Radical
I’ve spent weeks researching it.
I watched countless people beat it with clubs, with police batons. I watched someone unload buckshot on it. Hilariously enough, it took the first shot well. The subsequent shots finally cracked it true, and obliterated it. Edged weapons and blunt objects however? No, it went right on working just fine with a few more scuffs. By the third week, I’d placed my order for Cold Steel’s Soldier’s Targe. A shield big enough to cover my chest, strong enough to take a blow. Something I could maneuver with. Something I could cover myself, my friends with.
Because the protests out there are getting fucking bloody. There’s no “nice” way to put that. People are getting beaten to death either by the nazis or the cops. Having a shield is yet another safety measure alongside black bloc, safety goggles, and means with which to cease the outpouring of teargas canisters. All things I never would have considered as little as two years ago.
The fact I would ever have to physically, perhaps violently, debate my right to exist was something in the back of my head, under a thick blanket of ignorance. “Oh, that’ll never happen,” I said, “We’d never have nazis marching in the streets. I and my friends are going to be completely fine”.
I was a fucking fool. All of us, including you, were. Because the nazis marched and then the people in my community started winding up dead, harassed into suicide, forced to flee the country for places only marginally safer than the US. The nazis and the white supremacists came, armed with the backing and support of law enforcement and the federal government. It all happened as a silent majority-people who swore they were cis-het allies to the queer community-stood by and watched.
You, the people who told us you loved the gays, that you had our backs, that we were all “good ones” who deserved happiness, were idle as you watched white supremacists kill us. In night clubs. In schools. In the street. You did nothing as they came for us because we weren’t you. No, we weren’t white enough or straight enough. Some of us were disabled. Some of us were sex workers.
That’s just a thing that happens to our kind, doesn’t it? An unfortunate part of our community that we need to look after. So long as it’s not in your fucking suburbs, you don’t care. You stay quiet. Maybe if you’re feeling particularly spicy, you’ll quote inaccurate crime statistics.
You watch the news and pretend everything will be okay because it’s not you.
As I sit writing this, I’ve told no less than three or four of my friends how to get a concealed carry permit. I’ve been openly conversing with my SW associates on how best to keep ourselves fed, how to keep ourselves employed. I’ve got to hear my BIPOC and disabled friends sigh, almost giving up against an insurmountable death machine that feasts upon them on the daily.
We’re all disposable to you under the guise of “god and country”, the good ol’ red, white and blue. Because we’re not you.
So, I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. You’re absolutely one of us. One day your turn will come, and if you earnestly believe for even a moment that separating yourselves from the communities with bullseyes on them will save you, you’re just as ignorant as I was. The powers that be-white supremacists, cops, evangelicals and more-will kill you quick or slow. The time it takes matters not-fascism is patient. Fascism has unlimited resources. Soon enough, simply not being openly fascist will be all it takes to shove you to the ground, to restrain you, to tear you limb from limb in front of your family, your friends.
They’ll be next as well.
You’re wrong.
But you don’t even know why you’re wrong. You’ve done literally nothing, so how could you possibly be at fault? Right?
Oh, let me count the ways.
A Pus Filled Throat Wailing For Blood
Capitalism is a hideous machine that runs by cannibalizing marginalized communities. Its communion is a holy one, powered by tax shelters with crosses on the roof and people who hold absolutely zero qualms about openly embracing fascist ideology. Its maw widens like the fabled whale of Ahab’s hunt, and in a blink your neighbors are gone. Your queer kids and siblings are gone. It takes respite from its feast to vomit dollars at you, then goes right back to ripping the flesh of everyone and everything you love from the bone.
At the time of this writing, we cannot escape capitalism in the west. We can merely engage with it in a way that preferably has us wading through the least amount of blood. We do this by building communities (professional and otherwise), strengthening and safeguarding our connections in those communities, then perpetuating our communities by engaging the market on our preferred terms. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we just rejoin that beast, perpetuating human suffering by telling ourselves “at least it’s not us”.
The means with which we minimize that suffering are based within who and what our communities serve, the power and financial disparity our communities have compared to others, and how best to elevate those to (at least) a position within which capitalism might deem us worthy of human rights.
It’s not easy.
The beast’s blessing doesn’t favor moral people. It doesn’t favor the kind, the meek, the empathetic or the sincere.
