Our professions are not your punchlines Amy Schumer!
5/2/2018
Back in 2015, Amy Schumer performed what she considered to be a comedy skit about the gender pay gap.
In this skit she plays a woman working in an office setting, who goes to a strip club with the guys in the office after work.
She’s ‘not cool’ with the gender pay gap…
It apparently made sense to Amy to demonstrate the gender pay gap by doing a skit wherein a stripper, an erotic service provider, is choked to death.
I’m not cool with it Amy. I’m not cool with your portrayal of strippers as second class citizens. I’m not cool with you perpetuating the stigma of sex worker professions. I’m not cool with you normalizing violence against sex workers. I’m not cool with you Amy Schumer.
Amy Schumer is a privileged woman, a woman who has the benefit of equal protection under law, who makes millions, and she thinks it’s hysterical to use a dead sex worker as a punchline.
I’m not cool with her more recent support of SESTA, the ‘stop enabling of sex trafficking act’. A ghastly law, yet another in a long line of profoundly damaging legislation, always (falsely) promising to ‘prevent’ everything outside of the violation of sex workers and their human rights.
Amy and other privileged Hollywood figures (as usual) participated in a PSA to encourage people to contact their representatives in support of SESTA, which has had catastrophic impact on millions of sex workers; a law that is driving actual victims underground.
These so called ‘good intentions’ are the road paved to hell for millions of people, but Amy wouldn’t know.
What does Amy Schumer worry as she sits in her multi million dollar home with no concerns regarding how her rent is going to be paid this month or the next.
No one is engaging in unfair business practices which threaten her profession, well being and safety.
Is that your ‘sad’ ‘concerned’ ‘white savior’ face Amy? You sure didn’t have that face on during the skit where you were burying the stripper. THAT was funny to you.
The frames in the SESTA PSA where Amy and other Hollywood celebrities are holding signs saying ‘#IamJaneDoe are offensive.
No Amy, you are definitely not Jane doe. You are an insult holding that sign. How profoundly insensitive and tone deaf can you be? How profoundly insensitive and tone deaf can the producers of this PSA and the anti trafficking NGO’s involved be? Obviously hugely insensitive. Though in no way is this surprising, it’s par for the course.
Imagine Amy Schumer in her multi million dollar home, with her privileged career, her access to the public, falsely equating herself with marginalized, criminalized vulnerable people who do not have access to any of the benefits she does. This includes victims who she is helping to drive underground.
She has no fucking clue.
It is time to address the stigma perpetuated by comedians, actresses and actors who use sex workers as punchlines in their acts or portray sex workers furthering their careers; while these same comedians, actresses and actors, lobby for laws which further restrict the free speech of sex workers and our right to associate on and offline, while reducing us to second class citizens- all which have real world consequences for sex workers.
It’s time to let Amy Schumer and many others like her, know that their unfair business practices are being put on notice.
They must stop lobbying for laws that impact us without asking us what we want and need.
In fact- they should donate the proceeds of their shows to the sex worker nonprofit ESPLERP.org, funds to be used in order to address the negative stigma they themselves have caused and perpetuate.
Sex workers are not punchlines. Sex workers are human beings. Human beings whose rights must be acknowledged.
