As sex workers who also work within spheres of somatic sex education + sexological bodywork, we understand that the ethics of our field must include standing against all state sanctioned and imperialist violence against oppressed and marginalized peoples.
We are outraged by the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people and we denounce the financing and arming to the state of Israel by the US, UK and other colonial powers.
We take this moment to acknowledge and oppose the genocide happening in the Congo, Sudan, Armenia, and the centuries of ongoing struggle against colonial violence and cultural erasure endured by the indigenous tribes of Turtle Island.
As paraphrased from The Sex Worker Union in Berlin:
We are against the positioning of any one faith or race being used to fuel the fires of what is colonial geopolitical warfare. To ask us to condemn religious fundamentalism in the Middle East is cynical at best, when we, as sex workers and LGBTQ communities, are being targeted by Christian fundamentalists and moralists in the US who aim to "abolish" and legislate us out of existence.
We also echo the Sex Workers Union of the UK statement, in that:
"We recognize that this is a struggle against a colonial entity, and not a religious conflict. Standing with the people of Palestine is not a stand against Judaism, nor Jewish people, and we hold strong in solidarity with our Jewish community members in their fight against antisemitism and colonialism."
As sex workers, whose labor is largely criminalized and stigmatized in the US and Canada, we are familiar with political campaigns about moral superiority used to control and silence us and we are familiar with the tactics of dehumanization.
We believe bodily autonomy is a birthright for everyone across all intersections of culture, race, gender, class, sexuality, ability and religious beliefs. We recognize that colonial violence impacts the most marginalized in our communities and specifically impacts accessibility to resources and trauma-informed providers of care and pleasure.
We know that a trauma-informed practice harnesses space and pace, as well as a devotion to continual expanse of sensational resilience. It is our commitment and responsibility as
integrative somatic practitioners to build capacity for tuning into collective trauma on personal, local and global scales. We turn toward injustice by regulating with the intention to sustain commitment to action rather than neutralizing our systems into complacency and silence.
As practitioners we recognize that teaching about consent on stolen land comes with cultural discrepancies, especially for those of us coming from settler and white privileged backgrounds. While we believe the teaching of consent to be critical and liberatory, we also understand through the lens and scholarship of Black radical feminism, that the personal is political. We do not separate our work from a larger structural context of oppression.
We vow to do our due diligence in educating ourselves on the struggles of oppressed peoples as integrative to our facilitation around pleasure, consent and empowered choice and voice.
We vow to advocate for pathways of liberation.
From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free
In solidarity and dignity,
SW's within SSE
