This article has been written to address the whorephobic and transphobic narratives put forth by the article “Postfeminism is a plague” published in the 2024 Autonomous Women’s edition of Honi Soit.
The marginalisation of sex workers’ politics and queer politics from the feminist movement™ is deeply rooted in transphobia and racism. This is why we believe that this article warrants a published response.
As a grassroots feminist student collective with an autonomous Honi edition, we understand the value of having contributors from outside organising spaces, and that it is the responsibility of the editors to review submissions. This is why we recognise this not to be an individual contributor’s poor critique but an editorial mistake by a collective whose members have organised with us, stood next to us on picket lines, and marched alongside us in support of sex workers’ rights.
We believe that this appalling editorial decision of having the only article written about sex workers in Women’s Honi 2024 to be bigoted and disappointingly shallow. This is because the editors greenlit a piece that focuses on the culture war debate around sex work but not the work or the worker. This is an act of passing the torch from one bigoted SWERF to another, playing into anti-sex work, Catholic, puritanical narratives.
SWERF, a word created after and in the same vein as TERF, stands for Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist. There is nothing truly radical about this type of “feminism,” but many people purporting to be feminists, both intentionally or otherwise, leave sex workers and their work out of their discourse and activism.
In the following paragraphs, we will respond to the harmful sentiment that was propagated in the article.
Red Light 1: TERF Talking Point
Upon reading the article, the most apparent and horrific observation is how disturbingly similar the anti-sex work talking points are to TERF talking points. For every single SWERF point brought up, the argument is made in almost the same shape as the nasty transphobic hate we have to endure every day and night.
SWERFs are TERFs’ table
This is how bigoted separatist feminism works: it introduces purity into womanhood. It pretends to seek nuance, while promoting hate. It seeks to “save” the very demographic that it vilifies.
Red Light 2: Imaginary Sex Workers
An image of a woman in porn can be seen to stand in for ‘all women’, whereas an actual woman performing in porn is understood as essentially other. – Melissa Gira Grant
One of the biggest problems with the discourse around sex work is the inability and unwillingness to see sex workers as workers. This sentiment is true for the anti-sex work piece in Women’s Honi.
It is revolting to read an article disguised in anti-capitalist rhetoric that is devoid of class analysis. Wilfully or not, this publication ignores the humanity, the conditions, the challenges, and the difficulties that sex workers experience.
Sex work is work,
sex workers are workers,
and sex workers work because they need to buy groceries and pay rent.
“Unaware young women” are not “duped into starting an OnlyFans” by post-feminists or the girl boss media as this infantilising article suggests. We do so because it is our job, sometimes our OnlyJob.
This is especially relevant to us as queer people, since on this continent and all over the world, trans people often engage in sex work because they are locked out of traditional employment.
Sex work is estrogen and testosterone,
it is healthcare and education,
and it is food and housing.
This is why we understand there to be an inherent link between the devaluation of sex work and the denial of trans healthcare and housing. The detachment from these economic conditions is why SWERFism and TERFism exist. They are born from people who theorise about – but do not experience and cannot connect to – the struggles they claim to care deeply about.
In an attempt to contribute to a mostly academic debate around post-feminism, the writer was enabled by the editors to pick up their boxing gloves and punch down into the most silenced and sidelined corner, sex workers.
Red Light 3: Saviourism is Carceralism
The reality that the women’s movement™ and the world do not see sex workers as workers has dangerous consequences.
To us, the relationship between sex workers and their bosses is that between worker and boss. To SWERFs, however, it is seen as the relations between rape victims and rapists, and under this framework is born the Rescue Industry, consisting of SWERF NGOs, the Australian Border Force, the Federal Police, and the NSW Anti-slavery Commissioner. These organisations seek over-policing and deportation as a response to what they see as a moral problem.
“The ‘rescue industry’ seek to use our experiences to campaign against sex work, earning legitimacy by using our stories and competing for funding…” – Asian Migrant Sex Workers’ Advisory Group
NGOs like Project Respect and the churches campaign against the existence of women in brothels and massage parlours. These bigots send people into establishments posed as clients and “pray” the worker out once there is a booking or call the police on them.
