This will be me someday! Or not.
(Image from Prowess Pole Fitness)
For the right type of woman, sex work is contagious. Maybe she can’t resist stripping after finding out a friend is doing it, or maybe, if she’s like me, all it takes is one article about an upscale escort to render it a personal life goal. I think of myself as relatively well-rounded in the sex industry because I’ve worked on webcam, in a sensual massage incall, done fetish sessions, and (obviously) prostituted. But there are still some things I haven’t done and want to try. I asked around a little and apparently I’m not the only one with a burning curiosity to explore more aspects of the field. Welcome to our new Tits and Sass column, My Sex Work Bucket List.
1) Work in a ritzy Australian brothel. This one’s all on you, Satisfaction. I guess it’s true that those glamorous TV shows make innocent girls want to become escorts. (Innocent, already-escorting-but-not-in-Australia girls.)
2) Strip. It’s insane to me that I’ve never done this. I almost feel like escorting without having stripped first is like smoking crack before even eating a pot brownie. (I say that as someone who has actually smoked crack, and yes, the experience is exactly like escorting! Just kidding; crack is more fun. I’ve also never eaten a pot brownie but I’m open to the idea.) [READ MORE]
Strass (Union of Sex Workers) protests the passive solicitation law in Pigalle Square in Paris on March 16th, 2013–photo by Zaer Belkalaï, courtesy of demotix.com
Renowned 70s porn star Harry Reems died this Tuesday.
Apparently, you can tell a lot about a state or country by the porn it favors. The state of Kentucky has an unexpected fondness for hentai, and Britain is into girls who can squirt. Russia has a thing for Sasha Grey.
Tomorrow there is a book release party for HERE. by Lindsey Kugler at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, OR. HERE. is a “mini-memoir” about Lindsey Kugler’s experience working as a social worker and for MyFreeCams.
Dr Brooke Magnanti takes on lies, damned lies, and prostitution statistics in a Guardian article this week.
Wilmington, North Carolina police officers get drunk and arrest escorts. Good times.
A bill has been introduced to the South Australian parliament which would decriminalize all forms of sex work, based on the New Zealand model.
African trafficking survivors fleeing from Italy to Ireland find that the government is unwilling to grant them asylum.
The fact that a Brooklyn sex trafficking survivor is escorting now apparently invalidates what she suffered before, according to the prosecution, who want to drop her case.
[READ MORE]
Melissa Petro, Pros(e)’s editor, at a reading. Photo by David Kornfield, courtesy of the Red Umbrella Project.
Released in the fall of 2012, Pros(e) is the first anthology of writings from the Red Umbrella Project’s Becoming Writers workshop, a creative non-fiction workshop for people with experience in the sex industries. Caty Simon and Jessie Nicole produced this collaborative review out of an hours long conversation that had to be abridged to a fourth of its original size to be readable. We had a lot of feels, as the kids say.
A notable story for both of us (and Jessie’s favorite) was “Fist” by Josh Ryley, which we both had strong visceral reactions to. The mix of humor and horror was nothing short of brilliant, and like all the best pieces here, it illustrated a ubiquitous sex worker concern–what happens to a sex worker if a client gets seriously hurt during a session? Other pieces felt incomplete, like introductions to an untold story happening outside of the pages. And some left us lukewarm or cranky. But the power of Pros(e) is in the variety of experience.
Caty: Melissa Petro’s introduction opens with simple but vital points. We’re taught that sex workers are “if not worthless, than worth less.” We feel the need to tell ourselves we’re exceptional, to distinguish ourselves from the rest of that hoish rabble. This engenders horrible, elitist attitudes reflected in many other sex work memoirs, sometimes from the title onwards, as in Ivy League Stripper and the like. These attitudes also create barriers to organizing together. A collaborative writing project like this can make the vital difference. We show each other how we are the same, rather than one sex worker writing to show how a nice girl like her happened to end up in a place like this. Petro also reminds us of the erasure of male and trans* sex workers, and Pros(e) works against that by including a wide spectrum of voices from the sex industries.
Jessie: Pros(e) connects the value of storytelling, an idea driving RedUP, to the concrete benefits that sex workers can gain from having a venue to tell their stories. This anthology, simply by virtue of existing, is part of a larger project to counteract the stereotypes and stigma that works to threaten those in the sex industries. [READ MORE]
Hajra, Mumtaz, and Sheinaz take a break from fieldwork in a red-light district in Solapur, South Maharashtra. The three women work as peer educators with SAI, an NGO based in Mumbai. Photo by Helen Rimell, in Vice magazine.
Vice mag contributor Helen Rimmel did a photo essay on South Mumbai sex workers who are peer teachers on HIV, STDs, and women’s rights in the community. Ignore Rimmel’s offensive attempts at a narrative—”Life in the red light districts is…pretty much like living in a giant toilet bowl full of syringes and awful people”—and enjoy the photos of these heroines.
Somebody finally did it! A Cincinnati man arrested for soliciting an undercover officer is challenging the case, based on the assertion that making prostitution illegal is unconstitutional.
The Salvation Army calls sex workers cum receptacles now, apparently. Sex isn’t work, and it’s definitely not what God made you for, ladies (unless you’re having babies). Jury is still out on whether this is better or worse than being called a toilet.
In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Pivot Legal Society and Sex Workers United Against Violence are handing out pocket-sized cards to spread the word about the Vancouver Police Department (VPD)’s newly declared Sex Work Enforcement Guidelines. The new approach mandates that police prioritize sex workers’ safety, and these cards remind sex workers of their new rights re: the police.
In this weeks “sex workers saying typically intelligent things about their own lives” section, stripper memoir writer Ruth Fowler is exhausted by whorephobic, classist, and racist feminists, and Tits and Sass contributor and SWOP-LA director Jessie Nicole writes about the urgent problem of a dearth of sexual assault survivor resources for sex workers. Jezebel features Dylan Ryan’s piece in The Feminist Porn Book, and Born Whore takes well meaning but myopic sex worker allies to task.
[READ MORE]
Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers purports to reveal “the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years”, using information gathered from The Internet Adult Film Database (and without talking to any actual sex workers, conveniently).
In New Zealand, a bill that would ban street-based prostitution in parts of Auckland is currently before a parliamentary committee. If passed, the bill would give police powers of arrest, the power to stop and search vehicles, and would allow fines of up to $2000 for street workers and their clients. The bill has been lobbied for aggressively by unhappy local residents and conservative community organisations. The New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective opposes the bill, saying it “makes a scapegoat of street-based sex workers and would leave them more vulnerable to violence.” In a submission to the committee, one street-based worker commented ”This is my life. Please don’t make it any harder on me. I’m only trying to get by.” Sex work (including street work) was fully decriminalized in New Zealand in 2003.
Melissa Gira Grant reliably produces more brilliant work–this time, a piece on the history of sex work in the US and the forces that conspired to criminalize it.
The Indian government has decided not to recriminalize sex work, by not defining voluntary sex workers above the age of 18 years as victims of trafficking in their new definition of the criminal offense. [READ MORE]
