This article is published in the number 24-25 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 20, 2023
While the Republic Day parades were taking place in Rome, the first congress of sex workers was being held in Bologna on 2 June. In Italy, by the Merlin law of ’58, prostitution is not prohibited, but exploitation, facilitation and solicitation are, which in fact expose even those who practice autonomously to risks. The associations gathered in Bologna, in a meeting the following day extended to include experts and the public, requested the decriminalization and recognition of sex work, in order to be able to pay taxes on their incomes and enjoy the rights guaranteed to every worker in good standing. I admit that I can’t completely consider prostitution a job like any other, but the level of our individual sensitivity cannot be confused with the level of protection and the commitment to guarantee personal safety. It is undeniable that it would be better if everyone – including sex workers – enjoyed rights and protections. I’m reading these days Dear asshole (Fandango), the new novel by the feminist writer and former sex worker Virginie Despentes, who shocked the French in 1993 with her book fuck me (released by us in 1999 for Einaudi), and I posted a page in which he has the addict protagonist of the new novel say: «…I liked hard drugs, violent men and speed. I’ve been lectured a lot more about drugs than about men.” Thinking about the last heartbreaking feminicide, that of Senago, is inevitable, but what struck me so many years later fuck me (where the protagonists were a young prostitute and a porn film actress) is that the theme of the violence of the patriarchy, in all its forms, is always at the center of Virginie Despentes’ thoughts. They are thorny topics. But who are we affluent white women to decide what women who have other problems and other horizons than ours must do to survive? Our moral opinion on the subject is as irrelevant as that of males on breastfeeding and abortion.
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Source: Vanity Fair
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