Here’s a small piece of a article by Molly Crabapple on the law that allows New York sex workers to be jailed for carrying condoms, and how a war on whores is ultimately a war on all women:
“…LGBT civil rights and sex worker advocacy groups are fighting against the use of condoms as evidence. Mainstream feminism is not. A movement that rightly and vociferously fought pharmacists who refused to fill birth control prescriptions has remained largely silent about women being jailed for carrying another contraceptive.
Mainstream feminism might remember that the war on women always starts with the war on whores. Then, that category expands to include everyone but the white virgin tying her knees together in church. Until 1996, Ireland locked up unmarried moms and rape victims in Magdalene Laundries, where nuns worked them to death to cleanse their imaginary sins. The nuns built those Magdalene Laundries to imprison sex workers. Tens of thousands of women died within their walls, of every walk of life except the very wealthiest.
A bill to end the use of condoms as evidence was introduced in 1999. Health and civil rights organizations have been fighting to pass it ever since. Audacia Ray, founder of the sex workers activist organization the Red Umbrella Project says that while many politicians are supportive of the bill in private, they’re afraid to champion it publicly. They don’t want to be seen as pro-prostitution…”
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