“When they’re dead they’re just hookers”

“Let he who HASN’T raw dogged a porn star just after the birth of his fifth child with his third wife cast the first stone.”

Everyone is pro-feminism until they can score some cheap political points by throwing women under a bus.

In this week’s Trump scandal, it turns out he had an affair a decade ago. Not a big deal, except that the Other Woman was… <music ascends into a sharp pause> a porn star!! <DUN DUN DUN>

And I am seriously grossed out at this reporting. Every popular media source out there cannot stop trumpeting that the woman he was sleeping with was a porn star. It’s the most important thing you need to know about her, and it has to be the first thing you know about her! It makes the affair so much worse than any normal affair with a normal woman.

I expect it coming from the right, but it bothers me that even the left is leading with this sort of thing. That meme at the top? It was shared by a dedicated leftist colleague. I particularly love the lurid description of the sex itself, the same way gay people used to constantly have all references to their relationships reduced to descriptions of anal sex. The leftist colleague explained it away as not attacking sex workers–rather just pointing out the hypocrisy of the GOP and their railing that sex work is bad, porn is a sign of moral decay, and multiple marriages are because of a lack of godliness.

I consider this bullshit. All these headlines and memes are feeding off the derision of sex workers. Feeding off it, legitimizing it, popularizing it, and spreading it. You don’t get to call yourself pro-women while helping to degrade sex workers. You don’t get to use “but this is an attack on Trump, and anything we do to hurt him is good!” as an excuse. This sort of thing marks a group as an underclass who don’t deserve the same consideration and protections of everyone else. You can’t reform the social narrative about sex work while reblogging things that reinforce that narrative.

I spoke with a friend about this, and they gave me permission to post the following (paraphrased, and with some alterations for anonymity’s sake)

I was married to a sex worker. I was pro-sex-worker long before that… but there’s a difference between being theoretically for rights/respect, and living the reality yourself. I felt the impact of society’s casual disregard of sex-worker’s humanity much more viscerally when it was directed at a person I loved and shared a life with. I realized some things were a bigger deal than I had thought. And the casual contempt is part of that. It’s what makes it OK to mistreat “those people”

There’s groups you expect it from. The religious fuckheads, the GOP, and all the scum on the right. It still sucks, and it’s awful. But it was when it came from the left that it really hurt. Because I guess I bought into the whole “we’re on the side of women’s rights” thing. And then one’s supposed allies treat one as just as dirty as anyone else. A supposedly liberal comedy show like Archer uses “When they’re dead they’re just hookers” as a laugh line, and it makes you want to throw up.

My spouse learned this long before I did. She didn’t trust anyone, didn’t count any group as an ally. She was completely alone in a hostile world. I want the world to be better for her, and others like her.

I dislike the refrain of “Listen to [group]!” because it always comes with an implicit “…and shut up.” I don’t want anyone to shut up. Say what you want, but realize it comes at a cost that some of your allies will feel. I stopped considering the generic-left an ally a couple years back, and this was one of the reasons why (although, of course, not the only one).

For reference:

Yeah. Fuck that shit.