Building Sexual Consent from the Ground Up: workshop in Toronto June 12

Co-conspirator Juliet November and I will be co-facilitating a workshop called Building Sexual Consent From the Ground Up on Saturday June 12, 2-4 pm as part of the Trigger Festival in Toronto. You should come! It’s free, accessible and childcare is provided all day. Rad! (More info on Trigger and the day-long workshops being offered.)

Juliet and I are doing this workshop for a couple of reasons. First because both of us have been really affected by violence within the queer community. I am sure you have too, either as a survivor as the friend of one. From times we’ve listened to our friends work through the shame and self-hatred of a drunken encounter that wasn’t entirely consensual, to not feeling like we could say No to sex with a partner indefinitely, to having nowhere to turn to get protection from a violent partner because they’d risk deportation. Don’t we love each other enough to do something about this?

Second because we believe in developing non-state community responses to this violence. We believe in taking care of each other, reducing violence and holding people who’ve caused harm accountable–without inviting in the racist, homophobic, capitalist, sexist, ableist police or social services, for example. Our foundational vision is one where queers and trans people rely on each other–not state systems of control, containment and exploitation–to develop solutions to the problem of violence, understanding that violence as part of, and intimately connected to state and international violence.

Third, we are sex workers and know that our skills and strategies around establishing consent (individually, collectively, verbally, non-verbally) are diverse and fierce. We want to share them with our community!
Building Sexual Consent from the Ground Up

Learn from skilled sex workers how to better negotiate sexual consent and make great sex happen. This no-touch workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to gain practical skills in negotiating sex and help us uncover our individual and collective strengths and styles around sexual negotiation. We will talk about how to get the love, sex and intimacy we want, resist stigmas against sex and whores and how to end partner/date violence in our communities! All are welcome!

Saturday June 12, 2010 / 2-4 PM / The Raging Spoon, 761 Queen st West (near Bathurst) / Free!

Edited: June 7th, 2010

Organizing beyond Facebook against violence to sex workers

The last few weeks have been full of rage and mobilization for sex workers, as a group called “Kill Your Hooker so You Don’t Have to Pay Her” appeared a few weeks back and was quickly gaining members.The group has since been taken down, as somebody tells somebody tells somebody to report the site as offensive and eventually it was taken down. It feels good to have this small victory, but there are many many more similar sites. This kind of whore hatred is everywhere on the internet. One of my clients was once showing me a t-shirt online he wanted to buy that said “I Love My Hooker” but when he searched the apparel company’s website using the search terms “t-shirt” and “hooker” all this awful stuff came up as I watched in horror: Good hookers are dead hookers; Nobody plans to kill a hooker in their hotel room; Dirty Hookers Fishing Team You’ll definitely catch something (and that’s a real sport fishing business, grrr); etc etc I won’t go on. Can you imagine what other group of people you can openly joke about killing? Whose bodies are considered so worthless and not human? Well I can think of a few: people with disabilities, aboriginal women, transpeople… sadly I can think of all sorts of sites and jokes that make light of violence against us and others. I want to make a stand against these overt expressions of violence and the deaths they produce. But we gotta remember that violence against sex workers is not just about “stranger danger” – ie evil and random frat boys joking about our deaths online, or phantom mystery clients who chop us up. Sex workers face intimate partner violence (which has more ramifications if you are used to police violence and criminalization of your work, especially for people of colour), spiritual and psychic violence generated by whorephobia (since we often have to hide our work and we don’t have access to our histories of survival under colonialization, especially for Aboriginal people), state violence at the hands of government, police and the medical establishment, and I could go on and on. But I will save that for a later post on unpacking our ideas about risk for sex workers (but you could start with this amazing piece It’s You I’m Afraid Of by Juliet November.)

It did all feel a bit weird, though, to have everyone in my community mobilizing to send complaints to Facebook. Usually I am getting angry messages about the way that Facebook is censoring breast feeding photos, or gender pronoun options, or sex positive groups, or queer performances, etc. I guess that’s the old chestnut of freedom of speech. How do we want that right served up? Well, the learning and work I have been doing recently about advocating for decriminalization over legalization and regulation, as well as the reading and thinking I have been doing about the Prison Industrial Complex, including the inefficacy of police and state responses to violence in my community is directing me to question, more and more, the amount of time and energy I spend convincing the capitalist and governmental powers that be to hear me, or represent me, or provide services to me. All those things are important, no doubt. But I’m dreaming about other responses that build the sex worker community, that fortify us and that speak to our differences across race, class, gender, and ability, that make it possible for us to confront and transform violence in our lives.

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Edited: February 16th, 2010