Thread by @JoLuehmann

Sex work ≠ sex trafficking.

Equating them harms sex workers and sex trafficking victims. Listen to sex workers and victims, stop making decisions for them.

The problem has never been sex work, instead it has been for a long time the white supremacist cis-hetero patriarchy.

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Making this conversation about sex trafficking when nobody even has all the facts on whether there was sex trafficking continues to take the focus away from the facts.

A white Christian man decided that instead of dealing w/the traumatic effects of purity culture in healthy

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ways, or instead of finding support, asking for help... he was going to murder Asian women because they “tempted him.” Ending his temptation to make him “pure” was a bigger priority that the lives of these women. Because he was taught the world revolves around white men,

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and all of us must bend to ensure they fulfill the great mandate given to them by their white Jesus. They are chosen.

Purity culture teaches men that women have to protect them from temptation, not make them stumble. The sin then becomes that these women were...

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making him stumble. Not that purity culture is an inadequate and abusive sexual framework that leaves all repressed and traumatized. Not that men have been taught they don’t have to be responsible for their sexuality. Not that women have been dehumanized and objectified.

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Not that Asian women have been exotified and fetishized. Not that toxic Christianity deals in shame, fear and guilt. Not that white men have been taught not to be held accountable. Not that white supremacy dehumanizes BIPOC in general and Asian women in particular.

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None of the actual facts were the problem, all that mattered is that Asian women were tempting a white Christian man; therefore the world needed to change to adapt to his needs, to protect him, to coddle him, to ensure his own comfort and peace of mind.

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And do we have to have a conversation about sex work and sex trafficking? Maybe. But that is not the conversation we need to have today. Today, and every day we need to talk about the capitalistic, Christian, white supremacists cis-hetero patriarchy,

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because without it sex trafficking wouldn’t even exist. Without it perhaps we’d all have a healthy relationship with our own bodies and sexuality, without it the dehumanization of women in general and Asian women in particular wouldn’t be a thing, the commodification of

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human bodies for the pleasure of white men wouldn’t be acceptable. And we wouldn’t be grieving the horrific hate crime that took the lives of 8 people, including 6 Asian women, who were doing their job and didn’t owe a thing, or cause any harm to this white man who murdered them.