Going Negative In The Champagne Room: 2014 Gubernatorial Edition

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October 8, 2014

“I was never accused of having done anything wrong, but rather I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”—Paul Davis

“What’s the difference between a hooker and a politician? There’s some things a hooker just won’t do.”—an old joke I first heard from a lobbyist

Regardless of your opinion on reproductive justice, single-payer health care, or self-employment taxes, there’s someone running for office who will reflect that position. No viable candidate, however, supports sex worker rights. When it comes to the sex industy, a candidate need only be sex worker-adjacent to be subject to a vicious attack, no matter his party. Sex workers truly have no friends in major party politics in the United States (sure, Libertarians, in theory, but once they decide to run as Republicans they tend to neatly pull back on select issues of personal choice). This election year’s sex work-adjacent scandals are pathetically unimportant and an indication of campaigns that are desperate for distractions. One deals with a 15-year-old raid on a strip club; the other with a state-run jobs website that “accidentally” listed some adult-industry jobs. One’s a Republican attacking a Democrat; the other’s a Democrat attacking a Republican.

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The Stormy Daniels Effect, Part II: Post SESTA/FOSTA Edition

By

Juniper Fitzgerald

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March 30, 2018

A younger Stormy Daniels demonstrates powerful side-eye. (Photo by James Chang via wikimedia)

When I first identified “The Stormy Daniels Effect” here at Tits and Sass, my theory about the power of sex worker class-consciousness, the Stormy Daniels media cyclone was just beginning to brew. This week, after her 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night, it briefly became a full on news cycle shit storm. Commentary on Daniels ranged from sex worker-penned think pieces praising her as a “hero of the opposition” to the never-ending parade of trolls calling her a “whore,” “slut,” and “ho” on Twitter. There was also a slew of pedestrian commentary on mainstream media sites, including tired retorts to Daniels’s press coverage that claimed her sex work is evidence of moral and intellectual shortcomings. My favorite came from an anonymous troll who goes by the name mason B: “awwwwwww the HO’S [sic] have a national voice now isn’t that nice?”

While trolls are not the barometer for our country’s political and social health, the dichotomous identities slung onto Daniels most certainly are. Even Nate Lerner, grassroots director for Build The Wave and creator of the “Boycott Trump” app, recently tweeted, “It’s disconcerting when a porn star is more articulate than our president.”

That Daniels is considered a dumb whore on the one hand and a savior on the other is pretty telling—in our culture, we want our sex workers to occupy uncomplicated little boxes. Leftists and right-wingers alike want sex workers to fit into one of two wildly different narratives. More to the point, it is not lost on most sex workers that while some Democrats and progressives praise Daniels, it was, nevertheless, Democrats and progressives who just fucking passed FOSTA.

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Hey, Here’s Some Good News

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suzyhooker

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July 6, 2011

The US Court of Appeals has ruled it unconstitutional to require that international AIDS outreach organizations denounce prostitution in order to receive federal funds. Predictably, the government conflated sex work with sex trafficking in its demands that organizations sign an anti-prostitution pledge. (Hence its name; it’s not called an “anti-trafficking pledge.”)

The reasoning for the ruling was as follows:

Compelling speech as a condition of receiving a government benefit cannot be squared with the First Amendment.

Right on. Thanks, Second Circuit! (Except for you, Justice Straub, for encouraging that the Supreme Court take this on so the ruling can be overturned.)

More information about PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the anti prostitution pledge can be found here. And an early account of how the case unfolded can be found here.

Kat Takes a Stroll Through @aplusk’s Twitter Feed

By

Kat

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July 5, 2011

I’ve been trying to make sense of Ashton Kutcher’s recent twitter feed. After the Village Voice article came out on Friday, he just started firing off tweets that sounded a lot like how an upset tween would respond if #killjustinbieber was trending, and not so much like the CEO of a nonprofit. I’ve been doing a lot of head shaking and sighing after reading statements like, “The cry of a company waking up to it’s [sic] failure will never be as loud as the tears shed by girls trafficked on its platform.” Where to start? Isn’t this a little bit… really gross and unnecessary? He may as well tweet about the blood of 100,000 to 300,000 hymens.

How about, “No response @villagevoice? Oh I forgot U work business hours. Maybe that’s Y you sell girls on ur platform. they tend 2work the night shift”? First of all, I think I have to give up using sic now. Next, he does realize that “sex slaves” don’t have set hours, right? I know that he’s not getting his information from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit because even they have plots involving boys, and they also never mention anything about shifts. I’m guessing that most sex slaves are more on call than anything.

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Canada’s Doomed Compromise On Prostitution Laws

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Celine Bisette

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June 24, 2014

Sex worker activist Velvet Steele at a June 14th Red Umbrella rally in Vancouver. All photos courtesy of the author. — Sex worker activist Velvet Steele speaks at a June 14th Red Umbrella rally in Vancouver. All photos courtesy of the author.

On June 4, Canada’s Justice Minister Peter MacKay introduced Bill C-36. According to the Pivot Legal Society, this legislation will, if passed, criminalize “the purchase of sex, communicating for the purpose of selling sex, gaining material benefit from sex work, and advertising sexual services.” It would be functionally impossible to establish brothels, agencies, and sex worker collectives legally under the proposed legislation. This legislation is markedly different from the existing prostitution laws, as buying or selling sexual services has never been a crime in Canada. The Conservative government is adamant that this situation should change. According to MacKay, prostitution is inherently harmful and passing Bill C-36 will provide law enforcement the tools they need to go after “the perpetrators, the perverts, those who are consumers of this degrading practice.”

Bill C-36 comes on the heels of the Supreme Court of Canada’s unanimous decision which struck down Canada’s existing prostitution laws last December in the Bedford case (after Terri-Jean Bedford, one of three sex workers who brought the case before the courts). The laws the Court struck down were: communicating for the purposes of prostitution, living off the avails of prostitution, and keeping a common bawdy house (which is legalese for brothel, in this context). In their ruling, the judges declared that the laws were unconstitutional because they interfered with sex workers’ ability to take steps to keep themselves safe. The right to life, liberty and security of the person is guaranteed under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the prostitution laws were found to violate sex workers’ ability to exercise these rights. In their ruling, the judges explicitly state that “Parliament has the power to regulate against nuisances, but not at the cost of the health, safety and lives of prostitutes.” They also maintain that “a law that prevents street prostitutes from resorting to a safe haven”—an indoor work space—“is a law that has lost sight of its purpose.”

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