The Week In Links—July 26th

The Week in Links

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July 26, 2013

A Justice for Dora/Justice for Jasmine protest in Berlin. Photo by Matthias Lehmann/Research Project Korea — A Justice for Dora/Justice for Jasmine protest in Berlin. (Photo by Matthias Lehmann/Research Project Korea)

There were Justice for Dora/Justice for Jasmine protests against violence against sex workers at Swedish and Turkish embassies in thirty six cities worldwide on the 19th, as documented by Melissa Gira Grant in her article on the movement in In These Times.

But no sooner were the protests held were two more casualties of violence against sex workers discovered—Tracy Connelly, a street sex worker in St Kilda, murdered in her van and discovered by her partner, and Philadelphia resident and trans sex worker Diamond Williams, dismembered by killer client Charles Sargent and memorialized in a vigil in Love Park on Tuesday night.

Tits and Sass co-editor Bubbles has a review up on the New Inquiry of Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls, an account of the murder of several escorts whose bodies were discovered buried along the Long Island coast. Co-editor Charlotte Shane talks about fetish client she remembers with special fondness in The Toast, and Bubbles also has a strippers’ eye view of mining boom towns up on Buzzfeed.

Hard Corps, an anti-porn documentary, sought funds on Kickstarter. The documentary claimed to delve into the world of porn and trafficking “undercover.” Melissa Gira Grant inquired as to whether all sex workers who appeared in the documentary had agreed to do so, because if not, that would be truly exploitative. The project added a new item on their FAQ claiming that all those who appeared signed permission forms, but porn actress Nina Hartley, who appears in the documentary, stated that she didn’t remember whether she’d signed such a form and she certainly had no idea at the time that the footage would be used for “Hard Corps.” Furthermore, “Hard Corps” is backed by the Salvation Army, while Kickstarter guidelines forbid charity projects. Marie Calloway at ANIMALNY and The Huffington Post UK picked up the story.

Melissa Petro challenges our society to pardon ex-sex worker women as easily as it pardons men like Eliot Spitzer in NY Magazine.

Thomas Jane, star of guy escort series Hung, reveals that he himself used to be a street sex worker who saw both men and women as clients when he was down and out in Hollywood.

The Marshall Islands government says a US report naming the country as a sex trafficking destination for women from East Asia is “totally baseless“.

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The Week In Links— February 22

The Week in Links

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February 22, 2013

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.

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The Week In Links—January 10

The Week in Links

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suzyhooker

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January 10, 2014

VICE published a look at the world of illegal ass augmentation shots with some very frightening pictures of what happens when injections go wrong. The Buttloads of Pain video documentary debuts on the site next week. Please only see licensed professionals!

Kink.com director/dominatrix Maitresse Madeline auctioned an hour of cam time for a record-breaking $42,000. The auction was part of her Divine Bitches 2.0 rollout and we commend her on its success.

Terri-Jean Bedford challenged Stephen Harper to define sex acts with this hilariously detailed questionnaire on her blog in anticipation of the Conservative government trying to write new legislation in the aftermath of the Bedford decision. In the meantime, over the last five years, prostitution-related charges in Toronto have dropped by 90%.

Last week’s #notyourrescueproject got some media coverage as sex workers on Twitter told the rescue industry why they didn’t need to be saved from, uh, themselves.

Here’s a whole entire article about prostitution in the oil boomtowns of North Dakota where the journalist didn’t quote one sex worker, cool.

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The Week In Links: November 9

The Week in Links

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suzyhooker

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November 9, 2012

The biggest news for sex workers this week was, of course, California, where voters passed two new pieces of legislation invasive of sex workers’ privacy. voted to pass Proposition 35, the frightening anti-trafficking bill that may make sex offenders of a whole lot of people, and Los Angeles County voters passed Measure B, which would require porn performers to use condoms.

Melissa Gira Grant wrote a comprehensive summary of the potential harm Prop 35 could do. After Election Day, she recapped the potential effects on her blog.

The ACLU and EFF filed suit to stop parts of Prop 35, mainly those that require sex offenders to report all online usernames, and were granted a temporary restraining order.

Carol Leigh interviewed researcher Alexandra Lutnick, a researcher working on evaluating programs working with trafficked minors, about why she opposed Prop 35.

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The Week in Links—August 22nd

The Week in Links

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Red

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August 22, 2014

tumblr_nap773nKIB1qgalzuo1_500 — (Christy Mack’s dogs, who miss her. Photo via Mack’s Instagram)

Christy Mack, who was brutally beaten by her ex-boyfriend last week, inspiring this week’s series on domestic violence, now has a fund to help cover medical and recovery expenses. Donate if you can, and share!

Vice’s food column this week features an entertaining interview with lesbian stripper and sugar baby Jacq.

Ruth Jacobs does a brief interview with Tara Burns on writing.

Brooke Magnanti, formerly Belle de Jour of book and Showtime fame, explores what decriminalization would look like for the UK. Safer, for one, allowing workers to work together and share flats without being charged with pimping or trafficking. She also brilliantly and succinctly illuminates the economic fallacies of the Swedish model:

The economic arguments are rarely taken into account by those who support the ‘Swedish model’ (or End Demand). By mistaking services for products, they imagine fewer customers would result in fewer sex workers. But this is unrealistic – the assumption that the number of clients and the number of prostitutes is necessarily linked is in itself faulty. If fewer people ate at fast food outlets, would the minimum wage workers there be better off without having to do anything else? Exactly.

In nearly the same vein, the Daily Beast tells us why it’s time to legalize prostitution. Their reasons are all solid, but would apply more to decriminalization, an option many people apparently don’t understand is both different and better than legalization.

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