No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. But there is also a larger story here, one that Jabbour herself symbolizes. In recent years, I have watched sex-work activism of the type PACE practices become co-opted by social-justice ideology, whose elements include intersectional feminism, critical race theory and radical socialism.
The same hypocrisy that was captured on video when Jabbour denigrated an Asian event attendee plays out, writ large, in the way some activists now regularly prioritize their own moral grandstanding over a reasoned and tempered approach to advocacy. While sex-worker activism once was its own unique activist subculture, deeply informed by women with real experience in the field, it now has become just another branch office of the generalized, Twitter-mediated progressive movement that has colonized liberal politics.
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And sex workers are suffering for it. In expressing such concerns, I was hardly alone. But even as a critic of the new law, I was alarmed by the way in which its negative effects were being exaggerated by activists.
This was especially true of the university-trained academics and former academics who increasingly tend to dominate the field of sex-work advocacy, some of whom have gone so far as to claim the new law would cause sex workers to die.
This is a trend that has been building for some time: The field is now steeped in the belief that our entire legal system is fatally infected with bias toward sex workers, who we are told are constantly victimized and oppressed by the police and criminal-justice system.
