Thread by @EllyArrow

I actually go out of my way to not say that #prostitution is paid rape for every woman in the trade. I always say "many" or "countless" or "often". I never point to individual women and say "you were raped". That's not my place and it doesn't help anyone. What I do want is...

...for the many women who felt traumatized by johns including the not overtly violent ones, the seemingly ordinary ones, who stick to agreements to be able to trust that feeling and not be gaslit into "if this upset and haunts you, you were in the wrong profession".

I do think johns should be criminalized cause I think exploitation is the rule not the exception. But additional acts of violence (robbery, strangling, sudden assault etc) should carry additional sentences which is my understanding of the implementation of the abolitonist model.

It remains one of the biggest contentions between abolitonists and defenders of the sex trade whether prostitution itself is a violent or a neutral system. I do think it's the former and importantly that rape can and often happens with quiet aquiesence to someone more powerful.

I thought this was a lesson many learned from #MeToo. Not every rape is a punch in the face or being slammed on the bed. It's also wearing someone down emotionally or financially till they submit to something they do not want. I believe every woman who says "poverty was my pimp".

There are women who feel very strongly that poverty is not a pimp and that they have agency under those circumstances as well. Deciding on what law to support is a weighing decision. Its not possible to write a law based on both views. We must come down on one side or the other.

Getting everyone out who wants to leave while those content to stay hasn't worked out anywhere for many reasons but one being that #sexworkiswork disincentives prevention and exit programs. Additionally convicted pimps tell us they meet the demand if there's a lack of volunteers.

So I support a law that views prostitution as a violent system without saying every single encounter within that system is always rape. It doesn't have to be in every single case for the system and the men whose money and criminal activity upholds it to be horrific & destructive.