2016’s Worst Sex Work Stories

The new normal: why television has chosen to humanize sex workers
The headline says it all, folks. And yet, when the author attempts to answer her own question, it gets worse: “Sex sells, and it always has. But now being woke sells, too. By humanizing these characters, by providing them with a rich inner life – and, therefore, a backstory to and a reason for all the fucking – we can justify watching them fuck.”

How Sex Workers Are Fighting Back Against Trump
Intrepid reporter digs deep to discover that, golly gee, sex workers are just like other normal people organizing against the President-elect.

I applied for a job at Nevada’s most famous brothel
This set up just won’t die, no matter how much we want it to—every six months or so, like clockwork, we’re treated to yet another undercover journalist’s shocking revelations on the scant time she did sex work in order to write an article. We have Gloria Steinem’s original 1963 Show Magazine sex work tourist account of being a Playboy Bunny for eleven days to blame for all the examples of this genre we’ve endured since. But even Steinem managed to make it through the application process…which this author failed to do. Oh, but she did inform the madam that she has a stripper friend! I don’t know if that counted for or against her.

Near impossible to stop cops bribing sex workers, Parliament told
In uniquely honest headlines. Read “rape and blackmail” for “bribe,” btw.

Judge orders client of teenage prostitute to buy her books on women’s dignity
The hapless client was required to buy the young woman works by Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Anne Frank. I read Mrs Dalloway as a teenager and still ended up becoming an escort, so maybe there’s something tragically wrong with my reading comprehension.

Webcamming: the sex work revolution that no one is willing to talk about
No one is willing to talk about it, except the authors of a gazillion salacious pieces on camming that preceded this one! Columbusing sex work seems alive and well as a source of countless pitches moving into 2017.

My roommate, the prostitute
This affectless recollection of what a huge inconvenience his Backpaging roommate’s overdose death was for the author might just be able to claim the title of the year’s most dehumanizing writing on sex workers. We don’t know—there’s a lot of competition there.

Sex robots could over-exert their human lovers, academics warn
The ubiquity of pieces hand-wringing over the ethics of sexbot lurv has become a problem over the past two years, but the trend may have reached its apotheosis in the charming image this article evokes of robots literally fucking us to death.

The porn star who went to Iran for a nose job
That’s it, guys, that’s the story.

Why is Pokémon Go like prostitution?
Pokémon Go as an analogy for sex trafficking? Nailed it.

Daniel Holtzclaw raped at least 13 women, many of whom were sex workers, as an Oklahoma city police officer. SB Nation’s profile of him was so horrendous that the website took the unorthodox measure of pulling it the same day.