Kyle Payne is a Rapist

I felt too sickened to post this earlier, but I think it's important.

Kyle Payne is a rapist.

Not only is he a rapist, he is a rapist who has spoken out against rape and rape culture. This makes him not just a hypocrite, but a grotesque hypocrite. His hypocrisy is almost unspeakable as he has capitalised on his male privilege both to position himself as an authority on women's issues and an ally to them, and then to assault and violate and betray the trust of a woman.

I can't even imagine the perversity required to do such a fucked-up thing, but it sickens me to my stomach. And frankly, it makes me wonder about what we don't know about him. The clear fact that a sick fucking pervert rapist has been so outspoken on women's issues, makes me wonder what his motivation in aligning himself with the feminist movement really is.
Furthermore, as someone who has spoken out against pornography, he used the medium of photography with which to commit his crime. To me, there are very clear connections here that speak of some very twisted psychology.

He cannot be trusted. His apology is inadequate and will never compensate for what he did. His return to speaking about feminism and women's issues is arrogance and insensitivity of the highest order.

This evil fucker cannot be trusted.

While I idealogically disagree with many of the core tenants of radical feminism, I have empathy for their anger and where it comes from. Many radfems have had experiences that have shaped and directed their anger. I may not like them as a movement, I may find them hateful as people, but they are women who have been infuriated by a patriarchal world in which rape culture runs rampant over the lives of women.

This fucker has no place amongst them and his aligning himself with them is further violation.

That he is too arrogant and too self-obsessed to acknowledge this abusive behaviour is clear indication he has learned nothing and women are not safe around him.

Although not about Kyle Payne, I thought this article was an excellent and strong statement on the kind of rape culture this rapist has spoken out about whilst participating in, including the misleading characterisation of "rapists" and "non-rapists". After all, who would've thought such an outspoke "femanist" would commit an act of sexual assault, and yet...
No Person is "Born to Rape".

there goes the neighbourhood

There's so much involved in this issue and I'm not 100% confident I have the brain to express it all. But I'm going to try.

Street-based sex workers have been getting targeted by the general public, the media and predators (I know, I know, it's hard to tell the three apart sometimes...) in Islington, near the Hunter Valley here in NSW lately.

A forty-plus year history of street-based sex work is being called on to be shut down, and no cry of "clean up the streets" is complete without rampant stereotyping, Church involvement, moral outrage and... an increased incidence of assault against the sex workers at the heart of it all.

Yes, that's how the morally upstanding and ethical citizen handles an increased awareness of the hookers in his local neighbourhood: he rapes and assaults them!

What the hell is up with that?

I'll tell you what the hell is up with that: media coverage hysterically denouncng sex workers, dehumansing and condemning them, revealing widespread opinion that they're regarded with disdain and contempt by "normal people" convinces your average revolting predator that these are not people the world cares about and so are fair game. No one will respond if their rights are violated; they won't be heard and so the predator will get away with it. In fact, the predator probably considers he's done society a bit of a favour.

Not that the local conservative press reports anything about the dirty whores being abused though; they had it coming! That's been reported by the outreach worker from the local area - in the past 3 weeks, since the furore has been building, she's heard of four incidents of violent asault/rape and states that she has not encountered such a high level of violence in her role before.

But who cares about them? Worthwhile people are being inconvenienced here!

So inconvenienced how, exactly?

The righteously indignant will assure all and sundry that hookers are frotting in innocent people's front gardens, flinging loaded syringes about willy nilly and assaulting anyone who gets between her and her "trick".

In truth? Most street workers prefer to conduct their work discreetly and generally have places they prefer to take clients that they know is secure and private. As for the accusations of intimidation and harrassment - seriously? We're really expected to believe that?

I find it hard to believe for the same reason I find it hard to believe sexual activity is happening openly:

Sex workers are often the subject of stigma and discrimination.

Stigma and discrimination? Generally makes life a lot harder for people it's targeted towards to go about in a peacable way. Just ask anyone who's had to live with it. People... interfere. They harrass you. They insult you. They disregard you. Sometimes they hurt you.

Yeah, see, I'm not getting a whole LOT of motivation for the street workers of Islington to be all out and in the neighbourhood's faces about their work right there.

There's a disparity of power here, that's probably also integral to the indignant residents of Islington characterising this situation, and that disparity of power is NOT in favour of the sex workers. Do I need to draw comparisons between this and the old "all gays take drugs and have AIDS" or "all black people are violent criminals" stereotypes and similar hysterias around that rubbish that has occured in the past? I mean, are you with me on this? I don't want this to be freaking Marginalisation 101 here.

Newcastle MP Jodi McKay said the meeting was an opportunity for people to put their views on several potential measures.
She said these included setting up a designated sex-work area, increased policing, traffic changes, and improving street safety and cleanliness.

Yeah, GREAT idea there - just stable all the whores together so everyone can further Other and marginalise them and all the predators can capitalise on that and it can become a little tourist zone where all the nice, respectable people can drive through and gawk for Saturday night giggles.

