Home Blog Page 83

The Week In Links—April 11

By
suzyhooker
-
Monica Jones addresses a crowd of her supporters before her court date today: "Because you walk a certain way, because you look a certain way they can arrest you for manifestation...We will not tolerate the profiling of trans women of color." (Photo via SWOP-Phoenix's twitter account)
Monica Jones addresses a crowd of her supporters before her court date today: “Because you walk a certain way, because you look a certain way they can arrest you for manifestation…We will not tolerate the profiling of trans women of color.” (Photo via SWOP-Phoenix’s twitter account)

Monica Jones’ latest court date is today. Jones, an Arizona State University student, was targeted for arrest after she attended a SWOP-Phoenix protest against an oppressive diversion program, Project ROSE, backed by her own social work program. She was set up on charges of “manifesting prostitution”, but the ACLU constitutionally challenged her case at her last court date on March  14th. Check out SWOP-Phoenix’s twitter feed throughout the day to follow events, and view this Tits and Sass interview with Monica, as well as this interview with SWOP Phoenix activist Jaclyn Moskal-Dairman, to get more background on her case. Read up on more positive social work interventions with student sex workers in this piece we posted earlier this afternoon. UPDATE: At 4:30 PM, SWOP-Phoenix tweeted, “Judge unjustly rules Monica guilty. The fight for trans and sex worker rights continues.” Monica stated, “I’m facing 30 days in jail, this shows how unjust the justice system is. Because I was out there walking…The only thing that needs to be changed is the system. If they come for me in the morning they’re coming for you in at night…As an African American and as a woman, the justice system has failed me.”

The Somaly Mam Foundation has launched an independent investigation into claims that Mam lied abouut sex trafficking. Allegations that Mam lied about her own experiences and coached others to lie about theirs have dogged the Foundation for a couple of years.

Ruth Jacobs on the All-Party Parliamentary Group’s report on sex work entitled “Shifting the Burden”: the Swedish model is a failure, the Merseyside model is not, criminalizing client will not prevent human trafficking. She draws from from her own experiences: “Women in the sex trade who are injecting drug users are the worst hit by their sex purchase ban. No harm reduction (condoms, lubrication etc.) for sex workers or drug users (needle exchanges) is provided in Sweden as it is erroneously believed to encourage sex work and drug use. That was me, an intravenous drug user who sold sex, and I am the same person I was back then and I am the same as other women selling sex and shooting up their drugs, and I will fight for those women. They matter to me, and they should matter to every person who cares about human rights and every person who claims they want to end violence against women. And if you don’t care about the women in the sex trade like me who shoot up drugs, if you care at all about human rights and are against violence against women, then you should be against the Swedish model, which is violence against women.”

Continue

Discussing Other People’s Lives: Social Work and Student Sex Workers

By
Annie O Neill
-
Adrienne and Annie's Student Sex Worker Outreach project pamphlet (Photo courtesy of Adrienne Graf)
Adrienne and Annie’s Student Sex Worker Outreach project pamphlet (Photo courtesy of Adrienne Graf)

Adrienne Graf and Annie O’Niell are two social workers whose focus  has been sex workers. O’Niell has experience as a sex worker and Graf is an ally. Together, they have facilitated workshops at the university, state and national level on how to work with students in the sex industry. Here, they have a conversation about their work as social workers reaching out to sex workers.

Annie: How does your work with sex workers intersect with social work?

Adrienne: Even before I started doing social work I have always been in community with many types of sex workers. I was privileged to get to interact with many different people around this topic, and receive a lot of education and exposure that my current work is based off of. So from very early on in my young adulthood I was thinking about sex work as legitimate labor and sex workers as people in my community facing different types of marginalization. When I started in social work,  I just always thought of social work as a profession working with and for various communities and sex workers are in our/those communities communities. So for me there was never a moment of “Wait, does social work address the concerns and experiences of people in the sex industry?” I always assumed that of course it would. Cue massive disillusionment.

Continue

Dogs & Dollars

By
suzyhooker
-

DWD

From Randy Dollars

Sex workers, submit pictures of your furballs and funds here.

Afternoon Delight (2013)

By
Isabel Kennedy
-
(poster via axxomovies.org)
(poster via axxomovies.org)

There’s a scene in which under-the-weather-feeling, anti-heroine protagonist Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) describes the way she feels as “shit city.” Afternoon Delight, directed by Jill Soloway, is shit city. This film screamed “rescue project” from the very start. Rachel is a bored, restless, wealthy, vaguely hipster stay-at-home mom living with her husband and young son in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her contemporaries are mostly other jobless, Jewish, “hip” housewives who spend their time doing volunteer work, if only to thoroughly document it on social media; organizing play dates amongst their elementary school-aged children, and running something called “Craftacular.” Thing is, Rachel doesn’t like this life and she doesn’t like these women. She wanted to be a war journalist. In a scene near the end she wails, “I was so bored I could have died!!!!” One of this film’s only saving graces is the fact that her therapist is Jane Lynch, whose character is truly the only “delight” Afternoon Delight has to offer.

Continue

Stripper Music Monday: Picks From a Queer DJ

By
Gore Vidal-Sassoon
-

There was a long time when I first started working as a strip club DJ when I’d engage in small talk with customers. Almost always it led to them saying “You must have the best job in the world!” It was hard to understand why. I don’t have benefits. Trying to get days off is a daunting effort, and when I have to cover for another DJ I am yelled at for reaching overtime. I’m the whipping boy of management and certain dancers. Then the slow realization dawns of why they think it’s so great: I get to look at naked women all day.

So I wonder what they’d think if they knew they were talking to a fag (well, queer male, in the Rainer Werner Fassbinder/Paul Bowles sense. I’m attracted to women romantically and intellectually, but mostly sleep with men) who remains pretty indifferent to all the nudity. But since I don’t really want to discuss any more with them, or ruin any part of the illusion that comes with the territory, I nod and say “Yup,” then proceed back to my booth.

I’ve worked at two different clubs and there’s not much to the job. I come in, turn on the sound equipment and lights, put music on shuffle and wait out the day until I can clock out, chatting with the dancers or staff when free or not reading a book. I’m not out to my coworkers by any means for fear of being fired. In an industry that hires solely on looks and can fire someone for such bullshit excuses as saying no to a drink when already very drunk or trying to signal a customer over from stage, I’m sure a queer man in a highly hetero male space would cause waves.

Continue
1...828384...235Page 83 of 235
© Newsmag WordPress Theme by TagDiv