Thread by @ElSandifer

Reading Catherine MacKinnon’s latest War on Porn boosting column in the NYT, and it’s genuinely stunning the sort of unsupported and flimsy bullshit that you can get away with publishing as long as your position is “porn bad.”

Like, the amount wrong with this paragraph is mindblowing. Calling the term “sex work” gaslighting, as if it wasn’t coined by someone working in the industry. Acting as though the plural of anecdote is data. Just appalling, C- high school essay writing here.

That’s setup for this astonishing attempt to assert universal experience among sex workers. No citations to speak of. Those that exist elsewhere in the piece are a quarter century old, dating back to pre-Internet sex work.

Imagine unironically using the language of “gateway drugs” in the year of our lord 2021. And again, WHERE’S YOUR FUCKIN’ DATA CYNTHIA?

There are entire solar systems existing in the vast space between these two sentences.

To say nothing of the fact that a 20% platform fee is FUCKING FANTASTIC. Ffs, Amazon takes 30-65% to distribute ebooks. Nobody calls them pimps. They arguably should, but they fucking don’t because then they’d have to decouple their notion of exploitation from mere sex.

I mean, let’s not delude ourselves, a lot more people are working in Amazon warehouses out of desperation and a lack of other options than are in sex work because of it, and treating those as two different groups with different problems helps neither.

And at the heart of this, the vast unspeakable truth: that countless sex workers exist who are not doing it out of any sort of desperation, who quite enjoy the work, and who are proud of their skills.

These women have to be furiously erased in the name of feminism, inconvenient as they are to the same narrative of continual and absolute female disempowerment that underpins the gender critical feminist arguments.

And yet it’s transparently obvious, effortlessly verifiable that these women exist. They are happy to tell their stories. They do so regularly. And disingenuous idiots like MacKinnon completely ignore them, insisting they don’t exist in the name of protecting them.

It’s fucking disgusting is what it is. It’s so comprehensively dishonest and slimy as to undermine the basic assumption of good will. One wonders what compassion this sort of activism has for any sex worker unwilling to play the perfect victim for them.

Except one doesn’t wonder, because in truth you know. You know exactly how this sort of fact-blurring, self-righteous, willful ignorance of any perspective that runs counter to its own treats people.

There’s good, important work to be done on behalf of victim’s of sex trafficking and people whose participation in sex work comes out of a sense of lacking other options. But people like Catherine MacKinnon do nothing but hinder that work with their amateur hour bullshit.