Prostitution

Home Prostitution

The Silver Lining of FalseFlesh

I just finished reading a story in the latest Utne Reader about this ultra-creepy software that came out last March. Check it out: FalseFlesh is an image editing software program that lets users apply X-ray vision to people in fully clothed, G-rated photos. So, without being a real life stalker or rapist, you can create homemade non-consensual nudie pics of anyone you like, and they’ll never even know. Getting consent to see someone naked can be such a hassle sometimes and—let’s face it—also a letdown.

The Happy Hooker (1975)

Aside from having one of the best theme songs in the world, Willie Dynamite being the film with the best so far, The Happy Hooker was also one of the cutest films I’ve watched in a long time.

We’ve been here before, so I don’t need to stress how much I love 70s fashion. I mean, it’s garish sometimes, but so is the austere minimalist stuff Phoebe Philo was selling us a couple of seasons ago, so… I also adore Xaveria Hollander for riding a bike to sessions, because I am a bike-riding sex worker myself.

I suppose this story is pretty normal, right? Lady has a taste for independence and uses sex work to better her life. Lady sees a hole in the market and uses her ability to fill it. This story is cute, even if it’s not groundbreaking. Actually, she’s charming. I think we are supposed to understand that she’s kind of irresistible. I doubted her appeal at the beginning, but afterward I was in love!

Former Escort Refreshingly Less Calculating Than Former Housewife

Haters can't handle it; she's a cutie pie.

I doubt anyone who reads this site needs my condensed Wikipedia version of who exactly Ashley Dupre is, but here it goes: After her outing as Eliot Spitzer’s—one time! Though every media outlet started calling her his “favorite”—escort, she became a national joke for her music aspirations. Because everyone knows prostitutes can’t sing, or whatever. And no internet post about her was complete without a slew of comments making rude remarks about her asking price with relation to her looks. (Once again, civilians are complete dunces when it comes to the sex industry. Is there some national ranking system of attractive women that should cap rates of escorts? It was New York pre-recession, Dummies. Any twenty-something girl with decent teeth who wasn’t asking $1,000/hour was missing the opportunity of a lifetime.)

All of that didn’t stop certain jackasses from claiming that Ashley’s forced outing made her “a big winner,” as though the only reason she was escorting in the first place was in the hope of getting famous for having sex with a married governor. Even Barbara Walters had the audacity to imply that having her life ruined was worth it since she got an advice column in the NY Post. You figured us out, Media! All prostitutes are secretly dying to be nationally outed in a political scandal, which can only make our miserable lives better than they already are. What gave it away, the fact that we work under our full legal names and offer discounts to public figures?

So now Ashley is back in the public eye, sort of, if being on VH1 counts. She’s one of the semi-recognizable people on “Famous Food,” a show that claims to be about completely unqualified folks competing to join a restaurant group formed by two former reality TV stars. More accurately, it’s a show “about” people yelling at each other and coming up with bad ideas while they sit in an ugly room around a coffee stained conference table. It’s pretty hard to watch, but Ashley Dupre is the only element keeping it from being impossible to watch.

Being A Fake Sex Worker Surprisingly Not Great For Young Woman’s Writing Career

Remember Jessica Pilot’s “Secrets of a Hipster Hooker” article in Radar a few years ago? There was quite a bit of outrage in the sex worker community over that, in the words of one blogger, “steaming pile of horseshit.” Jenny DeMilo curated quite a few of the reactions in this post.

It’s been nearly three years, and a lot changes for a young woman between 23 and 26. Now it’s time for her entry into the “I’m sorry I wrote something racy” essay canon and Pilot’s got a piece on xojane.com about the repercussions of her public adventure. “I Was A ‘Hipster Hooker’ (And It Sort Of Ruined My Life)” covers the professional and personal tribulations she went through after the publication of her article

Donut Ho: Sex Work In The Strangest Places

By now the New Jersey Donut Ho is national news. How couldn’t she be? She was allegedly turning tricks at a Dunkin’ Donuts. You couldn’t pick a place with more cops if you were working inside an actual police station. To summarize: A woman who worked the late shift at a DD in Rockaway, NJ would leave her post at the drive-though window to entertain customers in their cars. She was arrested (and released) after six weeks of undercover investigation, a typical waste of public resources on pursuing victimless crimes. Well, not victimless; if anyone has standing for damages in this instance, it’s her employer, yeah?

Her choice of venue was unusual and entrepreneurial, though she wasn’t the first person to choose a nontraditional venue for selling sex. Here’s some other stories about similar go-getters in the sex trade.