Let’s be prepared for more articles like this one about sex surrogates as The Sessions, the film about quadriplegic writer Mark O’Brien’s relationship with the woman he hired to teach him sex, prepares for a wide theatrical release. People who have been on the internet for a long time might remember reading O’Brien’s amazing first-person account.
Gawker has a massive profile of porn gossipmonger/the guy who helped take down Porn Wikileaks, Mike South.
As bodies continue to be uncovered in Long Island, LI sex workers arm themselves for work. Meanwhile, local police keep “cracking down” on prostitutes, claiming that their press for arrests was in place before the serial killer gained national attention.
Audacia Ray offers a concise critique of the so called “superheroes” of New York who are pledging to protect prostitutes from the Long Island serial killer with their martial art skills. Everything about their approach and the media surrounding it is, frankly, a bunch of unhelpful paternalistic bullshit.
A former stripper is suing a Detroit strip club for firing her after she refused to perform sex acts on customers. Check out the video; the plaintiff uses the term “modern day sex slaves” but doesn’t provide any evidence of coercion and instead talks rampant drug use by her fellow dancers and ends with a moral plea to protect women from stripping altogether. The strip club owner admits there’s drug use at his club, but points out that there’s drug (ab)use in many professions.
Dickish Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew fame is running for mayor of Miami on the platform of requiring strippers to buy work permits. (“Fellas, relax,” he tells the customers. Because god knows dudes spending their expendable income shouldn’t be the ones paying more when you can tax the women trying to make a living.)
Police are looking into unsolved prostitute murders across the entire country in attempt to connect them with a recently charged serial killer suspect from Reno. Joseph Naso is charged with murdering four women. The media is speculating that some of those women were prostitutes but the police won’t confirm.
Things fall apart in the Witcher brothel. (Screenshot from Witcher 3)
In this video game brothel, clients and workers become disembodied parts before they fuse together in a scene that manages to be amusing and nightmarish at the same time.
The top Honolulu prosecutor had to drop charges against the massage parlor workers who were arrested in a raid and then charged with sexual assault after the police couldn’t find enough evidence to charge them with prostitution. Elizabeth Nolan Brown shreds the whole incident and points out that, while charges are dropped, some of the women are still vulnerable to deportation.
Katie Hail-Jares calls out the Honolulu Police Department’s use of coercive tactics to “rescue” sex workers and discusses the multiple ways this policy is not only ineffective, but outright damaging.
A South African ex-sex worker and Sisonke activist discusses the economic circumstances that led to him going into sex work and the social stigma and violence South African male sex workers face.
Despite all the big talk about rescuing sex workers and helping people who want out of the industry, the Canadian sex work exit fund is too small to be of much use to anyone. More on that.
The Terrence Higgins Trust in the UK seems to be actually invested in helping HIV positive sex workers leave the industry! Unsurprisingly, THT actually works with sex worker support group SWISH.
“It is unacceptable to find people engaged in commercial sex and then educating them on how to avoid contracting HIV. The only solution to addressing HIV prevalence is to prohibit prostitution,” Ms Ali said.
And on that note: two new studies are out examining why the attempts of other Indian states to replicate the success of Kolkata’s Sonagachi project—a “programme of HIV prevention through community mobilisation…intended to empower sex workers to tackle the social conditions which made them more vulnerable to HIV”—met with different results.
Trick or treat, smell my feet! Then pay me for the privilege.
Darren Vann, the man accused of targeting sex workers and killing seven women in Indiana, says he messed up by killing his last victim, Afrikka Hardy in Hammond instead of Gary. (True remorse.) S.E. Smith asks how a convicted sex offender was able to murder at least seven women over the past few decades. Gary Ridgeway could answer that for her. And our own Tits and Sass contributor, Peechington Marie, explains how Vann’s sex worker victims are stigmatized and erased by the media because they don’t fit the good victim profile on the Ebony Magazine site.
Olga Galkina, a St. Petersburg lawmaker, has drafted a bill that would give clients a choice between fines or arrest if they’re caught seeing sex workers, with the fines and jail time increasing if they know the person was forced into sex work, and best of all, an option that would forgive and forget the infraction if the client marries the sex worker. Galkina says that she favors legalization of prostitution and is using this bill to start a public conversation on the issue.
File this one under Civilians Being Obnoxious Idiots About Sex Work: two former New School students have started the world’s first “poetry brothel,” where:
….writers could present their work in a more vibrant, visceral setting. They would dress up, invent alter egos, and sell not their bodies but their poems.
A 19-yearr-old Chinese backpacker is looking for generous “temporary boyfriends” to fund her travels: they pay for her trips to their cities and her expenses while there and in return “they get a whole night with me, my undivided attention, and a chance to show themselves off in the company of a truly beautiful girl.” Haters say if she was getting cash rather than a trip we would all know what to call her, but I think we already do: thrifty.
Strippers at Sapphire Gentleman’s Club is Las Vegas won legal recognition of their employee status on Thursday, and the case is now back in the District Court to decide how much the approximately 6,500 dancers who work there are owed.
Siouxsie Q. talks about Facebook’s short lived legal name policy and the reality that pseudonyms keep us safe.
CNN goes inside the world of a feminist stripper and hears that “it’s hot and empowering.” Sex workers the world over who’ve been trying to break free of that word cringe in unison.
In the wake of her rebirth and the creation of her new anti-trafficking organization Somaly Mam breaks her silence to defend herself. Some things are too good to last.
The Angry Stripper, Sarah Tressler, is on a strip-trip book tour. “She cited Tucker Max and David Sedaris as styles she likes to emulate with her short stories.”
An off-duty Broward County deputy (Christian Benenati, pictured)