blogging

Ren has two more posts up as part of her guestblogging stint at Feministe . They both address issues that seem like they should be stunningly obvious to anyone with progressive politics and who sees sex workers as human beings, but they turn out to be hornet's nests of controversy:

The Problem With Creating a Monolith:

There are very few things that give me hope these days, but one of them is that Renegade Evolution has landed herself a guestblogging gig at Feministe this week, writing about sex work activism.  She's already written three incisive, orderly posts, one giving an overview of the issues pertaining to sex work activism and her own personal beliefs about it; the second is a basic guide to the philosophy of harm prevention, especially as applied to sex work, and the third speaks out about decriminalization. They're both very orderly, intelligent pieces, but the thing that makes me most optimistic is that so far, neither seems to have triggered the weird, hysterical blend of erotophobia and misogyny that masquerades as "radical" feminism.

As mentioned earlier, on June 23 (next Monday) I'll be hosting the fifth Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy. If you have written or plan to write something pertaining to sexuality, sexual freedom, feminism, gender, etc., send your submission to amberlr [at] gmail [dot] com, or mark the post for me in del.cio.us. You can (and should!) also submit posts by your favorite bloggers. The carnival's mission statement, once again:

Sex Positive Feminists (or sex-radical, pro-sex or sexually liberated feminists) believe that women's sexual freedom is an essential part of women's autonomy.

It's no wonder it's so hard to get a rational discussion going about sex workers. Even for genuinely interested, well-meaning people, it's hard to get any solid information. Before you can even start talking about solutions to the problems that sex workers face, you have to first have to correct the ideas of what sex workers are. Any conversation in the mainstream media about sex workers starts out with icons forged from sensationalism and half-truths, as we've seen from the coverage of the Spitzer scandal lately. The images of trafficked junkies who need to be rescued or decadent young women who have had their souls twisted by their lives of deception sell papers and television time better than a nuanced picture full of shades of gray does.

I wrote earlier about Sex Work Awareness, the new activist group founded by members of $pread, SWANK, and PONY to address this very sort of issue in the public consciousness. They've just launched a new blog called Sex Work 101 devoted to answering the questions that most people have when they're just starting to look past the surface. Audacia Ray writes that the idea of Sex Work 101 occurred to her at this year's Women Action and Media conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Dear friend, Amanda Brooks, has an excellent post at Bound, Not Gagged. In it she discusses a certain big blogging kahuna and his ignorance of blogs & websites run by sex workers.  Seems he's never bothered to look, just assume he's cooler than anyone else because he believes in his own 'blogger authority'.

Here's what I have to say about it .