On Friday, Swedish sex workers’ rights organization Rose Alliance released this statement on Facebook: “Our board member, fierce activist, and friend Petite Jasmine got brutally murdered yesterday (11 July 2013). Several years ago she lost custody of her children as she was considered to be an unfit parent due to being a sex worker. The… Continue reading The Bloody State Gave Him The Power: A Swedish Sex Worker’s Murder
Author: Caty Simon
I'm a small town escort and activist, with purely *academic* interest in drugs and madness (because identity politics are so passe). I've been escorting low-end on and off for eighteen years, and haven't gotten sex worker burnout quite yet. I'm a co-editor here at Tits and Sass, and you can also find my writing at Alternet, VICE, Raw Story, refinery29, The Forward, HTMLGiant, the emilybooks tumblr, the Red Umbrella Project's literary magazine Prose and Lore volume 4, in a couple of issues of make/shift magazine, and in the anthology Eros & Thanatos. I also have experience in the mad movement, the harm reduction movement, the drug users' union movement, and the low-income rights movement. I fundraise and do support work for Whose Corner Is It Anyway, a local mutual aid, harm reduction, political education and organizing group by and for low-income/street/survival sex workers who use opioids/stimulants and/or experience housing insecurity. I am the national sex worker liason for Urban Survivors' Union, the national drug users union, and a board member there.
Activist Spotlight: Carol Leigh on Sex Worker Sinema and Challenging the Anti-Trafficking Discourse
Carol Leigh, aka Scarlot Harlot, was the first sex workers’ rights movement celebrity I ever met. I’d been escorting for only a few months when she came to speak in my area, and I identified deeply with her writing in my dogeared copy of the 1980s edition of Sex Work. I was struck immediately by her… Continue reading Activist Spotlight: Carol Leigh on Sex Worker Sinema and Challenging the Anti-Trafficking Discourse
My Sex Work Bucket List: Caty
In one sense, I’m an old pro of a ho, as I’ve been escorting for a decade. But in another, I’m actually an innocent, because besides a few shoots for various feminist porn venues in my early twenties, escorting’s the only kind of sex work I’ve ever done. So, now, at the ripe old age… Continue reading My Sex Work Bucket List: Caty
Activist Spotlight: Audacia Ray, on Telling Stories and the Tricky Politics of Inclusion
Audacia Ray is perhaps most renowned in the sex workers’ rights movement for her longtime editing of the now sadly defunct $pread magazine. But as a sex workers’ rights movement activist, Audacia has really been everywhere and done everything: blogging for years about her sex working experience as Waking Vixen; publishing her book, Naked on… Continue reading Activist Spotlight: Audacia Ray, on Telling Stories and the Tricky Politics of Inclusion
Prose & Lore, Issue #1 (2012)
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… Continue reading Prose & Lore, Issue #1 (2012)