the world's oldest profession.
i watched cathouse the other night.
tonight, i'm watching hookers at the point.
do i even need to go into detail about the glaringly obvious differences? nearly all of the women featured from dennis hof's bunny ranch are white. they're in reno. rural, kind of. the women at the point are brown. latin. black. a white girl here & there. it's mindblowing. they're not safe. the cameras on them are from a film crew, not a closed-circuit surveillance system. if something's 'not okay' for the women at the point, they're on their own. so many disparities. i don't even think the women at the bunny ranch come exclusively from a position of privilege -- rather, their choices to become sex workers seem to be motivated by pleasure, rather than a drug habit or the needs of hungry kids @ home. these women get $1,000 for an hour of their time. the women at the point? one tenth of that if they make demands & stand their ground. i don't know how much of that is clever editing, & how much of it is fact. there's a lot at play. sex workers aren't necessarily born sex workers. but the disparities that i see between the two groups are many, & vast.
*sigh*
and then i see this over at angry brown butch. and this at feministe. i have no words. my heart breaks to know that the names of people who should -- just like every fucking body else, be uplifted as they are remembered for their lives -- are having their names twisted in death. it's fucked up. it's wrong. it hurts my feelings. how could panic be an acceptable excuse? i panicked, SO I KILLED HER. what? really? wow. panic has caused me to lock myself out of my apartment. panic has made me drop shit on the floor. panic has never, ever, EVER caused me to kill someone.
& for fuck's sake, if we could all cry misrepresentation as a reason to kill . . . i would have murdered no fewer than 5 men i've had sex with, one woman i used to be friends with . . . & my own father.
let's be for real. calling someone a prostitute (whether they were or not) somehow magically justifies it, if you follow what's been reported. no. i'm not buying it.
excuses aren't gonna soothe the broken hearts of mothers
no explanation given could ever make enough sense of this shit. someone threw away your baby's life because of what? because they were mistaken about who your child was? no.
someone told me today: when ppl attend your funeral, their wailing is meant to be loud so that it's known in heaven that you were/ are loved.
i definitely hope that these loved & lost ones continue to be spoken of.
1 comment:
Thanks for this. Today I wrote a post about human beings insisting on perpetuating hierarchical relations. It seems we need to invent categories where some can be considered better than others. We obsess about it. One of the ways we reinforce those categories is by talking about how not safe it is to be a member of this constructed lower level grouping. Then, after it's been pointed out how not safe it is, there is carte blanche to teach "lessons" to those who insist on identifying in ways that locate them within the constructed lower levels of humanity. I know I talk about systems of domination. But when I do, I think about how these systems are maintained by individuals who are willing to intimidate, harm and murder. Individuals maintain the hierarchies. Individuals hopefully will one day completely destroy these levels, too. Until then, I continue to get terrified chills and watch my back as I hope to gawd that one day it's not my child. Until then, I continue to risk whatever I can, whatever privilege I can call on working towards the day when it doesn't have to be anyone's child. So sad. So horrible. So fucking unfair.
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