Quote:
Originally Posted by asiansam
The ironic thing is that while it is largely our Puritan beginnings that fuel these modern day witch hunts, our cultural puritanism reaches across both sides of the aisle. Despite protestations to the contrary, sex is viewed as dirty in most segments of our society no matter what political stripe. What that means is that mongers are bad in everyone's eyes, and providers are either bad, or more likely, just poor exploited girls who are forced to do what they do by evil traffickers, and are all yearning to be rescued by do-gooders, whether conservative bible-thumpers or militant man-hating feminists. Lest we forget, our very worst enemies are the ones most threatened by the hobby, namely, square women (or civvies), and it doesn't matter if they are Dems or Repubs. Their power resides in their pussies (or the withholding of same). They don't want their menfolk bypassing their bullshit and getting relief elsewhere.
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written by staff editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown
The site
www.TheReviewboard.net (TRB) was an online mainstay of the Seattle sex industry and it previously provided a space for clients and sex workers to dish on one another in the interest of lust and safety, as well offered a free-advertising venue. But like so many tools that make life easier for those in the sex trade, this one runs afoul of our government's new mission to "end demand" for prostitution, which it has rechristened "modern slavery."
"The persistent criminalizing of communication based on hypothetical sexual behavior should be disturbing to everyone," said Mistress Matisse, a Seattle-based dominatrix and leading sex-worker rights activist, "the use of police resources to raid and shutdown sex worker resources like TRB message board does not reduce trafficking or make anyone safer. Instead, it increases sex worker's reliance on (possibly coercive) third parties, and makes it harder for us to screen clients for safety."
If the past few years are any indication, federal agents are more than happy to spend their time playing website whack-a-mole. First it was Craigslist's "adult" section. In 2014, it was MyRedbook.com. Then, last year, the Department of Homeland Security took down gay-escort site Rentboy.com And everyone from U.S. Senators to obsessed Illinois sheriffs have been trying to shut down the classified-ad site Backpage.
The shutdown of
www.TheReviewboard.net is just the government's latest attempt to go after consensual prostitution by stoking fears about forced sex trafficking, and it doesn't matter if they're actually putting everyone more at risk and making trafficking investigations harder. The goal has never been about sex worker safety or saving victims, it's about punishing people whom the government views as blatantly skirting its rules and then wringing from them all the assets that it can.
A local TV news report aired that didn't merely parrot police talking points. News video ->
http://www.kiro7.com/news/sex-worker...s-saf/40003683 <- Newscasters actually allowed sex workers to speak for themselves about the site's shutdown and how it puts them at risk.
Maggie McNeill, an outspoken sex worker advocate, said "There are thousands of sex workers in the Seattle area who enter the profession voluntarily, and are not slaves, or victims, and the sad irony is that the narrative that the police and the prosecutors are using is that they're doing this to protect sex workers, when in actuality, by doing this they endanger sex workers."
Seattle recently received a $1.5 million grant from the Justice Department to help "eradicate human trafficking" and "end modern slavery."