Highlighting the prevailing media treatment of women in sex work: “visual titillation with a side of moral rebuke,” LB discussed the rentboy.com shutdown, power narratives, agency, and the real harm of policies conflating trafficking and sex work.
A well-read sex worker knows that male prostitutes are rarely, if ever, written about, or spoken of, with such condescension. Dominick, a former escort who, for three years, wrote the popular Ask Dominick advice blog for Rentboy says, “The disparity boils down to sexism.” The “Pipe down, you poor, prostituted women, and let the real feminists tell you what’s what” tack is, he says, “trite heroic fantasy couched in paternalism.”
Big Bad Rent Boys, Sad Little Call Girls, and the Language of Sex Work