No, capitalism is a lapdog of oppression. As such, it will always ensure those who don’t fit the ideal of either consumer or worker become enslaved and broken within countless snares.You wake one morning and you can’t buy queer content because it’s a “morally unfit lifestyle” for payment processors. Processors who are pressured by hardline evangelicals like Exodus Cry. You can’t get paid for sex work for the same reason. All this and more gets told to you with a gore soaked pat on the back.
It’s for your own good, the beast barks, surely you understand?
Your community, this thing you’ve worked so incredibly hard to create, protect and perpetuate is light work to this hideous thing. It’s grown even easier to execute us via content catering algorithms, rituals that would sound arcane if you tried to explain them to a lay person.
But for you, I’ll try.
Algorithms focus on content that is a sure shot to ad revenue generation and profit for creators. Click a video about cats on Youtube, and more will show up in your suggested feed. What should be a morally neutral means of encouraging consumption becomes innately corrupted by its own drive. IE, algorithms across the web will show suggested content that is generating the most traffic/profit, which is often simply extremely similar content. Where this takes an insidious turn is via misinformation and outright propaganda. Seeing a critique video on a political figure will lead to speeches they’ve made, events they’ve attended, transcripts of their thoughts and much more. All for the low, low cost of your time and money.
Meaning, algorithms are a never ending game of “telephone” taking place in the deepest rabbit hole you never intended to trip into. Algorithms can build an entire subculture, lead to real world violence and destroy entire existences overnight. The utilization of them in the 21st century to oppress, harm, silence and kill marginalized communities at an unprecedented speed is a fascists/capitalists wet dream. No longer do you have to have an army. You can simply pay the right influencer, who via decentralization and virulent ignorance on the part of their audience will do all the work for you. It’s the war machines of the reich and Henry Kissenger’s darkest desire made manifest.
There’s a straight throughline between capitalist conquests and what we in the sex work community experience via deplatforming, harassment and destruction. There’s a direct pipeline between the puritans taking their first step in the new world, and the pressure placed upon payment processors to obliterate our industry by denying us a chance to eat, to live, to work.
It’s the overwhelming and obvious fact that we, by majority, are BIPOC, disabled and queer. Our multicolored flag offends the sensibilities of our oppressors for not being red, white and blue enough. For not engaging within the market via the “traditional” and expected means, and instead choosing to pursue our worth via jobs and lives that bring us joy.
That pursuit picked up exponentially during the plague, something capitalism and evangelicals tried hard to side step. Many of us within marginalized communities-specifically our disabled siblings and loves-took up sex work as a means to supliment wages lost due to layoffs, cut back hours, and the uncompromising position that working from home wasn’t “real work”. For some, it was a time of liberation and self actualization. We can, if we so desire, love ourselves and our bodies. If others chose to appreciate that financially, all the better. And yet, the grind culture of the west saw fit to destroy that and usurp any upwards mobility yet again from us. It preferred the disabled and neuro-divergent in compartmentalized boxes that it could clearly label-as accomplishments of mercy, or side shows to be laughed at and mocked. Damned be their medical conditions, that’s not how you were meant to be marketed. Capitalism wants to keep marginalized communities meek and pathetic in it’s own eyes, and the very concept that a disabled person could celebrate themselves and their own sexuality was simply too much to ask.
Capitalism is the root cause behind many of the NSFW, adult entertainment and queer communities woes. By its inescapable machinations all alternatives of payment processing and/or earning a living wage such as Bitcoin become shell games where our financial stability and mental well being are pawns for the same billionaires who delight in the lack of consequences at our abuse.
What’s more, algorithms have encouraged the manufacturing of discourse that in no way furthers the fight for human rights of the BIPOC, queer and sex work community. If you’re unfamiliar with COINTELPRO, now is the time to read up. The invisible, decentralized standing army built by political factions is aided in its goals through subterfuge, spy craft and intentional divisive dialogues intended to rip communities apart from the inside. Divided, we’re easier to conquer and destroy. Political party affiliation in the US more or less doesn’t matter so much as your usefulness for the dreadful, blood soaked machine of financial progress.
The concept of “simply existing” isn’t in the vocabulary of such adversaries. In the words of Gnostic The Poet, “non-violence only works when your opponent has a conscience”. Both parties play into that in order to encourage division. For republicans, failing to die and suffer for “god and country” means you’re a traitor. For the democratic party, you will never bleed enough for the cause to care, and if you did-they ultimately cowtail to corporate super PACs, no different than the boys in red.
