See, what Twitter does is it allows us to have a right to reply instantly. It means we can contact and immediately communicate with those who would seek to put an end to our profession, or misrepresent us in harmful and dangerous ways. We can talk directly to them/their followers/members directly and say ‘Hey! We’re here! That person is wrong, so here’s some stuff you SHOULD look at/think about/talk about.’ All with just the click of a button, and 140 well organi[z]ed characters…Not only that, but we can instantly see who is willing to listen, who will talk, and who will just block us instantly and remain in their own bubble of ignorance.
Bibiane Bovet, Montreal municipal candidate and out trans woman and former escort (Photo courtesy of the Montreal Gazette)
Some British GLBT organizations and trade unions are taking the excellent example of their African counterparts, standing in solidarity with sex workers’ rights organizations like the English Collective of Prostitutes and the Sex Worker Open University in their campaign against proposals to institute the Swedish model of criminalizing clients. Sign the Collective’s petition against the End Demand model—Rupert Everett will thank you for it.
One of Montreal mayoral hopeful Mélanie Joly’s hand-picked candidates for a municipal position, Bibiane Bovet, is a trans woman who used to work as an escort in order to finance her bottom surgery. Joly knows about Bovet’s sex working past and—gasp!—doesn’t care. In fact, one of Bovet’s escorting clients, another municipal employee, advised her to run for the position in the first place, and Joly went on record praising Bovet’s integrity and saying she has her full support.
SWOP-Phoenix is protesting the Project ROSE Prostitution Diversion Initiative, in which Phoenix police and students from the ASU School of Social Work team up twice a year to arrest local sex workers and have them “choose” between a six month diversion program or criminal charges. SWOP-Phoenix’s position is that diversion programs “ignore the fact that many people who work in the sex industry are not victims in need of rescue, but consenting adults who should not be arrested, coerced into diversion, or incarcerated for working.”
While on a vacation in Thailand last month, Rihanna took in a “ping pong” strip show in Phuket, tweeting afterwards that she was “traumatized” by the “live bird, two turtles, razors, darts and ping pong [balls]” pulled from the performers’ vaginas. In a pretense of shock they’ll be sure to keep up till they get their next bribe, the Thai Police shut down the club and arrested the owner, no doubt also throwing a few of the club’s performers in jail along the way. Riri! Don’t make us sad. After “Pour it Up”, we thought you were Good for the Strippers. Now it turns out that you are (inadvertently?) Bad for the Strippers. Stop getting second world sex workers arrested, Rihanna, that’s a REAL faux pas. Next time just use your celebrity tweeting powers to get the Thai equivalent of a humane society to spirit away those birds and turtles from non consensual vaginal spelunking.
With so many Tamil men dead or missing after three decades of civil war, with southern men filling up the jobs in the north’s building boom, and seeing as how widows are traditionally seen as inauspicious and unfit for remarriage, many women in female headed households in Sri Lanka’s North are engaging in survival sex work to subsist.
We covered SWOP-NYC’s letter to the Columbia Institutional Review Board reporting Dr. Sudhir Venkatesh’s wildly inaccurate and insulting research on New York sex workers in an earlier Week In Links. (One blog entitled the fiasco “When Your Own Research Population Organizes Against You, New York Sex Worker Edition.”) Now, our own Tits and Sass founding editor Charlotte Shane eviscerates Venkatesh’s historical amnesia, insistence on reinventing the wheel without acknowledging the work of sex worker researchers before him, and his approval of police abuse of sex workers in The New Inquiry.
Still from the film A League Of Their Own. Remind your customers that there’s no crying in baseball.
It’s that time of year again — the part of the year that I playfully refer to as sports season. For the next few weeks we’ll see an orgy of American sports converge — professional football, college football, preseason basketball, hockey, and of course, the World Series.
Any stripper will tell you that it’s definitely challenging to sell a lap dance when The Big Game is on. The Big Game is like lap dance kryptonite. Sure, you might be standing there in a tiny little spandex outfit but the men on the big screen are also wearing spandex and, well, one must prioritize their spandex preferences.
RIP Gabriella Liete, veteran Brazilian sex workers’ rights activist (photo by Tomas Langel)
An open letter extravaganza began this week when Sinead O’Connor wrote to Miley Cyrus, warning her that the music industry “will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think its[sic] what YOU wanted.. and when you end up in rehab as a result of being prostituted, ‘they’ will be sunning themselves on their yachts in Antigua, which they bought by selling your body and you will find yourself very alone.” Oh, Sinead, please don’t use the word “prostitute” and all that anti rhetoric—all we want is to keep listening to I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, admiring your bravery for disclosing your Magdalene Laundry trauma. Amanda Palmer joined the fray, writing an open letter on her blog to Sinead, in which she maintains that there should be “room for Miley to rip a page out of stripper culture and run around like a maniac for however long she wants to.” Right, go ahead, Miley, please feel free to keep appropriating Black sex worker culture. Shut up, Amanda Palmer (this should really be said more often.) Autostraddle posited that all this would start a never ending sequence of offensive open letters. O’Connor then wrote a second and a third open letter to Cyrus in which she expostulated further about “acting like a prostitute and calling it feminism,” and how such behavior engenders mental illness (?).
