Firstly sorry for being so quiet, I have been working on a pet project that I thought was going to be easy and turns out it is the most impossible concept I have ever had. I will keep working at it but not sure I will ever get an answer that I will be comfortable with sharing. However I felt today I needed to put a couple of things out there, so it has got me back into the flow of things. It is nice to get my head back round the day to day stuff rather than trying to fix the world.
So firstly good luck to @ethicalstripper who is up for a sexual freedom award, this is for her work with ELSC to mobilise change for dancers. She recently gave a view to a parliamentary committee discussing this and other things including Decrim of sex work. Because of the issues with licensing and social stigma it has been almost impossible for dancers to stand with their sex worker sisters because of the stigma that attaches and would feed back to the clubs. In the UK the strip industry has become more and more challenged and a minority of very loud voices has created an environment where clubs cannot allow any touching so clubs police their dancers. On a personal level I would say that any choice a person makes should be treated as valid and not policed by the moral minority.
We should stand together and fight to achieve personal freedoms but the way the industry is policed it makes it a major challenge. I can't think of a dancer I have met over the the last 25 years who would go ewwww and look down on prostitutes but because they don't want to have issues with the clubs they can't come out and say it. All sex workers are stigmatised to one degree or another and many cannot come out and say what they feel because of the judgemental nature of society. So yes TonyN stands up for Decrim because the right for a person to decide what they do with their body is a human right in my very no so humble opinion. Society is busy trying to divide various aspects of the sexual entertainment /adult businesses because they are easier to control if they are fighting each other.
So to all those workers out there no matter what aspect of the sexual entertainment industry you are in remember a divide front is a lot easier to combat. It will put words into others mouths to create a situation where people who should share common ground are pushed apart.
The strip industry needs to have its business practices and regulations reviewed, how this might be affected by Decrim I don't know but both parties dancers and prostitutes share more common ground because of stigma and portrayal by the press and other forms of media. Supporting Decrim should not preclude supporting change in the strip industry given the regulations clubs and dancers currently face. And certainly supporting reviewing and changing the strip industry legislation should not preclude supporting Decrim. I am just a humble man who feels the world has changed but we are still guided by laws written in a time when the church and it's morals had way to much influence on society. If people want to follow a religion I would never deny them that right but society has changed and it is time we recognised that and moved forward.
TonyN (tonyprince@acdcfan.com)