Anti-sex work legislation like Trump’s [Fosta – Sesta], posed as attempts to rescue sex workers, do significant harm via financial discrimination to sex workers across the world.
In the most recent debate around the Equality Bill, a piece of legislation that would introduce a wide variety of reforms necessary for queer people, including adding provisions for sex work to the Anti-Discrimination Act, the Christian right was seen handing out bigoted flyers encouraging people to call for the bill to be voted down.
As we write this article, the Australian Border Force has detained more than 128 Asian migrants who are suspected of being sex workers, regardless of their actual employment. Most are young Asian women.
To this day, the Australian Border Force continues to raid brothels in pursuit of migrant workers to deport. This anti-immigration campaign is all done in the name of saving migrant sex workers from trafficking and modern slavery.
Operation Inglenook is the name of this sadistic campaign. Racist initiatives like this have seen migrant brothel workers jump from windows several stories up in efforts to escape the Border Force. This violence is justified by infantilising, saviourist narratives that refuse to recognise sex workers as workers and ultimately work to undermine women’s autonomy by calling into question their ability to make informed decisions.
Discussions about the precarity of sex workers’ conditions must be centred on the struggles that workers face in the workplace, not the supposed illegitimacy of the work itself.
Paving a Path Forward
We want to push back against the belief that there hasn’t been any nuanced debate about sex work. As organisers in the movement, we engage with this discourse on an extremely regular basis. The assumption that sex workers – who are raided by police, deported, refused entry into the country, evicted, fired, murdered, sexually assaulted at work, and denied employment – do not have ongoing liberatory discussions is paternalistic sexism. This claim delegitimizes the decades of organising led by women, trans people, and migrants across the world, falling in line with the misogynistic tendency to devalue women’s work.
In 2023, the biggest women’s contingent to May Day in Sydney was the Working Girls Contingent, with workers coming out from bedrooms, brothels, strip clubs, massage parlours, hotels, and the streets. Sex worker activists stood in opposition to the devaluation of women’s work and fought for decriminalisation as well as better working conditions – for a union. The contingent chanted bravely: “Listen up we’re talking to you, we deserve a union too!”
We believe that critiques of body positivity have a place in our movement, but a response to body positivity cannot be body negativity and purity, a political framework that moralises and paternalises us: queers and sex workers.
We oppose ideas of body positivity and body negativity because we refuse to be understood as just bodies. We are not saviours and we are not victims. We are workers fighting for our collective liberation.
Sex workers and trans women are not the feminine divine that exist to recruit people into our class position. At the same time, we are not recruited by some TikTok into doing sex work or transitioning.
We are workers, and that means that the focus of activist discourse should be on our industrial struggles, like nurses, midwives, cleaners, models, early childhood educators, dancers, or hairdressers. It should be on better pay and better working conditions.
The USyd Queer Action Collective continues the proud tradition of campaigning around sex workers’ rights.
At the moment, we are campaigning on the Equality Bill, a piece of legislation that will put sex work on the Anti-Discrimination Act and end religious discriminations against the Queer Community.
To answer the question posed in the initial article:
How do we ensure young girls are shielded from this? What’s a good counternarrative to put out there? How do we make it palatable and shareable (an unfortunate necessity in the digital age) enough to become widespread and combat the disease of choice feminism?
We say: The things that women need to fight back against is the devaluation of our work and our lives. We organise our workplaces and campaign against housing discrimination, financial discrimination, and racist migration policies.
The counter narrative is that women deserve equal pay, deserve financial independence, and deserve to not be detained, incarcerated, and brutalised for wanting to live. What we need is better material conditions and for an ongoing campaign against the sexist and racist institutions that seek to remove us from womanhood and from our work, such as the rapist–filled USyd Colleges, the Catholic Church, and the police force.
No bad whores, just bad laws!
