Feminism and Stripping - [Guest Video]

Kinks (Kesiena) shares a few thoughts on whether or not stripping can be a feminist act.

More guest videos: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFF49AAFE68A5E43E

Want to do a feminist guest vlog for Those Pesky Dames? Click here for full details how.

Brooke Magnanti, the author better know by her alias, the fictional call girl Belle de Jour, has warned that the policing of sex workers in the runup to the Olympics is putting their lives at risk.

Sex workers face instances of violence at astonishing rates, largely because of the stigmatized nature of their work as well as misguided efforts to “rescue” sex workers which actually both drive trafficked individuals further underground and place sex workers in increasingly dangerous situations. For the women whose services were used by these American men in particular, the imbalance of power seems almost unimaginable. Clearly, the men who caused the harm to these women in Colombia and Brazil did so precisely because they knew they could, because brown-skinned women not of the so-called “First World” have always been assumed to be invisible, and because the gender-based violence that accompanied every U.S. war game in Latin America and the Caribbean has been buried, dismissed or even condoned. One should not assume that this history is not recent enough for average folks in Latin America to have collective memory of the role U.S. state agents played in these tactics that sought to crack down on dissent, self-determination and empowerment through terrorism.

Nakshatra: Agents of Violence: What the violations against sex workers in Latin America reveal about U.S. presence in the region 

Click the link to read the rest of Ashwini Hardikar’s post about US military presence and its increasing role in Latin American sex crimes.

(via bitemebeautiful)