The handouts are happening in the woke US state of Oregon. More than 75 strippers will be each given grants of $2,250 for assistance with rent, utilities and internet. It is all so 2020.
The New York Post reports:
Strippers of color in Oregon are eligible to receive federal COVID-19 relief funds thanks to a local sex workers advocacy group. Nearly $600,000 was made available in a grant awarded to the organization Haymarket Pole Collective, with priority for black, indigenous and transgender applicants, The Oregonian reported.
The grant will supply 75 sex workers with up to $1,600 in rent assistance, $500 toward utilities and $150 for internet, the report said. Two hundred others will be given a bag containing coronavirus protective gear, a COVID test, gift cards and other medical supplies.
Haymarket Pole Collective is the brainchild of PDX Stripper Strike, which was founded earlier this year by Cat Hollis and other strippers seeking racial justice in the profession. Sex work, like many industries during the pandemic, was ravaged by government-mandated closures of strip clubs.
To boot, sex workers turning to the internet to compensate for their in-person losses have had to endure increased competition, Hollis told the newspaper. “Not only has the industry been flooded with people looking for easy income, it had already shrunk in the number of spaces people can safely practice their work in,” Hollis said. “I think [sex workers] are in a hard spot, not for lack of trying.”
Ends.
The first point is how lockdowns are hitting the poorest hardest. Shares have soared to record levels, many Big Companies are reporting bumper profits, house prices are reported to be surging. The unprecedented money printing is causing a repeat of the 2010s asset bubble but on steroids. Meanwhile, real wages for the masses remain static at best. And this hits the poor hardest. So more and more women must realise the only asset they have left and sell their bodies whether as hookers or strippers. This trend – aided by the internet – is a decade long trend but the lockdown has, as this article notes, accelerated that trend.
This is happening not just in America but in Britain too. As your local Tory MP bangs on about why lockdowns are needed they, not meeting many poor folks who can tell them of the awful choices they are making, are pushing more women to sell their bodies for sex. Am I alone in viewing this as rather regrettable?
Then there is the woke nonsense. Why do strippers of colour or transgender strippers earn less than white strippers? I very much doubt that this is institutional racism. My suspicion is that it is all about supply and demand. I am married to a woman of colour but most men are not. Their sexual preferences are clear. I suspect that if black or transgender strippers earn less, it might just be market forces at play.
There was a time when feminists viewed pornography and stripping as exploiting women and thus as something that should be discouraged. But now some of the same folk seem to think that the state should be subsidising folks, or at least some folks, entering those professions. It is all rather confusing. Is it woke to suggest that taxpayers should fund strippers or that the State should try to stop the industry? I am so confused as to what it is to be a progressive in 2020 that I can’t answer that question.
My general principle is that the State should not subsidise any industry or participants in it which cannot survive on their own, whether it be coal mines where the coal has run out or banks which have imploded due to bankster greed or strippers who can’t attract enough clients. But maybe I am missing something here and the transgender strippers should win a better treatment than former coal miners?