For readers interested in learning more about how not to be labeled as registered sex offenders, a good first step is not to rape unconscious women, no matter how good your grades are. Regardless of the strength of your GPA (weighted or unweighted), if you commit rape, there is a possibility you may someday be convicted of a sex crime. This is because of your decision to commit a sex crime instead of going for a walk, or reading a book by Cormac McCarthy. Your ability to perform calculus or play football is generally not taken into consideration in a court of law. Should you prefer to be known as ‘Good student and excellent football player Trent Mays’ rather than ‘Convicted sex offender Trent Mays,’ try stressing the studying and tackling and giving the sex crimes a miss altogether…

Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richardson are not the “stars” of the Steubenville rape trial. They aren’t the only characters in a drama playing out in eastern Ohio. And yet a CNN viewer learning about the Steubenville rape verdict is presented with dynamic, sympathetic, complicated male figures, and a nonentity of an anonymous victim, the ‘lasting effects’ of whose graphic, public sexual assault are ignored. Small wonder, then, that anyone would find themselves on the side of these men—these poor young men, who were very good at taking tests and playing sports when they were not raping their classmates.

Society often treats women as if we are part of the marketplace, none too dissimilar from the latest model car or an expensive pair of designer sneakers. That we’re something or someone who can be had for a price – whether that price is actual currency or “niceness” treated like currency. It’s not that women don’t lament how the “hot” guy or the “rich” guy or whoever the “ideal” guy is is more fixated on looks and you’re too short/fat/plain/unsophisticated/whatever and he doesn’t see you. But the response is different. Men are supposed to have clear opinions on what they do and don’t want. Women are supposed to be passive actors who can be bought with stuffed animals and on-time child support payments.

But if you’ve ever interacted romantically with a woman, you know this is not true.

This idea that if you are “nice” to a woman – say hello, open a door, call her pretty – a man is entitled to time, attention, a phone number, a date, sex, whatever is woefully ridiculous as it presupposes women aren’t human beings, but products. That if you put in enough money or niceness tokens in them you can have the date you desire, but in no other part of your life this technique works. You don’t get the raise just for showing up at work every day. You don’t (or shouldn’t) try to buy friends. And friendship with someone of the opposite gender isn’t supposed to be a way station leading to friends-with-benefits-sex … unless that’s something you both want and agree upon.

It’s not guaranteed.

When someone tells me she has feminist concerns with sex work, knowing that sex work is my only solution to the problem of poverty, I have a lot of trouble taking her feminism seriously because she is not taking the reality of my life seriously. Acknowledging that “there has to be a better way” isn’t good enough. I need to not live in poverty. Not after the revolution. Right now. Knowing how I feel about some feminists’ disregard for my experiences of intersecting oppression, if someone offers me a version of feminism that doesn’t confront its own colonizing or transphobic practices, I’m not going to take that very seriously either.

(snip)

It is time to demand that feminists explain why they are so threatened by sex worker voices. Murphy says we should “start with research,” but that research has been going on for decades. If abolitionists choose to ignore everything that doesn’t tell them what they want to hear, there’s not much sex worker advocates can do about it.