Language is Unwritten

I want to write about language round trauma, exiting and the abolition of the sex trade.

I find language does fit the reality of being in or exited from prostitution. It is too detached to speak our truths.

It does not speak for or to our trauma, our long history of pain, our ability to survive by emptying our minds.

Spoken language based purely on facts is not adequate.

Words are just a surface, to speak to our truths we need to speak outside the boxes of just facts.

To understand some of the realities of prostitution, I tend to turn to fiction. I turn to the language of visual arts. I turn multiple ways of viewing each event.

I speak from a place of broken and fragmented memory.

Therefore fiction makes more sense than facts. Facts state there some kind of truth that can only exist when proven it is considered to be true.

But fiction said truth is seen from the angle you can know, experience and even change.

In the the worlds of fiction, truth is never singular by multi-faceted and constantly changing with culture and points of view.

This is clear shown in the use of language around prostitution.

This language is mainly the language of punters and sex trade profiteers.

It is a language that encourages us to see the buying and selling of the prostituted for male sexual greed as normal. Even as a basic human right.

It is a language that has no interest in the welfare of the prostituted.

Instead it is a language that dehumanises the prostituted.

This is the language that equates the prostituted with being goddesses. This is the language of novels romanticising prostitution. This is the language of sex work.

This language make the punters disappear, makes the sex trade profiteers unimportant – this language works by stating the lie that all that happens to an individual prostitution is her free choices.

The poison of this language is the lack of connection to the pushes that lead women and girls into prostitution.

There is little or no connection to poverty, to previous male violence.

There no connection to racism, no connection to women being second-class citizens.

This is the language language of the oppressor pretending it is being oppressed.

It is why I seeking and fighting for some other ways of exploring language – especially as ways to express the complex trauma that exited women have to live with.

I personally find inspirations from an eclectic use of language and expressions.

I reach the language of visual arts from the West and indigenous ways of seeing.

I find language from fiction with unreliable narrators. I seek inspiration from fairytales and classic horror short stories.

I listen to language in the street, listen to children.

I have always read fiction, listen to radio, watch TV, and been surrounded with the language of popular music.

Language is everywhere and nowhere.

Language is made by everyone every moment of the days.

I choose not invent new words, but used the old words to new ways of understanding.

I want simple words that read into highly complex and changing realities.

Simple words create a path for all – the issue of prostitution is too important for the elitist language of academia.

Language need to be understood by the many – when so many of the prostituted are being tortured, brainwashed, raped and murdered.

We need a language that speak clearly and head-on to the male entitlement and sadism that is the founding stones of all of prostitution.

I used the language of human rights, the language of those who have survived genocide and torture.

I see the language of survivors of wars and other man-made traumas.

My language is connected to the civil rights movements and other abolitionist movements.

This a start. Please join me on this journey.