I am asked – nay, challenged – to say what the issues I comment on here have in common. Not the obvious answer incapsulated in the blog’s title: migration, trafficking and sex, but what lies underneath those – or what the framing issue is above them all. What are you and I concerned about? What brings us together? What’s behind the immediate issues?
Leaving out regional tags the cloud to the right lists:
borders campaigns children clients colonialism culture dance demand development feminism gender equality helping hiv home informal economy laws media migration mobility money police porn power rescue research services sex tourism sexuality sexwork smuggling statistics sundaysex sweden trafficking transnationalism travel urban space violence
Which is not what I need, even if I add more such topics, like
rights, censorship, prison, law and order, fake economics, voodoo evidence, taboo, stigma, regulation, moralism, government repression, government intervention, sexism, misogyny, disrespect for women, disrespect for poorer women, neocolonialism, imperialism, sexual regulation and the list could obviously go on and on
None of these get to the nucleus of what we are worried, annoyed and protesting about. Recently several people – here on the blog, in emails and at live events – have said what we all know by now: that none of the debunking and deconstructing of the anti-trafficking movement’s messages has had much effect. Whatever has been mobilised with sex-slavery reductionism is impervious to reason and evidence. Therefore the question is, What would a counter-campaign look like? A positive message, not a negative one. One that doesn’t refer to organised political parties or broad schools of thought such as liberalism, humanism, libertarianism. Or to unfortunately over-used words like equality. And this is a non-academic question: no abstruse or long-winded replies allowed. Answers do not have to come in the form of a pithy Madison-Avenue message, either – not yet.
Sexual autonomy? My Body, My Self? Sexual Respect? Do those exclude anything really important?
Send ideas as a comment and let’s have a conversation, or talk to me via the contact form to the right.
– Laura Agustin, the Naked Anthropologist
Nowadays we hear escort more often, but not that long ago call girl was the symbol of high-class prostitution and savvy sex workers. Here are some images and a video version of Butterfield 8 that pretends the protagonist was just a slut. The imagery dates from recent enough times, when sexual liberation was a term masking gender inequality and sexism. A typical device was to grant bad women agency - a ruse we now see through but in some ways preferable to current victim imagery. This is interesting if one likes thinking about all aspects of culture change in reference to commercial sex, not just politicians’ and feminists’ statements (which provide only a narrow understanding of what’s going on).
