You are now logged in. Forgot your password? Celebrity activists co-opt sex worker messaging in push for policing sex. Actress and anti-prostitution activist Ashley Judd has been joined by Late Night host Seth Meyers and his wife, lawyer Alexi Ashe Meyers, to aid efforts to keep sex between consenting adults a criminal matter.
And, like some government-funded "awareness" groups, Judd and the Meyers are stealing the language of the sex worker rights movement in their battle to keep sex work criminalized.
The celebrity campaign calls itself one for "decriminalization. It's based on infantilizing assumptions about women and second-wave feminist conceptions of sex work, in which all porn and prostitution are "violence" against women, even when women consent, and all female participants in sex work are victims, even when they insist otherwise. To Ashe Meyers and her ilk, women are too feebleminded to be held equally accountable for the sexual activities they participate in; instead, we must treat them as legally equivalent to children, while holding the men they consent to sex with criminally responsible.
Incredibly, they call this a feminist solution to sex work policy. It's modeled after similarβand failingβpolicies in Nordic countries, often referred to as the " Nordic Model ," the "Swedish Model," or in the U. With a lot of bad baggage attached to these schemes, and data showing their detrimental effects on sex workers, proponents of asymmetrical criminalization are now trying to rebrand it the "Equality Model.
Most infuriatingly, they have been pushing this plan to the media as prostitution decriminalization and portraying themselves as being on the side of sex workers. The New York Daily News described Judd's and the Meyers' efforts as "join[ing] with sex workers' rights advocates on Monday to call on state lawmakers to curb the exploitative practices associated with the sex-trade.
