2018’s Best Writing and Reporting on Sex Work

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December 31, 2018

How August Ames’ Suicide Is Changing the Porn Industry by Tina Horn
After the tragic death of August Ames left workers reeling, a sprawling industry realized it needed to do better.

Don’t Ask Sex Workers to Solve the Problems of Violently Angry Men by Gaby del Valle
Sex workers are not ethically obligated to fuck the unfuckable.

The New Orleans Police Raid That Launched a Dancer Resistance by Melissa Gira Grant
After a week of police raids and a failed human trafficking investigation, the dancers of NOLA drew a line.

Stormy Daniels’ strip club arrest highlights how evangelical Americans are criminalizing sex work by Susan Elizabeth Shepard
Strip club laws have nothing to do with protecting women and everything to do with appeasing the Christian right.

Columbus Officer Was Under Investigation When He Shot and Killed Donna Dalton by Melissa Gira Grant
Dalton’s murderer had already received eight complaints against him.

Stormy Daniels Isn’t Backing Down by Amy Chozick
“Part of what has made Daniels such an effective adversary to Trump is that she seemingly can’t be humiliated or scandalized. She doesn’t have a carefully crafted image or a political base to maintain. Threaten to leak her sex tape? ‘I’ll leak all of them, and you can have as many as you want for $29.95,’ she says.”

Abused then arrested: inside California’s crackdown on sex work by Sam Levin
Homeless Black and Latinx women were targeted.

Donald Trump Played Central Role in Hush Payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal by Joe Palazzolo, Nicole Hong, Michael Rothfeld, Rebecca Davis O’Brien and Rebecca Ballhaus
Stormy Daniels was right.

A Stranger Truth by Ashkok Alexander Ashkok explains how as the leader of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s campaign against HIV he depended on one of the most threatened and marginalized communities—India’s sex workers—to help snuff out the country’s HIV crisis.

Michael Kimmel, #MeTooSociology, and Feminist Betrayal of Sex Workers In Academia

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Juniper Fitzgerald

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August 24, 2018

I’ve made an entire alter ego out of the things people hate most about women: bodily autonomy and self-determination in the form of sex work and body modifications, among other things. The recent allegations against prominent sociologist Michael Kimmel, a man known for his scholarship on masculinity and masculine entitlement, unveil the things people love most about women—complicity in the form of apologetics and silence, among other things.

As a former sex worker and sociologist, the allegations against Kimmel sent me spiraling in ways I did not anticipate, and not just because I have repeatedly experienced sexual harassment in my academic career. I am particularly revolted by the allegations against Kimmel because I disavowed my hard-earned sex worker gut feeling in order to elevate his career.

The lauding of Kimmel as a feminist hero and the white, cis women who still defend him, are particular kinds of institutional, personal, and professional betrayals. Black feminist sociologists like Patricia Hill Collins have, for years, pointed to the “insider within” position of marginalized people, explaining how social, racial, and sexual marginalization contributes to a clearer vision of society (a fish doesn’t know it’s in water, after all).

Despite my sex worker red flags going off every time I used to show Kimmel’s TEDTalk in the college classes I teach, titled Why Gender Equality is Good for Men, I’ve used his work for years. I’ve assigned his books. I’ve suggested him for paid lecturing gigs. More than anything, that’s how the “game” of academia works—in order to succeed, one must deny the knowledge gained as an “insider within.” Having played the game of sex work and the game of academia for quite some time, I always suspected that Kimmel was the kind of man who’d believe that fucking him was its own form of liberation. But I pushed that feeling to the side because YAY FEMINISM!

The allegations against Kimmel produced the hashtag #MeTooSociology, which is teeming with horror stories of sexual assault in higher education. Relatedly, after experiencing sexual harassment as an undergraduate and graduate student, I decided to do my Ph.D. dissertation on the sexual harassment that sex working femmes in academia experience.

In my dissertation, I interviewed 20 sex workers who were either students or faculty at an accredited university in the U.S. or U.K. Every single one experienced unwanted sexual attention in intellectual spaces—classrooms, offices, conferences, etc.—because of the lingering perception that sex workers are perpetually available. I also included my own experiences in academia as a once current, now former sex worker. I have been sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, and propositioned by no less than nine cis men in academic positions of power.

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It’s our 2018 call for pitches!!!

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suzyhooker

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January 11, 2018

This picture is a pitcher pitching a pitcher because we’d like to emphasize that we want your pitches.

Happy New Year, readers! Per usual, we are taking our January hiatus—-just a small break from publishing while we do a little site maintenance. Tits and Sass wouldn’t exist without you, so perhaps considering resolving to write something this year?

We’re soliciting for your pitches! New writers, please familiarize yourselves with our contributors’ guidelines. A gentle warning: first time writers are usually edited rigorously (but kindly!). E-mail your pitches to info@titsandsass.com.

