t lead to sex as “failures,” demonizes extroverts, and awards himself gold stars for not hitting women or raping them.
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| — | To My Someday Daughter, by Geordie Tait - a Magic: the Gathering Miscellaneous Article (via 3liza) |
Joss Whedon: Feminist
Interviewer: So why do you write these strong female characters?
Whedon: Because you're still asking me that question.
According to their research, pickup artist techniques are strongly linked to “men who have negative attitudes toward women and believe women are a threat to male dominance,” guys who get off on “putting women in their place.” As it turns out, women who respond positively to these attitudes tend to hate women, too. “Women who have negative attitudes about members of their own gender find men who treat them in a dominant way during courtship more desirable because it is consistent with their sexist ideology,” Hall and Canterberry found. Apparently both “men and women who believe women can be isolated and teased into sex have a low regard for women in general.
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- Women Who Love Pickup Artists Hate Women Too “I’m not like those girls. I’m cool. Fuck feminism! Now where are my birth control pills?” (via morninggloria) |
could it be?? lady gaga’s alter ego jo disgustingly objectifying women?!?
i’m going to guess that jo didn’t ask snooki if he could grab her breasts. also, salivating over britney spears like a piece of meat on stage during the live show made her look rather uncomfortable. it’s totes ok for gaga’s alter ego jo to treat women this way because this is how women are supposed to be treated. our bodies are not our own.
thank you, lady gaga, for using your enormous fucking platform to NOT be a feminist, to in fact openly deny being a feminist, and to also be a complete asshole.
“I’m not a feminist - I, I hail men, I love men. I celebrate American male culture, and beer, and bars and muscle cars…” -lady gaga
photo above: lady gaga celebrating American male rape culture
(Source: angstine)
