 She's a fellow at the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of Sex Workers Unite. This is a very different place from 1977 when I used to stroll down there on southern on the south of the market area, so Yeah, I wasn't quite ready for Salesforce. We were a different sales force then At the jack-in-the-box, of course, but anyway, and that's even gone I'm gonna read to you from the final chapter of my book This is this is the chapter called sluts unite disrupting Horfobia and slut shaming and I think because it really hits it's into some of the cultural Issues that we've all been dealing with more lately. I'm gonna do that, but the book really begins much earlier than that The poster said I am a slut and I vote and so does everyone I sleep with Fabiano Rodriguez is not a sex worker She is an Oakland based artist a printmaker and an activist Activist ally who works with incite women of color against violence and other resistance groups the posters she made for International Women's Day in 2012 came because quote. I was fed up Patriarch is destructive to society It's a form of violence against women and there is no place for it in contemporary culture Conservative talk show talk show host Rush Limbaugh had just called Sandra fluke a slut Because she wanted Congress to preserve funding for Planned Parenthood. I decided it was time for slut positivity and some major ass kicking of those conservative women hating men another poster politicians out of my poon tang chance and Chance and sign and signs about sluts who vote weren't the polite messages Observers expected to see at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina in August 2012 Especially when they were being delivered by immigrant women Protesters in the United States keep your government off my pussy. The message was culturally and politically disruptive Straight people don't think of sluts as voters much less as a block of citizens Who would cast their ballots on issues of sexual liberty and gender-based violence the message messages? politicians out could also be read as mocking sex scandals involving the public officials and sex workers or someone other than their wives and spouses Stopped the political rise of more than a few men and women on both sides of the aisles of Congress Why shouldn't politicians be called out for the hypocritical slut negativity? Tied intricately then to the politics the cultural activism in which these women and men were engaged sought to read it or seeks to redirect people's attitudes and change public opinion and then policy for Sex worker activists years of working to decriminalize prostitution have brought only a handful of legislative and courtroom victories and many of these have often been reversed later Despite that slow progress negative opinions against sex work and sex workers have lessened Especially among the younger classes of American society It was then perhaps predictable given the vicious war against sex that was waged waged by religious conservatives and anti-porn feminists in the 1980s and 1990s That some people wanted to find out for themselves. What was so bad about sex porn and queer politics? What they found was that bad could be a lot of fun Adult film stars like Nina Hartley and Candida Royale Veronica Vera and Gloria Leonard were making their own feminist porn Betty Dodson was still teaching women about masturbation and there was Joni Blank's Good Vibrations in San Francisco Many San Francisco many sex workers well same thing And I know many sex workers had access to the new technology giving them greater power over their working conditions and freeing Them from the middlemen who in earlier times had demanded large shares of their earnings Working as a stripper or a go-go boy could be liberating even if club management sucked and The dressing room camaraderie was better than any women's studies class Performing gender became another means of self-expression redefining the meanings of camp and drag the rediscovery of 50s underground Icon Betty Page led to the recreation of a pin-up girl with Dita Vontiz as the leading new star young women revived burlesque and the striptease erotic dance arts on the verge of extinction Generating another Vibrant subculture with several varieties within it Cultural shifts are years in the making and spread over generations The 1980s were by no means an easy decade for sex Conservative fear mongering about porn queer and alternative sex AIDS urban crime crack and black male violence Challenge the creative efforts of sex workers and other sex activists to shift the narrative Proclaiming no more nice girls radicals decided to embrace that stigma Refusing to drink the Kool-Aid of the Reagan Revolution Susie Bright and Debbie Sundahl began publishing on our backs in 1984 Thumbing or was it perhaps fisting their noses at the politically correct off our backs and Financing it in part with Sundahl's earnings as a dancer through at the Mitchell Brothers through their Though some commercial presses art galleries and theaters wanted to exploit outlaw representations created by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley and Holly Hughes Bright remembers that because we were women printing sex We ended up paying the what amounted to an enormous bribe to be printed at all There were neither federal grants nor fairy godmothers for most creators Working girls the film of 1987 was that independent unrated and still I think under appreciated film by directed Lizzie Borden shot in her own Manhattan loft it focused on Molly's 18-hour shift in a Manhattan brothel Showing the showing the people she worked with and her clients conveying the banal the daily realities of the job Without judgment or titillation It is still regarded as the gold standard for realism in prostitution pictures writes former spread editor Monica Shores in large part because Borden based the characters on women that she knew Ivy League Educated smart humanities majors who were shut out of the yuppie jobs their classmates had Film historian Mark O'Brien observed that the sex workers Marginality is not a function in this film of their otherness, but actually of their ordinariness They're too disturbingly like us to be acknowledged Books by sex workers that disrupted what straight people thought they knew was are another kind of activism The voices of the French poots poots that were heard in Claude Claude Jauguet's prostitutes our lives published in English in 1980 including the women who went on strike in Marseille in 1973 and in Leon in 1975 Protested their oppression by the police and the Catholic Church the memory of that strike Inspired Frederic Della cost the head of Cleis press to issue a call for stories and essays documenting quote women's resistance on issues that have previously Previously been either invisible or distorted by sexist ideology That book became sex work writings by women in the sex industry published in 1987 and introduced the term sex work to the into public