As usual, pitches from workers who are of color, trans, and/or genderqueer will always be prioritized, but don’t feel pigeonholed into writing on topics of identity. We know you’re experts on a wide variety of topics.

We love pop culture and media analysis, takes on breaking sex worker news, event coverage, and essays that illustrate the way the personal is political. We’re less keen on hyper-personal narratives but exceptions are sometimes made for the truly extraordinary. Pitch us almost anything you want, but listed below are a some specific topics we’re always looking for.

Porn workers: you didn’t get nearly enough coverage in 2018. We want to hear from you—-particularly about the ways your industry is both influencing and being shaped by the tech industry.

Sex working in the Trump administration: Has a second gone by when you aren’t reminded that Donald Trump is president? What are the sex worker angles? Migrant workers, we want to hear from you on how you’re navigating this especially hostile landscape and what other sex workers can do to help.

Movie, book, and television reviews: Vanity Fair said that the past year was a great one for sex worker portrayals in entertainment. What say you? We generally prefer reviews of entertainment that’s fairly current, but older material isn’t off the table.

The newest trends in criminalization we should watch out for: How are law, policy, and anti-trafficking discourse being leveraged against us black and grey market workers in this new year, and how are we adapting and resisting?

Survival workers and trafficking survivors: We want to make Tits and Sass accessible to your analyses and perspectives, so often shut out of the sex workers’ rights movement. Tell us what you’re thinking about and what issues are relevant to you.

Naked Music Monday: This column’s only parameter is that it must have some music. Write us the perfect playlist for a session or strip club shift. Is your favorite artists latest single sex work adjacent? Analyze it for us. In the past, writers have covered Cardi B and Beyoncé plus pole dancing with Bruno Mars, given us inspirational playlists and endorsed art haus indie for a session.

Support Hos: Does a sex working character on your favorite TV show warrant a closer inspection?

Activist Spotlight: Americans workers, show us who’s doing the work on ground in your area.

Don’t forget, if you need advice, we have some irregular advice columns. E-mail Dear Tits and Sass for any of your general sex work inquiries. If you need advice about making a risky decision as safe as possible, send that to Ms. Harm Reduction.

Quote of the Week

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suzyhooker

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July 19, 2015

No one is owed consequence-free hiring of sex workers, not when sex workers themselves labor under some of the most hostile conditions imaginable. And the idea that the outed man should be allowed to do what he wants with whatever other adult he wants? That, basically, adults should be able to carry out victim-less actions to improve their own lives? It would be really amazing if such a vociferous commitment to that notion were in evidence when credit card companies are furthering endangering sex workers’ livelihoods and safety, TV shows are treating sex workers’ precarious safety as entertainment, or when men brutally murder sex workers with impunity because they know this is a class of people who are not publicly valued.

—Former T&S co-editor Charlotte Shane on the misguided outrage concerning Gawker’s now-pulled story about Condé Nast’s CFO’s hiring of a male escort.

Quote of The Week

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By

suzyhooker

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January 20, 2017

I am proud of the work I’ve done as part of the Women’s March policy table – a collection of women and folk engaged in crucial feminist, racial and social justice work across various intersections in our country. I helped draft the vision and I wrote the line “…and we stand in solidarity with sex workers’ rights movements.” It is not a statement that is controversial to me because as a trans woman of color who grew up in low-income communities and who advocates, resists, dreams and writes alongside these communities, I know that underground economies are essential parts of the lived realities of women and folk. I know sex work to be work. It’s not something I need to tiptoe around. It’s not a radical statement. It’s a fact. My work and my feminism rejects respectability politics, whorephobia, slut-shaming and the misconception that sex workers, or folks engaged in the sex trades by choice or circumstance, need to be saved, that they are colluding with the patriarchy by “selling their bodies.” I reject the continual erasure of sex workers from our feminisms because we continue to conflate sex work with the brutal reality of coercion and trafficking. I reject the policing within and outside women’s movements that shames, scapegoats, rejects, erases and shuns sex workers. I cannot speak to the internal conflicts at the Women’s March that have led to the erasure of the line I wrote for our collective vision but I have been assured that the line will remain in OUR document. The conflicts that may have led to its temporary editing will not leave until we, as feminists, respect THE rights of every woman and person to do what they want with their body and their lives. We will not be free until those most marginalized, most policed, most ridiculed, pushed out and judged are centered. There are no throwaway people, and I hope every sex worker who has felt shamed by this momentarily [sic] erasure shows up to their local March and holds the collective accountable to our vast, diverse, complicated realities.

—Janet Mock’s tumblr statement on the erasure and subsequent re-addition of sex workers’ rights content in the agenda document this week for the Women’s March On Washington