All other political parties, movements or attempts at fighting for a better tomorrow have been met with assassination attempts (usually successful), media smear campaigns unseen since the cold war, intentional black book backing of harassment groups and intentional feeding into fear and paranoia within human rights focused advances.
The beast roars, and cries out in the tongue of computer science.
The world trembles, and we scatter for safety.
If you’ve ever asked yourself why your favorite creator has to resort to multiple platforms, multiple means of payment, creating content for free, starting go fund mes to cover medical expenses or simply pay bills, that’s why.
We are all victims of a death cult. One that will never be satiated until the streets run as crimson rivers up to their knees with the blood of those they deem disposable.
A Caustic Chord Singing Praise
Cults have their devotees, and in the case of capitalism, the largest and most prominent are organized religion-primarily north american evangelicals in the US and Canada.
I understand this claim is going to alarm and offend some of you. Frankly speaking, I don’t care.If a challenge to the reality of your ideals is all it takes to shake you, your god is weak and unworthy of praise or devotion. There. I finally said the quiet part out loud, the whisper that’s been haunting you in the long nights.
Back on course, churches of any shade in most countries can apply for tax exemption status. This means they have a disproportionate amount of believer fed money with which to influence city/state/national politics. Much like the bias of algorithms, organized religion is biased towards the sensational, the spectacle. Despite claims to the contrary, nobody likes a minister who whispers or a God that doesn’t enjoy a good scrap.
So organized religion tells you to go to war. Sometimes this comes via “god and country”, encouraging the (mostly men, mostly young) in its congregation to go fight a culture they’ve never encountered out of some divine mandate. If they’re to perish, all the better! You’ll be martyred for the cause and never forgotten! Teach those heretics by amassing a mountain of bodies!
Except, oh gosh, sometimes there’s not a physical war to go fight. Never the matter-the home front needs protection. You want to secure a future for your family, your children and race don’t you? Why, look at that mountain of dead! We’re dying out, man!
And so the machine churns and roars, spewing a smoke screen into the endless blue sky. The beast promises a blessing, and points its hoary hand towards…well, whoever is convenient at the time, really. In the last twenty years, that has increasingly become the same marginalized communities that have filled the beasts belly since time immemorial. If they’re not white, straight and cis enough? They’ll burn bright on the pyre.
Which is why hate crimes towards queer people have increased many fold. It’s why the life expectancy of black trans women is thirty-five. It’s why the queer cousin you have is afraid to go to school. War is profitable, and the church will happily pay to ensure anyone unlike them never gets a steady breath.
Sex work comes into this via the obvious-we’re composed of people society deems socially unacceptable, doing something incredibly “heinous” and immoral. Our actions often lead us to using contraceptives, which refute the beautiful gift of life. It leads to us taking proper precautions against STIs, which we should take as our punishment for being so wicked. If the entire country standing by during the AIDs crisis wasn’t enough to convince you, look at the lightning speed with which monkey pox was deemed “the gay virus” and something only queers could get. Organized religion influences these decisions with mountains of money that hasn’t seen an audit since Cotton Mather and Increase Mather decided witch hunts were a great way to seize property.
It’s easy to corral people and whip your devotees into a frenzy if you say the “enemy” is a sinful, plague carrying affront to god.
Except that doesn’t always work, so they decide to kill us via a multitude of tiny cuts. Applying pressure to payment processors, encouraging raging preachers to have us killed, getting local politicians to say they’ll “line us up against the wall and kill that grooming scum”. Couple this with those arcane algorithms, and what you get are darkly violent hymns and war chants not seen since the first crusade.
An army without ever lifting a finger, ready to kill and die against an “enemy” that is starving, homeless and dying in debt.
Nice “godly folks”, that lot.
We, as a community, have thus been forced into being nomads ever gazing over our shoulders.
Where We Lay Our Weary Heads Is Home
The hand wringing is earnestly the worst part.
“Oh, it’s not our fault,” the platform you’ve spent the better part of a year building an audience on will say, “We simply have to appeal to advertisers. It’s to deal with all those-you knows-that used the platform the wrong way! Surely you understand!”
They say this with a crooked smile, then follow it up with those age old lies.
“It’s for your own good” they say, “Think of the children!”
I’ve been told this at least once every four months since 2018, when Tumblr decided to do a NSFW purge. That I, and people like me, were an affront to common sensibilities even with proper age restrictions and law compliant means taken to ensure our content never reached the wrong people. Even with extensive tagging options. I’ve lost the energy to care when I hear news of a platform taking measures to exterminate us at this point. Instead, I take a breath and begin setting up counter measures, alternative platforms and more right away.
