The Week In Links—February 7th

Happy Chinese New Year! Finally, it’s the Year of the Whores.

Rest in peace, Gloria Leonard. You sassy old dame, you.

Hey, guys, remember our friend Alice Schwarzer? The German “feminist” who is vehemently anti-sex work. Yeah, well, turns out she was hiding a lot of her money in a Swiss bank account and she got BUSTED! Schadenfreude.

This could easily be the coolest field trip ever. Wouldn’t it be fun to pay a visit to the Red Light Secrets museum, an educational museum about sex work?

Oh, hell yes. Male escorts and porn workers will compete on Saturday to be crowned Mr. Florida. The contest is a preliminary to the Hookies and serves to fight myth and stigma surrounding sex work.

One Vancouver strip club is willing to throw Mayor Ford a bone.

Can you smell what The Rock is cookin’? And question what The Rock is readin‘?

This Cosmopolitan writer epiphanizes that not all porn workers stay fit and attractive by having “coke-fueled orgies and plastic surgery.” Apparently, they do something called, “exercise.” WELL, whaddya know?

Strip club scandal in New Zealand: former employees of Mermaids were flown into town to testify about the club’s shady business dealings by rival strip club.

Wait, what? The frenzy about sex trafficking during the Super Bowl is all rhetoric? You don’t say! Hah, sarcasm. Sex workers already know that most of trafficking information is hooey. Former sex worker and our friend, Melissa Gira Grant, has been reporting and rhapsodizing  about trafficking hysteria for as long as it’s existed. Oh, now that we’ve got your attention, here’s a quick interview with her about her work and her new book. We’ll running a more in depth interview with Grant in the near future.

Melissa Harris Perry also debunks the Super Bowl trafficking brouhaha in this short feature on MSNBC, with some help from prominent Louisiana sex workers’ rights activist and Women with a Vision representative Deon Haywood. (Read the Tits and Sass Activist Spotlight Interview with Haywood here.)

Indian sex workers are such bad-asses. They’re demanding social inclusion via the Kolkata Platform of Action charter. This means that policies addressing issues like health, education, social security, and violence reduction must factor in the needs of sex workers.

Prosecuting sex workers? Ontario can’t be bothered.  Edmonton police will also be heavily dialing back its focus on sex workers.

Oh, fuck you, Sheriff Garcia. I hope don’t get re-elected and lose to the candidate running on the Prostitution Is Awesome NEENER NEENER NEENER platform.

This woman experienced all sorts of awful things, but choosing to NOT be a sex worker was not one of them, even if she disagrees.

Shilpa Samaratunge illustrates the diversity of Sri Lankan sex workers.

Big kudos and solidarity to this mother: her daughter was murdered by a serial killer. Now, she and other women are filing a petition to encourage the London police to adopt the Merseyside Model for the safety of sex workers.

You may have already heard but just in case: Amnesty International has called for the legalization of sex work.  And they’re totally cool with acknowledging that sex work is actually labor. Here is a copy of their proposal, which we should emphasize is a leaked document. That said, a web chat with Amnesty International’s policy document took a few predictable turns.

Denver Westword interviews Tits and Sass contributor Mindy Chateauvert about her new history of the sex workers’ rights movement, Sex Workers Unite. Chateauvert speaks eloquently about police brutality, HIV criminalization, and sex worker participation in Stonewall and Slutwalk: “This is in many ways a movement about living in dignity.” Stay tuned for the Tits and Sass review of the book.

The first sentence of this article in the Oregonian says it all: “A police operation meant to protect girls working for a pimp ended with an 18-year-old woman partially stripped, talking sex while massaging a naked police detective in a hotel room.”

Support Monica Jones, a trans and sex workers’ rights activist and social work student who was falsely set up on charges of “manifesting prostitution” after attending a SWOP-Phoenix protest against oppressive sex worker diversion program Project ROSE, by signing this petition. You can view the archived Tits and Sass video interview with her here.

Check out this roundtable discussion on decriminalization with Guyana Sex Work Coalition’s Miriam Edwards, the Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination’s (SASOD) Joel Simpson and Guyana Trans United’s Quincy McEwan.

Edinburgh University students had a chance to vote on whether the Edinburgh University Students’ Association (EUSA) should actively support the decriminalization of sex work at a student council meeting this Thursday. Sex Worker Open University, SCOT-PEP, Rhoda Grant (uggh), as well as a student sugar baby are quoted in this piece in the Journal, a Scottish student newspaper.