As of Tuesday FOSTA and SESTA passed the House and Senate, and Trump’s planning on signing FOSTA into law. I don’t know why more people haven’t been talking about the implications of this. Just now, as a broad example of everyday changes which will affect not a small portion of the country: the entire Craigslist Personals section is completely down because of their new liability for anything that happens as a result of people posting on their forum, something which will become more and more pervasive online: Check it out.
Want to talk about sex freely on the internet? Nope, too risky. What if talking about sex ends up in a situation where someone is trafficked?! The company which runs the platform it got talked about on is responsible for aiding traffickers.
Politicians are calling this “Sex Trafficking protection” but what they really want is an opportunity to prosecute Backpage so they can win talking points about how sex trafficking was done in during 2018 under Trump. It is ineffective rubbish at the price of free speech on the internet. Even the Department of Justice has weighed in saying these bills are unconstitutional, and trafficking survivors and sex trafficking advocates have spoken out against it as well. I wrote two articles a couple weeks ago about these votes and what they meant. Who knows, my own websites might even go down.
- My article on SESTA and
- My article on FOSTA (Freedom)
When will the people of our country look at the reality of sexual repression and start dealing with the issues it causes head on instead of swallowing more and more politically charged restrictions and lies?
I will tell you one thing: this bill is not stopping sex trafficking. It is, though, making sex work of all types — and even dating and domestic partnerships — less safe. When indoor prostitution is decriminalized sex workers of all varieties are able to work more safely, and domestic violence drops by around 30+% (as does the general population’s number of gonorrhea cases).
Human beings need to be and are going to be sexual. Period.
We should be defining sex work as work and figuring out how to help people who want to do it be safe, have resources easily and openly available for people who wish to exit that work so that they can leave the industry reasonably, and put in place meaningful sex trafficking measures for locating and dismantling those situations without further traumatizing the victims themselves.
This is utter bullshit. To be precise: it is sexist, homophobic, racist, transphobic utter bullshit. Let’s call a spade a spade here — sex workers by and large are not cis heterosexual white men… funny (not): Most politicians are.
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
Please support my work on Patreon. For one time donations click here: Support the Artist
~Thank you.