TonioTimeDaily

"Thompson: How do misconceptions play a role in the way we view sex work as work or not, and protecting the rights and lives of those in the industry?

Love: The stigma is that sex work isn’t a real job. People [don’t] really understand the amount of unpaid labor that sex workers do, or the fact that you are doing marketing and advertising and web development and photo editing and video editing and social media marketing. It’s like you’re doing all the things and yet people still don’t see sex work as work.

People still view women who do this work as hoes and sluts and loose women, not as businesspeople who are taking part in this multi-billion dollar industry. People still think that you don’t pay taxes on sex work That’s harmful because that mentality and behavior trickles into everything else—housing discrimination, the ways in which people are criminalized in children and family court, and so many other systemic issues from houselessness to depression. When people are not able to house themselves because they’re being discriminated against because of their job, or if people are treated unfairly in children and family services because they are putting photos and videos up online of themselves in order to feed their kids, that can lead to a whole nother set of issues."

"Thompson: How is your better understanding of this matter playing a role in diminishing the fetishization and degradation of disabled people and being more of a safe space?

Love: I’m a parent of two adult children, and having a grandson who is also neurodivergent certainly informs my work. We have a large number of people in the collective who also identify as neurodivergent or disabled, and there are more of us than people think. There are a lot of folks who are coming to understand that their brains and their bodies just work differently. Having very reasonable expectations of people, asking people about their bandwidth to take on certain projects, and picking up the slack when people can’t and not holding it against them—that’s one of the ways in which we try to level the playing field.

We invite people to be vulnerable when necessary, approaching them with compassion and asking them what’s going on and if we can support them in any way, and not penalizing people for not being able to take on something at that point in time. We all experience moments of exhaustion. Even if it’s not disability-based, we all have these moments where we just need somebody else to pick up the pace and it doesn’t mean that we’re not capable. It just means that sometimes we need help.

I encourage other people to do the same thing. Just because someone is struggling today doesn’t mean that they’re not gonna ever be able to do the work. It just means that today they are struggling. If we can continue to take the compassion that we would want for ourselves, and extend that out to the rest of the world in a very meta way [so] that the work in general becomes easier, whether it’s sex work or otherwise."

Side note: "LGBTQIA+ people do the same sexual positions, sexual acts, and everything sexual thing you can think of that heterosexual, cisgender folks do."

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