daisysnotebook:

Two things:

1) When I, a woman of color and one who has too often been reduced to a fetish, take issue with the portrayal of women of color in pornography, please don’t jump in and use your boner as a defense of that. Doing so just proves that you have no understanding of how hurtful, misogynistic, racist, and downright degrading the porn industry is of WOC. 

2) I understand that the sex industry isn’t the only exploitative industry, and I respect every sex worker’s choice, but this isn’t about individuals. I don’t give a fuck if Stoya is a millionaire who owns her own business or how much she loves it. Good for her if she enjoys her work and feels empowered by it. But she can’t speak for the women who are forced to do sex work, the ones who do it out of necessity but would not choose to do sex work if they had other options, the prostituted women all over the world who were trafficked, abused, forced into sex slavery. Standing with them in no way invalidates the personal choices of those who are happily working in the sex industry and have chosen it because they love it, nor is it shaming sex workers as a whole.  Did you know that the number of sex workers who were forced into sex work— either out of absolute necessity because of capitalism or because they were forced by people who abuse and hurt them— far outnumbers those who chose it because it empowers them? And you want people to stop bringing exploitation up because you’re afraid of invalidating the experiences of a small number of people?

But we need to be aware of the exploitative nature of the sex industry to a lot of the world’s women who don’t share those positive experiences.