It’s an exhausting life, and several times I have asked myself if any of this was truly worth it. I could simply get a nine-to-five somewhere. I could bleed for the machine, this insurmountable and horrid thing I’ve no chance of beating. But then the idea passes and I’m logging into some new site a peer assured me would tolerate us, if only for a while. I give a silent prayer to gods I don’t believe in the people there are nice. I begin again, anew. As do countless others just like me. People who take every precaution to obey the law, to gate our content, to ensure we can live while also chasing the dream we’ve fallen into countless times.
At least for a while, we’re safe.
Make absolutely no mistake-an assault on NSFW/sex work content is first and foremost an assault on marginalized communities. The slide into overtly fascist politics in the west has increased these deplatforming methods over the last twenty years, though such policies were already being murmured well before 9/11. To engage in deplatforming communities deemed a threat to the American ideal-meaning anyone who wasn’t white and cishet-ensured that the machine got to keep running for a bit longer. The rise of the NSA, the horrendously invasive Patriot Act (followed by Biden’s recent homeland defense bill) and the counterproductive signing of SESTA/FOSTA gave the federal government unlimited power to attack us.
It doesn’t matter if you’re “one of the good ones”. There are no “good ones” in the eyes of fascists, save the ones they put themselves in the ground.
How many of your friends have left the industry and community already? How many queers do you know trying to “reach across the isle” politically, if only to ensure their own safety? How many times do you hear allies making completely tone deaf statements, as though they speak for the safety of us all?
How many more cis-het white saviors preaching from a mountain of our dead do we have to suffer before we realize the only people that can speak for us is us? That realization, if you’ve been in the community long enough, has been a forever ringing alarm bell that falls on ignoring ears within the greater political sphere of the US. Sure, some of us have run for office. Some of us have even been successful, despite character and real assassination attempts. But due to division within the community, the belching of dollars from the beast and lies, its rare policies and laws last more than eight meager years. Appeals to higher authority fail unless the circumstances are merited as a threat to national security.
As of this writing, we’ve endured well documented police brutality and violence towards the BIPOC community, queer people and sex workers at a rate equitable to genocide. Our president’s answer to that was “more police”.
So we’re all nomads. We word things carefully. We set up the equivalent of a community watch to keep ourselves safe, to keep our content platformed, and to ensure we can at least feed ourselves. This endless caravan grows weary, but we continue to march. For the alternative is to die in the wastes, another body for the pyre, the political machinations of people who will view our suffering from the pages of the local news.
To be in the NSFW/sex work/BIPOC community is to exist in a constant state of kinetic transition, praying that communications hold out another day. Because without them, you’d surely perish.
The cure is a united front based in fact checking, tracking of the financial routes of our oppressors, and being incredibly fucking loud and annoying to those that want us dead. Even louder than we already are, even more preposterously incapable of being marketable than we have ever dreamed. To fight means to wave your “freak flags” as high as we can and demand nothing less than control of the reigns of our lives.
“Become ungovernable” is a meek statement for people unaware of how deep corporate ties affect politics. No, I say unto you “become unmarketable”, be the radical boogeyman of gender identity and flesh that they fear you are.
Become the nightmare of the beast, wander no longer. Run your roots deep within your community, and never bend to the wind that blows from that beast. Let your will and being crack the concrete jungles of corporate america. Shatter their gilded halls with a thousand vines they can’t kill or ignore, that no amount of pruning will ever make pretty their modernist sensibilities again.
For our communities have always been. We always will be. They can kill us, they can strike at us, they can deplatform us. We persist regardless. Their genocidal ideals are modern machinations, and all machines are overcome by growth at some point.
And the caravan has grown so sagged with exhaustion, hasn’t it?
A Smirk In The Dark
You’re still probably just standing by.
But, I hope these words laid a few things bare. I hope it got across just how dire the situation is-and the length some of us are willing to go. But go on, ignore it all. Pretend I’m just some crazy person on the internet.
I’ll think of you fondly as I wake every morning. As I continue to stand against all of this, surrounded by my BIPOC/queer/disabled/sex work siblings I link arms with. Long after you’re gone, after the machine has used you and discarded your desiccated husk, I’ll look down. I’ll crack a grin.
I’ll still be fighting.
-j