Please join filmmakers Tami Gold, Bienvenida Matías, and Alex Vitale for a screening of the film “Sex Work: It’s Just a Job.”
“Sex Work: It’s Just a Job” is a 56-minute documentary about the struggle to decriminalize sex work through an ensemble of people who work or have worked in the sex trades. It is an uplifting story of honesty, solidarity, strong alliances, and human warmth. At the heart of the film are deep questions about policing and human rights in America. Please see a full film description below.
There will be a Q&A after the film with Tami Kashia Gold, Director; Tahtianna Fermin, organizer and model; and Jared Trujillo, Low and Policy Council Equity NY.
Presented by The New School's Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute.
Co-sponsored by The SexTech Lab.
The Kellen Auditorium is wheelchair accessible, via the east door near the stage (there are three steps up at the west door). There is a designated wheelchair area at the back of the auditorium, otherwise all fixed seating. There are all-gender restrooms on all floors of the Parsons School of Design building (accessible by wheelchair), except the first floor, where the Kellen Auditorium is located.
Every day in cities across the country, hundreds of people are arrested for engaging in or offering consensual acts with adults.
Their crime? Trading sex for the money. They are harassed, denied housing, incarcerated, and threatened by police officers. Today sex workers are building a growing movement demanding that consensual sexual acts between adults be decriminalized. This is their story.
Today a growing movement is demanding that consensual sexual acts between adults be decriminalized, even when there is a monetary exchange. Advocates argue that this is the only way to reduce the harm experienced by people who engage in sex work by choice or circumstance – and to protect those who are coerced into it, but fear turning to the police.
“Sex Work: It’s Just a Job” shares the voices of an incredibly diverse group of sex workers discussing the ways in which they would benefit from decriminalization rather than current prohibitionist approaches including “end demand” or the “Nordic Model.”
The film tracks organizing efforts to decriminalize sex work in New York State, including the successful campaign to repeal the discriminatory “loitering for the purposes of prostitution” law, which was used primarily to criminalize trans people in low-income immigrant communities.
The film features a variety of organizing strategies including parades, mutual aid efforts, legislative lobbying, protests, and community speak outs interspersed with personal narratives from sex workers about the harms they have experienced from police and the ways in which prohibitionist approaches make them less safe. In addition, Michigan District Attorney Eli Savit and Economist Manish Shaw provide expert analysis about the harms of criminalization and the need for decriminalization.
The film was inspired by the bestselling book "The End of Policing," which lays out the ways in which police have been used to harm vulnerable communities rather than provide true public safety and the many ways in which they could be replaced by less harmful intervention that center people’s well being, not violent social control.
One of the chapters looks at the issue of sex work and lays out the inherent harms of using police to criminalize sex work as well as alternative strategies such as decriminalization, harm reduction, and improving the economic security of vulnerable populations. Prof. Vitale has been involved in sex worker advocacy since the early 1990s, while working at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, and is currently active in the Decrim NY coalition, working to fully decriminalize sex work in New York State.
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