Well, That’s What You Get

Well, that’s what you get, I guess. Really, this “Stupak” uproar – you uproarers – that’s what you get. Yeah, I woke up feeling a tad bitter – so apologies right off the bat for expressing myself thusly, but; fuckin’ a, that’s what you get when you don’t fight for the rights of all women.

How can any feminist expect to be ‘given’ rights over her uterus if she doesn’t also demand rights over her vagina? We’ve given these people, these anti-choicers, so much when it comes to women’s sexual rights that it will be impossible to get reproductive rights.

Hey, Look At This

From The Guardian :
20 Oct 09

There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein’s weapons.

In the case of sex trafficking, the role of the neo-conservatives and Iraqi exiles has been played by an unlikely union of evangelical Christians with feminist campaigners, who pursued the trafficking tale to secure their greater goal, not of regime change, but of legal change to abolish all prostitution. The sex trafficking story is a model of misinformation. It began to take shape in the mid 1990s, when the collapse of economies in the old Warsaw Pact countries saw the working flats of London flooded with young women from eastern Europe. Soon, there were rumours and media reports that attached a new word to these women. They had been “trafficked”.

[...]

The evidence was left even further behind as politicians took up the issue as a rallying call for feminists. They were led by the Labour MP for Rotherham and former Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane, who took to describing London as “Europe’s capital for under-aged trafficked sex slaves”. In a debate in the Commons in November 2007, MacShane announced that “according to Home Office estimates, 25,000 sex slaves currently work in the massage parlours and brothels of Britain.”

There is simply no Home Office source for that figure, although it has been reproduced repeatedly in media stories.

[...]

Repeatedly, prostitutes groups have argued that the proposal is as wrong as the trafficking estimates on which it is based, and that it will aggravate every form of jeopardy which they face in their work, whether by encouraging them to work alone in an attempt to show that they are free of control or by pressurising them to have sex without condoms to hold on to worried customers. Thus far, their voices remain largely ignored by news media and politicians who, once more, have been swept away on a tide of misinformation.