colorblinding:

ardhra:

You know, for the record, I’m not white. But thanks for projecting your biases onto me and erasing my identity and my experience of abuse. Really. Despite my saying very clearly that I’ve experienced abusive exotification of Asianness and all my previous posts about being a woman of colour. Just cos it’s convenient for you to believe that anyone who disagrees with you is more privileged than you (this is pretty rich coming from someone who teaches undergrads in the USA), doesn’t mean I am.

This is what happens when you ignore racial and class-based structures and just ignore what is in front of you.

I know that not all sex workers are escorts or “actresses” (yeah, not all sex workers are women, either) for “classy alt porn”. I know this because I’m friends with sex workers and I listen to them when they tell me about their jobs. I don’t just repeat sensationalist titillating headlines about trafficking and sex slavery without evidence.

TW: RAPE AND SEX TRAFFICKING

To continue from my last post. In the event that you will not simply take my word for it, and require that I substantiate my argument, this is from an article by Meredith May written in 2006: 

Many of San Francisco’s Asian massage parlors — long an established part of the city’s sexually permissive culture — have degenerated into something much more sinister: international sex slave shops.

Once limited to infamous locales such as Bombay and Bangkok, sex trafficking is now an $8 billion international business, with San Francisco among its largest commercial centers.

San Francisco’s liberal attitude toward sex, the city’s history of arresting prostitutes instead of pimps, and its large immigrant population have made it one of the top American cities for international sex traffickers to do business undetected, according to Donna Hughes, a national expert on sex trafficking at the University of Rhode Island.

“It makes me sick to my stomach,” said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. ”Girls are being forced to come to this country, their families back home are threatened, and they are being raped repeatedly, over and over.”

Because sex trafficking is so far underground, the number of victims in the United States and worldwide is not known, and the statistics vary wildly.

The most often cited numbers come from the U.S. State Department, which estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labor and sex worldwide each year — and that 80 percent are women and girls. Most trafficked females, the department says, are exploited in commercial sex outlets.

Relying on research from the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department estimates there are 14,500 to 17,500 human trafficking victims brought into the United States each year.

You can disagree with me all you want, but you can’t disagree with the truth. It’s good that you have empowering notions of sex work (I am not being ironic here); and I do think that sex work is something that can be a wonderful and positive experience for many sex workers — especially if they consent! If it is their choice! If they want to do it! But when I am trying to discuss the notion of how Chinese  and APIA women are coded a certain way — and this way tends to be within a certain discourse of whoredom as constructed by Western male consumers, it is really fucked up and wrong of you to have come into my discussion and attempt to derail it by saying I was somehow making a whorephobic claim without thinking about the reality of what it means to be a “Chinese whore” in America. 

My reaction to you, as someone who was, in fact, forced briefly into sex work (I don’t think I can even call it that because it was against my will and I was briefly held captive by my rapist), was a combination of outrage, due to your complete dismissal and call for the erasure of the violent reality of sex slavery and APIA women’s fraught relationship with it insomuch as we are coded within that discourse and field of intelligibility — and trauma, because of the way in which you tried to say we (APIA women) needed to stop talking about exotification as though it is a bad thing; that sex work does not make people feel worthless; that the notion of buying a human being does not strip that individual of his or her humanity and agency. It made me feel like you were indirectly and unknowingly erasing my own experience and my rape, and the fact that I am still to this day being virtually raped by men who pay to view those images of my rape and its aftermath and gain sexual gratification by looking at those images. 

My humanity and agency was stripped from me that day, and every day of my life I must live knowing that somewhere on the internet, another piece of it is ripped from me without my consent. It was stripped from me because the man who raped me and made those images of me and distributed them over the internet did not think I was human. And because all those men who would pay to see images of a 14 year old child being raped clearly do not think I am human, either. Therefore to them, there is nothing human about my body, which is just a body, a yellow body, an exotic body, an Asian body which exists as a cheap sex commodity solely for the purpose of their own gratification.

And it is in this sense that I approach the notion of what it means to be coded as an Asian whore in America.