"We need to face up to hatred of prostitutes...

[LJ_Reloaded]

... among feminists, too"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/05/hatred-prostitutes-feminists-brutality

Sunday was International Sex Worker Rights Day. This year it provided an occasion for sex workers and erstwhile colleagues including Brooke Magnanti (Belle de Jour) to highlight the vicious abuse they have received under the Twitter hashtag #whenantisattack.

Writer and former call girl Magnanti is forced to live in secrecy, her number taken to the top of any 999 summons list because of the innumerable threats she has received. One recent example proposed that she should be gang-raped and then executed. She has been accused of being responsible for rape, sexual slavery, and prostitution itself. Her family's privacy has been invaded to find the "causes" of her choice and her personal appearance derided, not least within what might otherwise be called the sisterhood.

Magnanti reminded us of Julie Burchill's observation in her 1987 essay "Born Again Cows" in the book Damaged Gods: "When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women." This would seem crazed were it not for MSP Rhoda Grant, who is sponsoring an "end demand for sex trafficking" bill in the Scottish parliament, declaring violence against sex workers a price worth paying to secure her proposals. As Magnanti tweeted: "Let that sink in. Politician thinks it's OK if people die b/c of her bill. No one bats an eyelid."

Is it not time we came to terms with prostitution? Instead, the prostitute herself (and it is usually her as regards societal venom) becomes the target for culture's anxieties about sex. The collective attitude would appear to be: "They gets their money, they makes their choice"; that choice being to surrender all claim to humanity's most fundamental physical and intellectual rights. The result being that across societies, our own "liberal" state included, whore-bashing – literal and metaphorical – is somehow deemed acceptable.

Hey, don't get mad at me, I didn't say this nonsense!