In a bizarre moment during her presentation, Moore screened a video of sex workers engaging in what she described as "commercial sexual exploitation," because, she said, "a picture is worth a thousand words. The video, from July 19, comes with a content warning for "partial nudity," and essentially just shows sex workers walking around on a corner of Aurora β nothing that will be surprising to anyone who's driven that stretch in the past decade.
But the video, which Moore described dramatically as "a snapshot of one hour of the sex trade on one corner of Aurora" was oddly familiar to me.
It looked like a surveillance video, and reminded me of the prurient YouTube account I reported two years ago that showed videos of sex workers walking up and down Aurora, seemingly without their consent.
Consent and collaboration are important when you're talking about supporting sex workers and survivors of gender-based violence. But the SODA and SOAP proposals are quite transparently not about creating more robust support for sex workers or people who use drugs: They're about getting them to go somewhere else.
And that dehumanizing, distancing approach was evident in the rhetorical tools committee members employed at the meeting, perhaps most of all in Moore's video. Even setting aside the privacy concerns it brought up, taking videos of sex workers to screen publicly at a recorded meeting that's also posted online β without giving anyone in that video a voice of their own β is an odd way to try to prove how against exploitation you are.