Also, um, did the supposed sex worker in that photo give her consent for that image to be used? I'm going to guess, oh, leesseee.... NOT.

Yeah, memo? That's NOT okay, actually. I realise you see sex workers as subhuman, but it's still nice to get permission.

Behind the house of an Islington family my wife knows is a lane that is used by the prostitutes who work Islington's streets as a toilet. They defecate in the lane - hey, this is a blog - they crap in the lane, and jammed in a gap in a fence is a rag they use to wipe their bum.

Really? You've all gone down there and watched, have you? I hope you paid them something at least, you perverts.

Seriously, this kind of violently dehumanising characterisation makes me sick. Where's his proof?
To me this smacks of the old, tired association of whores with filth. I can already see it - some busybody has heard a few girls sharing a joke in the lane, has gone stickybeaking and has seen a rag jammed into the fence. Hey, there may even have been poop, who knows. It doesn't mater, even a middle-class busy body can add two and two and get five!

There's also a classism here that is really severely detached from the reality of life on the streets. Whilst I really doubt there's a communal rag that just hangs around for anyone to use, people I've known who've lived on the streets either routinely or for certain periods of their life, have openly discussed the fact that whatever materials are to hand will do instead of toilet paper. That's what happens when there's no easily accessible toilet facilities and you don't have a home to go to. Oh yeah, and those materials? Don't get reused.

I'm not saying this is the situation for the sex workers this ass supposes he's writing about, but of course he hasn't considered anything else might be involved here.

Also, I love the way he is associating hookers with deliberately "depraved" behaviour. Yeah, actually, given the choice? Most people, regardless of who they are, will take functional toilet facilities, actually. They're not doing it - supposing they even truly are, and I kinda doubt that - just to insult your wife's friends, mate.

Nearby are the pimps, ferals on BMX bikes often,

Look, Jeff, mate, I hate to out you as a client but it's the only way I can figure you know those guys are pimps and not just part of the local colour.

Seriously, this stereotype is so fucking American. Pimping is barely, barely a presence in the Australian sex industry.

You know, on that, I've yet to meet or encounter an American sex worker with a pimp.

Commenters on the articles (the various ones linked) are indicating the neighbourhood is quite a diverse and alternative one, suggesting to me this moral outrage is actually a symptom of gradual gentrification, rather than their upstanding neighbourhood being overtaken by debauchery. I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Certainly this commenter seems convinced (scroll to comments):

nice one guys....buy a cheap house becuase of the issues, then get rid of the problems and sell a expensive house. How dare you threaten to take money out of my pocket cause that's what you would be doing if you sue the council. You guys knew what you were in for when you bought a cheaper than average inner city home...live with it

But back to my pal Jeff....

As I ride my bike through Islington on some Saturday mornings between 6am and 7.30am they're there, prostitutes and pimps; they're there during the day; and they're always there when I've been driving at night.

OH MY GOD THEY'RE FUCKING IN THE MORNING! BUT THAT'S WHEN CHILDREN ARE AWAKE!!! NO! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

On another note... Jeff, you're... driving around the hookers an awful lot. Just "when [you've] been driving at night", eh?

You just dig fresh air and late night aimless drives do you?

Wait, am I making assumptions based on vague and cliched data? I am? Well, we can't say you didn't teach me anything in that case.

Thanks, Jeff. It's been real.


Moving on.

She said she had been working with the council, government agencies and sex workers' advocacy group ACON to identify plans to tackle the matter of sex work in Islington.

Well, Islington sex workers may as well roll over now if ACON's on board. They're fucked. Fuck you, ACON AND YOU'RE NOT A FUCKING SEX WORKER ADVOCACY GROUP.

That said, if the outreach worker up there is from SWOP NSW - she seems kinda awesome so with her on their side they may get a decent outcome. I wish her all the best with her endeavours cos I know she's extremely distressed by this situation.

And from the comments on that last article:

This is all a very strange business. Islington is booming, property prices are high, the suburb is so much better than when I purchased my house in about 1980. Prostitution is lower and there are far less issues. The best way to reduce prostitution is to help the street workers with their issues like housing, gambling, education, child management and drugs. The considerable number of residents who are clients should not be overlooked.
Posted by Bigfeller on 5/03/2009 9:34:39 AM

Interesting... still reductionist and marginalising, but at least the crazy pants are off. Thanks Bigfeller.


WE'RE HEADED FOR CHAOS!!!

THE prostitutes in Islington can't work from legal brothels, as they will not be allowed to do so ("Uneasy streets" Herald H2 7/3).
They are either drug- or alcohol-addicted or under-age, and the brothels exclude them, rightly.

Um, you know I hate to keep on asking this but... where's your fucking proof? Seriously. I mean, is Islington a town of detectives conducting impeccable and highly intimate investigation into the detailed lives of these sex workers? Or have they just watched too many episodes of Special Victims Unit?

