Belgium is working towards new laws regarding sex work, making the workers eligeble for pensions, healthcare plans, contracts and overall more legal status. This was done in corporation with sex workers, orgs surrounding sex work and my place of work, the Union.

Now, I worked with former sex workers and human trafficking victims myself and I am aware of their struggles. I am not going to outright deny their right to fight for improvement.

What bugs me is the normalization of an industry that is heavily, and I mean very heavily, infested with human rights abuses. For every one empowered sexworker there are a thousand human trafficking victims. Giving them a pension is not helping in the slightest.

And then there is the whole thing of tying things like unemployment benefits to you wanting to look for work. Here in Belgium your benefits can be cut as soon as you refuse a job that is offered to you through government instances. What if we further legitimize sex work and you refuse a sex worker position? There have been caes already of the instances offering unemployed actresses porn jobs, so why not offer them sex workers contracts? And why not cut their benefits of they refuse a fitting job? Right?

And everyone is so happy about it. As if the whole industry is one collective of happy people doing a fun job instead of the horror it is.

Sorry for ranting but fuck me what a mess

  • darkcalling
    312·
    10 days ago

    Misogyny and patriarchy are so normalized and interwoven with our lives that we’re expected to take minor improvements on an abomination as progress. I feel your pain comrade.

    It’s like a slave strike that results in a law for better accommodations and maximum amount of corporal violence that can be used. It’d obviously be an improvement in a vacuum but it’s just making something that shouldn’t exist slightly more comfortable while lessening the ammo those against it have. The solution of course is abolition so anything that perpetuates it, normalizes it, gives it good PR, allows people to live in denial about it or act like it’s okay is frustrating and I must say confusing.

    This is just the limits of working with reformism and within capitalism I feel. It does make one want to condemn and step away from the whole thing in disgust as a farce.

    And I’ve expressed before these same fears. It’s logical and will happen which is why I’m against normalization. I’m not for criminalizing victims but not for legalizing it either for these reasons.