Gabriela Leite, veteran sex workers’ rights activist and founder of Brazilian sex workers’ rights organization Davida, died of cancer yesterday, October tenth, at the age of sixty two.
Tracy Clark-Flory rants in Salon about why she didn’t want her husband to get a lap dance at his bachelor party (but, hey, she’s cool, she’s spent so much time writing about porn!) In the process, she reveals more about her own dysfunctions than any problem with strippers.
Ottawa police officer Sgt. Rohan Beebakhee is under fire in court for meeting with escorts, giving them his card, and saying things like: “I’m just here to let you know, should you have a bad date, or you find yourself in a bad situation, I don’t want you to be hesitant about calling police.”
The World Health organization published a new document informing government agencies and NGOs that sex worker led programs are a fundamental part of the fight against HIV. Sex workers themselves have known for ages how important peer-led projects are, but it’s nice to see it affirmed by mainstream organizations.
In related news, Kenya’s Medical Research Institute states that gay men working in the sex trade need to be included in the country’s HIV prevention strategy. Men who have sex with men are often prevented from accessing HIV testing and medication, and consensual sexual activity between men is illegal under Kenyan law and carries a maximum penalty of fourteen years’ imprisonment.
Cathy Reisenwitz critiques New York’s new prostitution and trafficking courts in Reason. Her op-ed also discusses recent FBI trafficking stings, and there’s a choice quote included from an FBI special agent’s press conference which makes the agency’s agenda of stripping sex workers’ agency abundantly clear: “The FBI is part of the apparatus in place to protect people, sometimes even from their own poor choices.”
In reference to the closing of Edinburgh’s saunas, Vicky Allan writes in a Scotland Herald op-ed that one thing much worse than a world full of super brothels is a world in which sex work is driven underground. At this point, though, we’re pretty tired of feminists prefacing pro-sex workers’ rights sentiments by going on about how uncomfortable they are with sex work. This isn’t about your comfort.
Strip club Rick’s Cabaret banned Giants watching at the club, because their recent string of losses soured customers’ moods.
Socialist PM Maud Olivier, writer of a new proposal for the French government to fine clients of sex workers, acts like she invented the Swedish model. The Local interviewed a spokeswoman for French sex workers’ rights organization STRASS, who explains how the law would further endanger sex workers.
It is with great pride and pleasure that we announce Kate Zen and Josephine have joined the Tits and Sass editorial team! Kate will be our news editor while Josephine will be focusing on television and film reviews. With more hands on deck, we can bring you more posts. Plus, they’re awesome, and just generally fun to have around.
Speaking of expanding our breadth, how about sending us a pitch or submission if you haven’t done so already? The more voices we feature on the site, the more relevant we are, and without relevancy we die inside.
strippers from the south to weigh in on local conventions
submissions for what will hopefully be our most monster group post of all time, “The Most Shocking Thing(s) A Client Ever Told Me.” You’re not limited to narrowing it down to only one!
current event pieces for Kate: What do you think of New York’s new prostitution and trafficking courts? Equality Now’s campaign to keep sex work criminalized? Possible criminalization/adoption of the Swedish End Demand model in France? The exclusion of Kenyan gay sex workers from that country’s HIV treatment agenda?
good old fashioned comedy. How about a satirical take on a first person report from Sweatpants Boner Man? Or a parody of a TER review?
first person brothel experiences, in the United States and abroad.
what you’re looking for. You can always email us questions for Dear Tits and Sass, or drop us a note with topic ideas. Tell us what you need to read about and we will do our best to oblige.
We’d also like to take this opportunity to publicly affirm our commitment to showcasing diverse viewpoints and striving for inclusivity. Sex workers are already left out of so much, including public discussions about our own lives, and we don’t want to replicate that exclusion here in any way. Please know we are going to work hard to have the site reflect the variety of people who come to the sex trade in terms of skin color, gender identities, national identities, and sexual identities. You can help by continuing to hold us accountable and encouraging every sex worker you know to contribute. Those who don’t feel like writing a full post on their own can submit images, conduct interviews, or participate in roundtables. If you’re willing to share it, we will figure out a way to include your perspective.
Our email address is still info at titsandsass dot com. Let’s get started.
It is with great pride and pleasure that we announce