Survey - Sex Work

[Davidontour]

I applaud your positivity David, you're obviously a Glass-Half-Full kinda person
Attitudes towards the LGBT community have improved dramatically in the last decade.
This, in my opinion, is partially due to a number of gay people in the public spotlight 'outing' themselves.
Sports figures like Paul Galvin, Politicians like Leo Varadkar and the Rose of Tralee whose name escapes me.
When you have champions like these to say 'This is me and btw I also happen to be gay' then it makes being gay
more normal and understandable. And society always fears what it doesn't understand.
That's why I would have plenty of time for Kate McGrew. She has started a ball rolling by 'outing' herself as a sex worker
and for that she is to be congratulated. It's always difficult to be the first.
Hopefully in years to come we might look back on threads like these and ask ' What was all the fuss about?'
Here's hoping anyways

I do agree on your 'self-outing' point and applaud Kate McGrew for doing so, as well as Laura Lee and Charlotte Rose amongst others. Given the stigma involved, they are very brave to have done so.

However two ladies I personally know gave honest and detailed interviews to the BBC, showing the day to day realities of sex work here. Instead of using these to help educate the public, the BBC decided to make the programme entirely about trafficking victims, specifically one from 2009. That would have been fair enough had they balanced it with another programme about consensual sex work. They didn't and ''have no plans to.'' It's the equivalent of doing a documentary on aviation, but only portraying the industry through the experiences of plane crash survivors.

I'm old enough to remember when the gay community were regarded as a ''bunch of poofters'' in the media and when the idea of the press suggesting the Catholic Church harboured child abusers would have been unthinkable. Eventually (after far too long), these taboos were finally broken and it took guts to do so.

In the meantime though, we have a media so lazy they'll print any unsubstantiated crap from the likes of TORL word for word. They'll push the trafficking angle because the notion of 'sex slaves' makes for more lurid headlines than ''women make tidy living from consensual sex''. And they'll ''out'' sex workers in a ''vice expose'' despite the fact that said workers are breaking no law and still won't be under proposed new laws.

The thing is that anyone with actual experience of sex work (including current SWs, clients and even NGOs) know full well that SW as portrayed in the media is so much bullshit.

Sooner or later a reporter who isn't a gutless wonder will challenge the myths. To the guy who visited here a few months ago, it isn't too late to strap on a pair.