Also, what the fuck? The brothels will "rightly" exclude them? So what's your solution, genius? You don't want them on the streets and you don't think they deserve to be in brothels. So how are they supposed to work?

I shouldn't have asked...

Alcoholic and drug-addicted mothers have babies to strangers and are allowed to give birth to damaged children. Enforced sterilisation is the only answer.

Hookers and junkies: just like animals, in a way!

I don't even know how to go on, after that.

There is some balm for this gaping wound. An anecdote shared by another worker in response to this issue. Formerly a brothel worker, she noticed walking her way to the parlour, befriending the women and even renting a room from one of them, that the Islington sex workers were making stacks more money than her, chose when and how they worked, had no overheads and never had to deal with stupid brothel owners.

She ended up quitting brothel work and starting anew on the streets.


I fucking love those stories.

these stories sell themselves!

Apparently there is a reporter from Channel 9's A Current Affair ringing around to various sex worker organisations, possibly others as well, wanting to do a story on the horror of sex work and the poor, broken, traumatised whores trying to leave it.

A Current Affair is basically The National Enquirer, sans Aliens, on television - but it's a popular show and engages the most sordid mentality of the average devoted television viewer.

She's been pitching the story in various ways but seems to be most attached to the idea of exit and retraining for battered whores and has been disregarding the advice of the most awesome sex worker orgs that have informed her exit and retraining in not "up there" on the average whore's list of priorities. She's flat-out not interested in hearing, because apparently these stories just sell themselves! The hook is the personal stories.

But not the personal stories of freedom and autonomy, and certainly not the personal stories that discuss the fact of it being just a job and certainly not the personal stories criticising the stigma of society making the sex worker's life difficult, as opposed to the industry itself.

No, if you want your voice heard as a sex worker, you better make sure you are broken so you can be exploited and exposed on national television! Of course they'll darken the lights and blur your face but they'll also wheedle out in exquisite detail all the horror and pain of your life and cut and edit to make sure it's as garish and exploitative as possible. Oh, and you have to be an ex-whore, or one desperately wanting to leave, just to be sure that the audience can actually sympathise with you.

One major sex worker org revealed that after all the workshops they do, they have the attendees fill out an evaluation form, which includes queries about what services they'd like. One option is support to leave the industry. The org believes only one or two out of a hundred have ever ticked that option.

Another worker, who'd been doing a research project, stated that the only person they met who expressed a desire to do retraining during an interview she met at a organisation focused on exit and retraining and who later confessed in private that she had only said that because she felt she had to for the org to support her to do further upskilling. She wanted the upskilling because her real issues as a mature worker was finding other ways - like the internet, which computer skills would help her with - to advertise, rather than compete with younger girls in parlours.

So apart from the fact that this would suggest an actual exit and retraining project created shame and stigma for workers accessing the service - not really the objective, is it? If you don't fit the little retraining box by being duly ashamed and humbled by your past and wanting so desperately to escape it then no upskilling for you! - it would seem that once again, as is so bloody typical with the industry, we're encountering a straight dichotomy. You either want to stay in the industry, or you want desperately to leave, and there's no inbetween or overlap at all.
Furthermore, the idea of specific exit and retraining for sex workers creates and reinforces the misbelief that sex workers are uneducated, disempowered, weak, unskilled and pathetic and desperately need help because the only thing involved in sex work is lying on your back and spreading your legs.

It's reflective of the general and widespread misunderstanding of what the industry even involves. My capacity to engage with people and socialise increased hugely through the industry, which I entered quite shy and insecure. I'm also sensitive to other people's shyness and capable of far more assertiveness. These aren't, by a long shot, the only skills that I have gained as worker, nor the only skills I have to self-define and specify to others who ask stupid questions and certainly not the only skills that are transferable to other industries and work forces.

I'm at that point now where all the skills involved in sex work seem so bloody obvious to me I'm amazed other people can't see them off the bat. Everything from handling money to negotiating services to advertising to managing clients - a huge range of practical skills are routinely utterly disregarded and denied. You can only be a whore if you're a victim, apparently. This insistence on reducing our jobs to passive activity is one of the contributing factors that keep whores down. Our work gets no respect, just as we don't. It's far more than sex simply being a skill - and really, considering the way sex is marketed as a skill in books and other tools designed for the average folk, the blindspot folks seem to have when it comes to the industry really is a shocker and speaks volumes about the stigma focused at it - it's everything else that's organised around the sex.

What pisses me off most of all is these people who do these stories claim they want to represent us, to take our actual stories out there - but they're not interested in talking to us unless we fit whatever preconception they're bringing with them.

Quite frankly, as someone who works both in the mainstream business industry and the sex industry, the most horrible thing about entering the average workforce is having to lie about my sex work experience and conceal it. There are gaps in my resume and I have to conceal significant parts of my life - which I hate - as well as let all the fantastic skills and experience I've gained simply remain unstated, as though they don't exist. That's disempowering. And that's not an experience created by the industry, but by all the puritanical fucktards who dare still to judge sex workers.