Text of Petition to Support Sex Workers’ Rights

Petition to Support Sex Workers’ Rights
Support Nevada’s State Rights!

When sex work is a part of the underground economy, workers have no labor rights; they suffer violence, stigma, isolation, fear and criminalization.
Support the basic labor rights and human rights of your local sex industry worker!
Sex Workers Outreach Project asks the people of Nevada to:
• Support the right for sex industry workers to be free of violence and exploitation.
• Support the rights of individuals to choose sex work.
• Support sex industry workers’ rights to work and travel just like other workers.
• Promote labor rights for those who freely choose sex as their work.
• Support the rights of consenting adults to make individual choices about their sexuality.
• Stand up and fight against coercion, deceit and violence against women.
• Spend our tax dollars to combat sexual assault, rape, and abuse.

Sex Workers Protest ‘Feminist’ Attacks

October 5th, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Robyn Few 1-877-776-2004

Event: Sex Workers Protest ‘Feminist’ Attacks
Date: Friday, October 5th
Time: 6 PM
Location: in front of the Glitter Gulch, 20 Fremont Street
City: Las Vegas
Website: http://www.swop-usa.org, http://www.boundnotgagged.com

Sex Worker Showdown in the Streets of Las Vegas

On Friday, October 5, 2007 sex workers from Nevada and California will meet in the streets of Las Vegas to gather signatures for support of prostitutes rights in Nevada. Sex workers, advocates and allies will gather at 6pm in front of the Glitter Gulch, 20 Freemont Street to counter-protest the self-proclaimed, ‘radical feminist’ “Day of No Prostitution March.”

“Prostitution is a legal industry and the workers should be supported, not subjected to discrimination and stigma from so called feminist fringe groups,” says Robyn Few, co founder Sex Workers Outreach Project USA. “We are here to say, NO SEX WORKER PHOBIA WILL BE TOLERATED TODAY.”

“Anti-prostitution zealot, Melissa Farley has descended upon Las Vegas with manipulative statistics and rhetoric, claiming to help prostitutes by criminalizing their industry. Of course that forces it further underground. Fundamentalist feminists like her are harming, not helping prostitutes,” says Carol Leigh of Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network.

Celebrating Sex Workers

How taboo is that, really? Saying sex work is work? Or good work? Step back, or step up, because I want to take this day, the day proclaimed by some UNLV students as a Day of No Prostitution, as a day to celebrate sex workers.

What I loved about sex work: that I could retire from a whole career in my life before thirty. I loved retiring, it’s true. I felt powerful after having organized my life so that I could participate in society on my own terms. There were times when sex work felt beneficial in its own right, but more so, sex work let me have my cake and eat it, too — how sinful, to be able to be an activist, budding journalist, go to college, and not have to hide.

For everyone who has claimed there’s some cottage industry of sex worker activists who come fully-formed from women’s studies programs, who do sex work just for “credibility” in order to sell a book, or defend “pimp culture,” or whatever supposed spoils of war we get for being whores? Really? Sure, whore stigma is leveraged differently across race and class and gender lines, and it’s usually the already-pretty-privileged workers who get airtime. Can we just call that what it is — social injustice, and not evidence of some huge pro-prostitution contingent in the media, government, and politics — and fight it together, please?