PLEASE STOP SAYING "CONFINED TO A WHEELCHAIR!" I mean christ it doesn't even make sense! Most of you use shoes to help you get places - are you confined to your shoes?! No. Your shoes give you a level of mobility you wouldn't have without them. THAT IS ALSO WHAT A WHEELCHAIR DOES
Mainstream films are all like: stalking is romance! Relationships should be hard! She says she hates you because she loves you! He's just mean because he's broken, fix him, it's romance!
And people are still like: Stop porn from teaching unhealthy relationships to the youth!
Thank you to everyone for making your voices heard.
We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change.
OnlyFans stands for inclusion and we will continue to provide a home for all creators.
As many, many SW scholars and activists have been telling you - the roots of the 21st century "feminist" anti-trafficking trafficking movement are in the religious Purity movements of the late 19th century and are utterly intertwined with scientific racism and eugenics. 1/?
This whole idea of criminalizing people for transporting women over state lines for any “immoral purpose” is, incredibly, 108 years older than SESTA/FOSTA—it’s from the 1910 White-Slave Traffic Act:
Idk who needs this, but one of the few real skills taught in law school is research. It's simple, but still, there's no shame in not knowing - you can't know until you're taught! I paid way too much to learn this, but I want to give you the quick version right now: 🧵
Dear civilians,
Please, please, PLEASE, I am begging you. We do not need any more civilian documentaries about s/x w/rk. We just don't. Please, take your "complicated" feelings about the industry to therapy and give your movie money to actual s/x w/rk/rs
People have a lot to say about s3x workers using drugs to work & working to get drugs, but needing a job in order to get the drugs you need to do that job is literally just American capitalism
That
@iamjohnoliver
&
@LastWeekTonight
know the difference between decrim and legalization is because of the hours of work put in by
@melissagira
educating the show's producers. She is a blessing to this movement❤
It's really cool that everyone's watching
#HowToBuildaSexRoom
on
@netflix
but meanwhile sx workers & adult businesses can't even take payments without their accounts getting shut down so buy yr toys while you can but don't look for an expert to show you how to use them
I swear it will never get old for you people to use "porn star" as a synonym for "trashy" or "failure," and all I can think is it's so obvious you've never actually met a porn star before
People who say poor people are lazy have obviously never spent the whole day taking public transit & waiting in the soul sucking social services office only to be told you don't have the right paperwork
You know what is so fucking wild? I went to law school because I wanted to understand all of these opaque laws and regulations that fuck up sx wrkrs' & survivors' lives. I think I also wanted to prove to myself that I could do something so intellectually challenging. So now,
Beloved wh0res, I remember vividly the feeling that because I had done SW I was not worthy of love. I've now been with my partner for over 13 years, & he has fed me pedialyte and soup after long shoot days, and loved me better than I ever knew possible. You too deserve this❤️
Every time criminalization increases, there is a lot of fear and a lot of desire for information that will make people "safe." Please, please remember that there is no such thing as perfect safety, there is only harm reduction. Relatedly, if you are arrested, it is not your fault
People always want to know if sex workers are "happy," but the question is not just absurd (are doctors happy? are baseball players happy?), it is also entirely irrelevant to our fight for justice
When we say you need to hire SWs to write, research, study, do public speaking about SW it's not some arbitrary ban on civilians (as if we had that power) it's because SWs are denied these opportunities again & again & again in favor of less "controversial" so-called "experts"
Carol Leigh gave her whole life to people in the sex trades, and never stopped learning, growing, and questioning her own analyses. She was the rare icon who also made herself a student of younger activists. She gave me so much, and I'll hold her in my heart always 💔✊️☂️
It is truly amazing how people can hear you're a s3x worker one time and never, ever forget it but hear your pronouns 50 times and never, ever remember them
a question for s/x wrkrs only: what pice of writing/youtube video/documentary/podcast (esp a specific episode) do you point civilians toward to better understand our lives, industries, culture, stigmas, and/or relationships?
I'm really looking for disability theory books that conceptualize acceptance of living in a chronically ill body on its own terms - not as a battle, but as a whole and complex being. Can we seek medical care without thinking of our bodies as broken?
It's 4am and I'm thinking about how FOSTA makes it much harder for people in the s/3/x trades to even access information about abortion in a post-Roe world, much less an actual abortion
I know some people will be disappointed to hear this, but I don't ID w "s3x positivity" or "body positivity." For me, s3x & body neutrality (or ambivalence tbh) make more sense as guiding principles. I need room to feel positive, negative, in between, neither, both, everything
Just a reminder that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a critical race theorist & radical who argued for economic redistribution & universal access to basic resources & against capitalism
@itsLotusLain
@laura_lemoon
If you want to be listened to by people who have power or people who think they are smart, you have to give them a very silly, shallow metric they see as a stand-in for intelligence. And that is a loss to ALL of us. It's tragic, in the full sense of the word.