discourse Then when the former president of the screen actors Guild became president of the United States The culture wars the sex wars and the porn wars split the producers of commercial culture sex negative political rhetoric and government policies that Institutionalized straight family values often seemed overwhelming in the 1980s distrust in electoral politics eroded while conservative Republicans and the greed is good capitalists controlled government The confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the new restrictions on abortion sexual privacy and sexual harassment Claims Undermine the belief that the Supreme Court would uphold justice and equality Activists turned to culture to the meme warfare to restore and even reinvent the popular Reinvent the radical is is radicalism needed to change the system Critical engagement with popular culture became that political strategy to attack the status quo The sexually repressive culture and politics of the Reagan and Bush years became the obvious target Horses and strippers and and butchers were the working-class activists that Susie Bright remembers in the sexual story She wanted to tell they weren't they were telling them in a women's pro porn movement They weren't academics quotes so eloquent and rational it would have made were so swoon The factor the scholars and the lawyers of the feminist anti censorship task force Debated Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and the women's studies crowd in the academic journals and in court sex workers and sex radicals made their own films wrote their own books and published their own magazines fact the Feministic anti-censorship task force which formed in 1984 spoke about the theory of Pornography with its focus on censorship and freedom of expression as constitutional rights But while anti porn activists tried to shame fact members by calling them pimps The group didn't ever address the fact of sex work with women and men and others who work in the sex industry fact successor feminist for free expression FFE formed later in 1992 to resist new attempts at censoring those sexually explicit materials and articulating of feminism that was not Anti-sexual since the beginning Candida Royale and Veronica Vera as well as anti sprinkle and other adult film performers have been board members of FFE and their speakers yet. It was two decades It was not until 2012 that before the sex positive feminist for free expression Actually came out in favor of decriminalizing sex work And that was as a result of Vera and Royale's intense efforts whores and strippers and a handful of butchers and porn stars took on Horophobia and used a cultural activism to challenge it and Then former stripper and bikini kill singer Kathleen Hanna lip syncs lipstick slut on her stomach in 1992 and inspired the girls around the world to start a fucking riot Riot girls were committed to creating their own media to controlling their own representations Younger third wave activists questions the anti-porn and anti-sex rhetoric of the mainstream feminism and women's studies scholarship as Lusty lady organizer and comedian Julia query joked women's studies majors employed in the commercial sex industry Were the new stereotype the sex positive feminism of the 90s had pop culture appeal for those Ironic gen Xers it could also be packaged marketed and commercialized in 95 Mac cosmetics contracted With RuPaul as its spokes model for Viva glam lipstick with every cent of the selling price going to the Mac aids fund monies that have helped start and to fund the st. James infirmary and other sex workers groups to do harm reduction work sex workers also cashed in Penning autobiographies novels advice books often with mainstream presses Norma Gina Amal Dovar Carol Queen Tracy Kwan Erica Langley Shauna Kennedy Lily Burrana Even the unemployed workers in Sheffield, England did the full Monty the 90s made pro sex feminism cool But lipstick feminism even Viva glam's requires constant reapplication to stay bright Women in Toronto organized the first slut walk in April 2011 Because they were tired of slut shaming and victim blaming the police the media and everyone else needed reminding that rapists were criminals Victims did not ask to be sexually assaulted London organizers declared rape is never ever okay if she is wearing a mini skirt Not if she is wearing a mini skirt Not if she was naked not if she was your wife your girlfriend or your friend not if she was a prostitute Sex positive feminist might party all night with the sluts But some folks couldn't abide the whores from the other side of privileged town a prostitute commented 17 year old girl on slut walk The slut walk tumbler will do anything for sex and have no standards Sandra fluke is running on an anti prostitution pro Anti-trafficking platform for Congress right now Despite the acceptance of sluts the prostitute remains that deeply embedded symbolic marker between decency and Disrespect the ethical slut engages in sex of her own or his own quote free will while the dirty whore insists on paying are getting paid for sex sex positive feminist and other sluts believe that there is nothing morally wrong with Consensual sex between between two or more people in private or for adults in a semi-public setting The horofobia then remains pervasive in the social psyche showing its ugliness even in sex positive communities The positive emphasis on sex work confuses those straights into thinking that sex work is about sex not work The cognitive dissonance that deep chasm with stereotypes and prejudices Interferes with the capacity of civilians to hear sex workers speak about their experiences Stories that don't conform to the super fun and happy sex work narrative Ten to flummox pro sex feminists they can identify with privileged Exotic dancers porn performers and professional dominance even fantasize about being one But think junkie whores need to be rescued should be prevented from working in their gentrifying neighborhoods Such disrespectful treatment leads to that silencing Ignoring that mansplaining or rewriting what sex workers have to say Writing in the blogosphere recently sex workers say they're frustrated with the unaccritical acceptance of sex positive feminism Furry girl the Seattle based founder of sway is also the blogger behind Feminism because she got tired of trying to shoehorn my life into a useless Ideology like a pair of ill-fitting high heel shoes the habit of always trying to put on a good face For sex workers leaves little room for those who have had not so good experiences They fear talking about the bad stuff because they're straight audiences whether they are pro feminists Prohibitionists or the media tend to stuff those stories into an established morality tale about sex violence and bodily integrity But the truth is that by telling our stories with all the gory glory gory details and the delicious Specifics we can get to the revolution that sex workers are creating rights now