(Photo by the Edinburgh Eye)
Last week in Cleveland, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and Amanda Berry escaped from Ariel Castro’s “house of horrors” where he imprisoned the women in a nightmare of rape and torture for almost a decade. Castro has been arraigned on four charges of kidnapping and three charges of rape. The courageous women escaped with the help of Charles Ramsey, a neighbor who broke into the home after hearing Berry’s screams. A charismatic man, Ramsey became an instant celebrity after declaring he knew “something was wrong” when he saw that a “pretty little white girl ran into the arms of a black man.”
Everything about the Cleveland kidnapping case—from Ramsey’s critique of race to the captive women’s histories of abuse—has stirred important conversations about domestic abuse, sexual abuse, police incompetence, and race. Unsurprisingly, for those of us who follow trafficking hysteria, it’s also inspired a lot of talk about sex trafficking.
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We don’t need to polarize people’s experiences in the sex trade. We need a better understanding of those experiences in all of their complexities. I feel like I get sucked into this debate where I have to argue that lots of different parts of the sex trade exist, over and over again. What is the investment that these well-intentioned people have in erasing a significant chunk of the people they claim to represent? It’s not like there aren’t voices out there that really disagree with this message. There are many but they are usually marginalized.
—Hadil Habiba on ad campaigns against the sex trade.
“[Abolitionists] speak so fiercely about fighting for women’s right to self-determination but clearly that does not include us. Perhaps by women, they only meant themselves (…) They speak in jargons we do not understand. We guess it was their way of telling us they know better and so we should just leave it to them to run our lives. But we really do not care about “patriarchy”, “commodification” and other words they spew. Those matters don’t bring food on our table nor pay for our rent. All we are interested in is work undisturbed.”
—The Philippine Sex Workers’ Collective inaugurates its new blog with an entry on triumphing over abolitionist feminists
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Stoya plays Marie Antoinette at Molly Crabapple’s recent art opening. (Photo by Jennifer Loeber)
Seven sex workers’ rights organizations have been denied the right to intervene in the Supreme Court case deciding the constitutionality of Canada’s prostitution laws. However, many religious and abolitionist groups supporting the prostitution laws will be allowed a hearing, much to sex workers’ rights advocates’ outrage.
Nassau County is the first county in NY state to disallow condoms as evidence in prostitution cases. The NY Times covered the continuing struggle to get the no-condoms-as-evidence bill passed in the state legislature since 1999, quoting Sierra Baskin, co-director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, extensively.
Texan rad fems discover escort review sites the way Columbus discovered America, and don’t allow an opportunity to create legislation based on trafficking hysteria to go to waste. The New Statesman’s Helen Lewis is also full of puritanical outrage about Britain’s Punternet.
Similarly, the Australian media discovers camgirls.
Alternative porn star Stoya gets a great profile in the Village Voice, in which she talks about her homeschooled childhood, loving New York, and speaking for herself in her Vice column and her tumblr rather than allowing journalists to distort her words.
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I’m Anise and I’m a full service sex worker. This is my kitteh Saskia, it was a lot harder than I anticipated to get her to stay still with the stack.
Sometimes I feel like money only comes in 2 colours, greens and yellows.
Want to submit your own Stacks & Cats or Dogs & Dollars photos? Do it here.
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I’m Lucy and I’m an LA based dominatrix. Here’s The ever elegant Mr. Javier swimming in a sea of money I made for my upcoming trip to Berlin. Keep up the excellent work and I’ll do the same 