Good morning beloved SWs! I know we did this a few years ago, but I think it's time again: what have you learned from doing sx wrk that you value and/or use in other contexts?
and it's so WILD to me how I can say the exact same thing that I said before I had latin after my name, and be spoken to with this like, respect and like, people in authority positions who've dismissed me in the past before I even started talking and now they will LISTEN to me &
Last month, I got what I was certain was a spam call. Instead, it was this. I'm still utterly floored. Incredibly grateful and honored to finally be able to share the news
Congratulations to the recipients of the 2021 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant! Learn more about their artful and essential forthcoming books and read excerpts from their work on our website:
Cis white women who previously felt secure enough to look benevolently on trans people, sex workers, BIPOC, have not had to develop strategies for living under state surveillance, criminalization, and exclusion - the experience is new to them so they believe it's unique to them
I now have long covid, but I've had similar symptoms, & a diagnosis common to long covid patients (POTS), for years. I've done chronic pain therapy, chronic illness therapy, CBT, DBT, etc etc - no amount of therapy has fixed my tachycardia, fatigue, pain - what HAS worked is meds
@itsLotusLain
@laura_lemoon
The first time I went to meet with a member of Congress, I was shocked by how little they seemed to know, how limited their imaginations, how their attempts to balance reelection ambitions with actually doing the work of world changing that is their ACTUAL JOB. It still shocks me
I see a lot of SWs shutting down or stepping away from Twitter accounts. Just want to share a harm reduction tactic in case it's relevant to you: don't shut your account down entirely & keep control of your handle to prevent others from using it to impersonate you
I have these latin credits or whatever, right? juris doctor magna cum laude blah blah bullshit blah blah - and I don't want to downplay the hard work it took, but it did NOT teach me about sx wrk, about adult industries & our norms & culture & language or anything like that -
I am so goddamn tired of people in the s/3x trades getting kicked off platforms. Like, you say you want ppl to stop trading s/3x so you take away our ability to get/save money & to talk to each other online? As if being broke & alone isn't why we started hustling in the 1st place
This use of "victim" language has been (imo) an intentional tactic by white-cis-hetero supremacists who know how it confuses people naive to the issue - this is the danger of the "both sides" approach - it undermines power analysis & makes audiences think there is no truth
Some of those white feminists turned to anti-sex trafficking activism, taking their own exaggerated feelings of victimhood (their response to internal critique) and building a movement that still centered themselves
having some heavy feels today about inequity. redistributing cash (or trying to) is one of the most difficult parts of my work while also being one of the most important. Half of it is just poor people passing money & labor back & forth. This is, obviously, not redistribution.
Happy valentine's day to the intentionally single, to poly folks, to best friends as committed to each other as any couple, to promiscuity for pleasure alone, to chosen family love, single parent love, love separated by visa processes, to folks separated by death or incarceration
all I ever wanted was to be taken seriously - like I spent a lot of my twenties just yearning to go to school, I mean like, I wanted the silly ivy castles and I wanted this "college experience" of being immersed in learning, of talking about IDEAS & doing difficult work, and
A short thing I want to say to sex workers and survivors about EARN IT is that we still have a lot of fight to fight. We are nowhere near the end on this bill. The time is now to support each other as a community with a diversity of lived experiences
I know I've said this before, but school-style English grammar & punctuation isn't "correct," it's a gate used to exclude. Learn it by necessity - to get into the rooms where power is held - but outside of that language is alive - constantly changing, & different everywhere
I don't know who needs to hear this, but I recently co-founded a coalition that is very intentionally a non-productive organization. We are coming from a disability justice perspective and in some sense this is about making our small coalition accessible to us, but it is also
The times publishing the CK op-ed with the inflammatory and racist word "p*mp" in the headline is just proof of the popularity of white supremacist politics on both the right and the left
1) you need a search tool that doesn't allow itself to be manipulated by folks with more cash to invest in search engine optimization (SEO). For this, I recommend using something through your local public library - most libraries will have subscriptions to academic databases
The point here is that we've inherited a model of "non-profit" work that made it impossible for impacted people to lead the ways that work was done. You aren't a better person if you work for free, you just have more of our country's misallocated & unfairly distributed resources
I mean I really think it's that abled people don't even know how to use a wheelchair! Or a cane. Or crutches. You only find them confining because you don't have the skills!
I got that. It was all my dreams come true in terms of the substance of the courses I took - I learned so much - history and theories, how to see through constructs we've so embedded in our lives that we imagine they are REAL in the way that like, a tree is real. It was fun!!
I love learning - being able to see things from new perspectives. But that's just my own pleasure. It doesn't DO anything but invisibly exist. But people hear "law school" & they take me seriously - HEAR me like 2 initials, J.D., are a megaphone - & it absolutely fucking sucks
in case you didn't already know: all tech companies see SW as a proxy for trafficking and are actively creating apps, data scraping tools, algorithms, etc to seek SWs out, to mine our posts & ads for "patterns" that will help "detect" info they'll use to "solve" trafficking
Literally the reason you know about any of this is because of sx professionals but go ahead and enjoy the privilege of consuming knowledge & products created by people who are largely excluded from legal economies
#howtobuildasexroom
@netflix
These tactics always increase when less-marginalized groups (e.g. white cis women) are threatened similarly to more marginalized (e.g. trans people) - the less marginalized start to take steps to separate themselves from the more marginalized to keep what status they had
@itsLotusLain
@laura_lemoon
It's infuriating. Because another reason I went to law school is to learn how to open the statehouses, Congressional offices, regulatory processes, + + +, to the countless brilliant whores who are so much smarter than the average politician it's not even a contest.
