Dulce with today’s earnings as a Dominatrix 
—Maggie
Sex workers, submit pictures of your furballs and funds here.
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Suzy Hooker
Suzy Hooker is the collective byline for any T&S contributor who wishes to remain anonymous for a particular post.
Hey guys,
I want to submit my little camera hog/piggy bank for Pigs & Paper! His name is Chorizo and we’re from Chicago.
Thanks,
Daffnie & Chorizo
Sex workers, submit pictures of your furballs and funds here.
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Caty: Ciara’s given us many music and video masterpieces over the years: “Like A Boy” (is there anything better than her going soft butch?), “I’m Out” (a song that values ass shots, selfies, and texts as much as us harlots do), and “Never Ever” (cleverly riffing off syrupy 80s soft rock? Especially appealing to the sex worker sensibility, given how much of it we have to listen to appease our baby boomer clients). But her true hooker anthem is the unalloyed brilliance that is “Ride.”
Do not try this at home. Ciara in “Like a Boy.”
Josephine: Truth! Ciara’s created a plethora of handy tracks over the years. “Goodies,” her breakout single, was played nonstop at work in its day, a perfect song for customers who just don’t understand that we won’t go home with them. The music video for her single “Work” is beautifully subversive; a band of gorgeous women dancing their asses off in a construction site, a space that is classically reserved for men only. Kind of like a strip club! But you’re right, “Ride” is easily her Unintentional Sex Work Anthem. [READ MORE]
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image via Flickr user Kate Gardiner
In chronological order, here are the ten biggest international sex work stories. See yesterday’s post for the U.S. stories.
1. Amnesty International Considers Supporting Decriminalization
In January, a leaked Amnesty International internal document about the human rights benefits of decriminalizing sex work set off protests from anti-sex worker activists and support from sex workers and public health workers. Amnesty swiftly moved to say “gotta hear both sides,” and are not expected to issue another public position until next summer.
2. New Zealand Brothel Worker Wins Sexual Harassment Case
New Zealand’s Human Rights Review Tribunal awarded damages in March to a woman who had filed a sexual harassment case against a Wellington brothel owner.
3. Indian Sex Workers Boycott Elections
After years of being ignored by the political elite, Kolkata sex workers boycotted the General Elections en masse. They demanded status as employees so that they too may receive government benefits and the removal of the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act.
4. Somaly Mam’s Fraud Covers Newsweek
Somaly Mam, the anti-trafficking darling for the daytime television set, is a fraud who eventually resigned from her own organization.
5. Brothel District Cleanups Spark Protests
Rio’s public prosecutors launched extensive brothel raids to “clean up” the city for the World Cup in June. Earlier this year, though, when Chinese police cracked down hard on the southern city of Dongguan’s sex industry, publicly parading suspects barefoot and handcuffed through the streets, they received international ridicule and criticism for the move. And when the Indonesian government tried to close down the Dolly sex district in Surabaya, East Java, hundreds of sex workers rose up in protest and sex work continued to thrive online and underground in Surabaya.
[READ MORE]
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(Photo via Flickr user doug88888)
In chronological order, here’s what we deemed the most noteworthy sex work stories of 2014 in the United States. Come back tomorrow for the biggest international stories.
1. Belle Knox
In February, Duke’s student newspaper published an interview with a porn performer who was was outed to her classmates at Duke by fellow student Thomas Bagley. She was met with death threats and a three ring media circus once her performing name, Belle Knox, became public. In response, she reinvented herself as an advocate for sex workers’ rights, writing opinion pieces in various venues and speaking at the Toledo International Human Trafficking conference this year about whore stigma and sex worker exclusionary feminists. She also inspired an episode of Law & Order: SVU.
2. The Urban Institute Study
The government-funded Urban Institute study of sex work published in March (hey, look, it calls for more funding for law enforcement!), The Hustle, painted a sensational picture of the commercial sex economy where pimps can make $33,000 a week manipulating sex workers into work and inspired a hundred stories about the relative strength of the sex industry economy in U.S. cities. One problem: the study was extremely narrow, relying on a sample of only 36 sex workers, most of whom had already been incarcerated or were in a diversion program.
3. Monica Jones
In April, a Phoenix court found Monica Jones guilty of manifesting prostitution. Jones had been arrested during a sweep conducted by Project ROSE, a prostitution diversion program jointly administered by the Phoenix PD and Dominique Roe-Sepowicz of the Arizona State School of Social Work. Jones, herself a student of social work at ASU and an activist, attracted international attention when she spoke out about her arrest and experience with the sweep. Sex work activists, transgender community activists, and the ACLU all called for attention to the problems with ROSE, the crime of “walking while trans,” and the language of Arizona’s manifestation of prostitution statute. She is appealing her conviction and was recently deported from Australia for allegedly violating the work conditions of her visa while traveling for her studies. In November, Jones told the Best Practices Policy Project blog that Project ROSE will be discontinued.
4. No Condoms As Evidence
New York sex workers’ rights organization Red Umbrella Project was one of the primary supporters of the campaign to stop the NYPD from using condoms as evidence, which achieved a measure of success in May when they announced they would no longer use them as evidence in prostitution cases. They still may be used as evidence in trafficking cases, however.
5. MyRedbook.com
MyRedbook.com and SFRedbook.com, two Bay Area sex work advertising and discussion forums and invaluable tools to thousands of sex workers, were seized by the FBI in June. The site operators have plead guilty to charges of using the mail and the internet to facilitate prostitution.
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