I bet you thought that with the most recent season of 30 Rock all wrapped up, we wouldn’t have any more opportunities to obsess about Tina Fey’s mean-spirited sex worker obsession. But with our girl TF, the sex worker hate is a constantly bubbling stream. So let’s drink deep from her well with this old SNL Weekend Update monologue about how Hugh Hefner’s “whore” girlfriends were all sexually abused. Comedy is funny!
I will be the first to admit that my experience in the industry has been super privileged. I was lucky to find a gig that works for me and hasn’t created in me a serious hatred towards the world in general for being kind of terrible and fucked up around race and sexuality. Having said that, I do recognize ugliness when I see it, and this industry is, in some ways, extremely racist, as are some of the people who participate in it. I often struggle to put that into words, because sometimes it’s as simple as someone thinking my body, because it is not white, is not worth as much as a woman whose body is white, and sometimes it’s as complicated as a client going all the way around the race issue (in his mind) but saying things that are clearly race specific and kind of awkward and weird (like “I love the things you people do with your hair.” because he didn’t want to say “Black Women” even though “you people” is so much worse and actually made me recoil in disgust and say, without thinking, “If you’re going to fetishize me you should figure out a way to do it that doesn’t make you sound like a troglodyte, ugh.”)
A friend turned me on this Irish sex worker organization, Turn Off the Blue Light, and their great poster campaign. Prostitution is currently legal in Ireland, but an opposing campaign called Turn Off the Red Light has been picking up momentum in their push for criminalization—ya know, to “end sex trafficking.”
Police are now suggesting more than one serial killer has been using Long Island’s Gilgo Beach for hiding (female, often sex worker) victims’ remains.
Pictures have been released of two men wanted for questioning about the assault and robbery of two different prostitutes working in midtown Manhattan. (Yes, the article is tone deaf and offensive—yet the Gothamist’s rewrite manages to be even more so—but look at these pictures if you work in New York!)
Audacia Ray is on the Ms. blog writing about amnesty for sex workers and the Long Island murders, while Melissa Gira Grant writes about the consequences of sex worker stigmatization for The Guardian.
Escorts are writing letters of support for their Miami agency owner, who’s been accused of coercing women into prostitution.
This story would be so much cooler if the Christian weatherman refused to work on a day when strip clubs were treated badly in the news.
Salt Lake City is passing new laws to try to stop sex workers from screening clients to weed out undercover cops.
Houston is hosting a strip club-set opera.
Patton Oswalt is pretty much doing Chris Rock’s old keep-your-daughter-off-the-pole routine.
Yes, strippers exaggerated their earnings to get no-doc mortgages. The kicker to this story is so true. Here’s an amazing look at the mortgage brokers’ memos about stripper earnings.