I can be standing next to another sx wrker &/or survivor [most recently
@itsLotusLain
&
@laura_lemoon
], two of the absolute smartest people I know, who have the experience & analysis to translate even their traumas into policy that would make the world better than ever, but in
I am a sex trafficking survivor, and
@laura_lemoon
speaks for me. She is one of the great voices of our movement. Tomorrow is International Day to End Violence Against S3x Workers. That includes the violence of "End Demand." Please read every word of this:
@itsLotusLain
@laura_lemoon
these rooms, so many people use degrees as a metric that they can't even hear the knowledge, the ideas, the way that e.g. Lotus and Laura clearly explain what is happening to our cohort and what we need, but still don't get listened to - it starts to feel impossible -
Hi it's me your neurodivergent friend you haven't heard from in 3 months, here to text you a 2000 word update & then disappear again as soon as you reply
Abled vaccinated people, please just wear your damn masks. It does not hurt you to do this. You may be 96% protected from serious illness and hospitalization, but everywhere you go there are disabled and chronically ill people who don't have that benefit. Just wear your masks.
OK beloveds, today 3 street-based s/xwrkers need groceries including my dear friend, a disabled single mom & organizer of color who spends every day hustling up supplies 4 wrkers. They only need $150, I know we can get there! Please RT!
cashapp $LoreleiLee
venmo: @ Lorelei-Lee
Advice from a cybersecurity expert (not me): now is a very bad time to share financial or other private information with twitter the company. Do not trust their privacy protections to function right now. Treat every feature here as though you risk exposure of any shared info
Being poor is time consuming, expensive, and arduous and requires navigating systems designed to punish you for being poor. Meanwhile middle class people barely know that these systems exist
Three-ish months ago, I was in a small medical bldg (in a northeastern US city) that had two single-stall bathrooms, marked "male" & "female." Beloveds, I was tired. I didn't want to say anything. I just wanted to pee. But -
I started sworking at 19 and while I literally was "groomed" into it or whatever by my 27 year old boyfriend, I simultaneously faced all the conditions stated below, along with what I now know was Ehlers Danlos syndrome + CPTSD making straight jobs un-survivable. There's layers!
I know there's this archaic tradition that says tips are a reward for good service, but we all know by now that tips are actually about making up for shitty wages. We all know that service workers survive or not based on tips
I once dated a straight guy who said, "It's so easy to date straight women. All you have to do is be slightly less shitty than the last straight guy they dated." And I keep wondering if that is how the Democrats feel right now
Honestly the way people talk to each other on this platform is the worst. This is like the party I really wish I hadn't gone to & I keep trying to make it worth it when really I should just go home
My therapist, trying to teach me to honor my desires: What's something you want?
Me: wealth redistribution
Therapist: okay, but that might take a while. Something attainable
Me: to be a better person
Therapist: *head in hands* okay, let's take a step back
At a training for repro organizers,
@MistressBlunt
& I were asked how to minimize power imbalance between volunteers when some have more resources & therefore time to volunteer, lead projects, etc. Simultaneously, Blunt & I said: "Pay them"
First pandemic flight. First flight using mobility aids. First time in an airport transport chair. I am very happy I decided to just bring all the damn pillows.
"Whether or not they were actually sex workers or self-identified under that label, we know that as massage workers, they were subjected to sexualized violence stemming from the hatred of sex workers, Asian women, working class people, and immigrants."
The MA Joint Committee on the Judiciary will hear 2 SW bills today - a decrim bill to repeal "common nightwalking" and give amnesty to SWs who are victims of crimes from
@decrimMAnow
and a client-criminalization/Nordic model bill. You can watch live here:
Just got the call that my wheelchair was approved!!!!! Eternal gratitude for healthcare providers who work endlessly fighting a terrible system to increase access for their patients❤️❤️❤️
Beloveds, I'm absolutely devastated to share that my beloved friend & movement member Jaylanee has been evicted with her kids & needs emergency aid. They need to be out in 24 hours & it's freezing. I'm heartbroken. Please donate if you can & PLEASE RT❤️
The person at the front said casually, "oh yeah, a customer said something to us." My jaw literally dropped - ONE customer - I said: that was me! Another employee said, "oh yeah we took the signs down that afternoon. You had a good point." I was like, THANK YOU SO MUCH 😮
2022: a nurse forgot to take out my IV before I was discharge and I forgot to remind her, so I went home, watched a basic-nursing-skills video, and took it out myself. Heading into this year feeling like a badass