promethea.incorporated

brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?

theunitofcaring:

I’m against criticising fanfic for being problematic because I’ve so rarely seen it done well, and so often seen it be destructive to young writers and to communities and to healthy conversation, that it’s probably better to just say “don’t like it, don’t read it”.

But I’m amazed that no one who is enthusiastic about criticising problematic fanfic says anything about what is objectively the most problematic fanfic, which is “character A is a sex worker and character B saves him and then he quits sex work and they fall in love” fics. Like, that’s perpetuating an actually really harmful message to an audience that actually mostly doesn’t know better, the people writing it often pretty much believe in the message as presented and basically never problematize it (also, none of them use the phrase ‘sex worker’), the characters are mostly morose caricatures who lament how they “fell so far” as to be “selling their body”, and there are disappointingly few subversions in which the sex worker is not, in fact, miserable and abused or brainwashed or enslaved (or in which they want to stay in sex work after Falling in Love.)

and seriously:

police departments will often do mass arrests of sex workers specifically for the good PR. It’s good PR because people believe that the sex workers are helpless and in need of rescuing, but these rescues basically never make their lives better and often involve horrific violations of human rights.  Treating sex work like a dangerous addiction you can save people from results in abuses of the people involved. Sex workers don’t think or speak in terms of ‘selling their body’, which is bullshit anyway; like everyone else, sex workers sell their time and labor. And you shouldn’t date a sex worker in the hope that, once they fall in love with you, they’ll “see they’re worth more than that” and switch careers. 

ending state violence against people involved in sex work (by legalizing it) is really important. stopping the hot fanfic in which the narratives that serve that state violence are used to fuel plot is less so. but I still find it unpleasant to run across, and it’d be cool if writers would throw in a scene that reflects the actual biggest source of violence and risk in the industry: the police.

2 months ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #nothing to add but tags · 169 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink

  1. thej-key reblogged this from theunitofcaring and added:
    Whoa whoa whoa, this conversation was about fanfic being problematic and unrealistic. Let’s go back there.
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    Thanks for the post. Do you have a source for the “vanishingly small share of trafficking arrests have anything to do...
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