1940 World War II military propaganda poster (Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine)
I was in the midst of a pretty good day when I received a phone call from one of my non-client lovers. The poor boy had come down with a case of throat gonorrhea, which I didn’t even know was a thing. He was just calling to let me know I had been exposed the last time we had sex, since we had made out with great vigor and he had also gone downtown, like the sweetheart he is. I thanked him for letting me know, told him to feel better, hung up and began to evaluate the situation in the calm and rational fashion that any sex-positive, non-monogamous person might try to evaluate a situation such as this.
Gonorrhea. No big deal, right? I have always expected to contract an STI at some point in my life, and as far as STIs go that’s not such a bad one. I was feeling a little funny in the junk, which I figured was probably due to a yeast infection. It seemed likely to me that I might, in fact, have gonorrhea, and I should probably get tested ASAP either way.
Then I remembered what I do for a living. I remembered that there weren’t just lovers whom I may have exposed, albeit unwittingly, but possibly about three clients as well. Even worse, I remembered that I desperately needed to make the money I was planning on making over the coming weekend— or else I wasn’t going to be able to pay my rent.
Mother. Fucker.
In my work as a full-service escort, STIs had always been a sort of intellectual, if abstract, concern. It is something I knew could be a really detrimental thing to have happen to my business, but it hadn’t happened yet, so I wasn’t too worried about it. Now here I was, in the exact situation I had only considered in the abstract. The one where I need to make money but can’t really figure out an ethical way to do so without exposing myself as every client’s worst nightmare: the poxy whore.
Monica Jones, Arizona State University social work student, trans activist, and SWOP Phoenix member, is fighting to stay out of jail after the police targeted her for a false “manifestation of prostitution” arrest, reacting to her participation in a SWOP protest against their recent stings. (Photo via indiegogo)
Michael Musto’s Lou Reed obituary in the Daily Beast goes on at length about Reed’s penchant for including street sex workers and trans sex workers in his songwriting. Therefore, we can mention Lou Reed’s death in the Week In Links without going off topic.
Fellow Phoenix activists have started an indiegogo fundraiser site for the legal defense of Monica Jones, a trans activist, student sex worker, and SWOP-Phoenix member, who was falsely arrested for “manifestation of prostitution” as part of the Project Rose sting after her participation in a SWOP-Phoenix protest against the project.
Philadelphia voters will have an opportunity to vote against the retention of Judge Teresa Carr Deni, who famously ruled a sex worker’s rape “theft of services” in 2007. Philadelphia feminist activists are rallying to get out the “no” vote.
A petition against the abolition of prostitution, the so-called “Manifesto of 343 bastards” (named in homage to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1971 abortion manifesto, the signers of whom were nicknamed the “343 sluts/bitches”) created an uproar in France in part because it claimed public intellectuals and authors among its signers.
The FBI says killer truckers are abducting street sex workers and other women at truck stops, raping them and leaving their bodies along the nation’s highways. If we never hear the phrase “high risk lifestyles” again, it’ll be too soon.
Spiegel Online interviews Johanna Weber, the founder of Germany’s first professional association for sex workers, the Professional Association of Erotic and Sexual Services.
The porn star hired to play Hannah Horvath in Hustler’s XXX reinterpretation of the HBO hit Girlsdoesn’t understand why Lena Dunham can’t appreciate her work. After all, performer Alex Chance maintains that “while Dunham ‘never has normal, hot, oh my God that’s porno sex’ in Girls and is ‘always second guessing’ to cater to her partner, the porn star has had some of her best sexual experiences on camera. (Although the This Ain’t Girls XXX sex had to be more awkward than normal porn to stay in character.)” Plus, “since Girls is ‘pretty much like a softcore porn to start, we didn’t think it was much of a stretch to go on and put the hardcore in it.’ ”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s much anticipated writing and directorial debut, Don Jon, is a romantic comedy about the shared struggle for intimacy between two shallow New Jerseyites, one with a propensity for porn and the other for Hollywood fairytales. Unfortunately, the film’s “satire” is so uncritical it mirrors the very problems it claims to critique. For starters, the filmmakers intended Don Jon to be a critique of negative media portrayals of women, yet the film itself fails to pass the Bechdel test.
Gordon-Levitt’s character, nicknamed for the legendary, womanizing libertine, occupies himself by rating women’s attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. He makes a rather sick game of seducing “10”s—or “dimes,” as he and his douchey friends refer to them—despite not actually enjoying the ensuing sex. In fact, after bland fucking with equally bland “dimes,” he scrambles from post-coital cuddling to his computer where he loses himself in the fantasy world of mainstream pornography. He prefers pornography, as the annoying voice-over informs us, because “real pussy can kill you.” Of course, this doesn’t make much sense considering he’s presumably face-to-face with “real pussy” every time he takes home a “dime,” but whatever… In any case, his love interest, Barbara, played by Scarlett Johansson, is meant to parallel the protagonists’ shallowness through her adoration of Hollywood chick flicks. Cause, like, dudes like emotionless fucking and chicks like romance, duh.
We’ve been working our tails off here at Tits and Sass H.Q. We’ve calculated, tabulated, carried the four and moved the decimal. We almost ran out of bananas to feed our staff of well-trained statistician monkeys. It was a close one, but we persevered. Now we can finally publish what may be considered the most important and scientifically relevant bit of sex worker research ever done. Yes, the results of our poll are in and we can now answer the most pressing question of our time: What, dear sex workers, irritates YOU the most?
oh yeah is that the problem, Nick? Maybe stop helping cops, then.
Virulently transphobic and whorephobic radical “feminist” lawyer Cathy Brennan was at it again this week on twitter, intensifying her campaign of terror against trans women by threatening to out trans sex workers. One trans sex worker whom Brennan has victimized told Tits and Sass, “She has a webpage for me on her…site, where I sit alongside male rapists and murderers, and she accuses me of misogyny. She has collected information from various social media profiles of mine, and [g]ives links so her followers can harass me. She has collected all this information together with what she believes to be my real name. I fully believe if I were ever to say on twitter I had found a job outside sex work she would attempt to contact them [a]nd show them my adultwork profile. The irony of her being anti sex work yet in a position where she would make any other job impossible [for the sex workers she outs] is particularly bitter. She only ever picks on people without the resources or backup to challenge her. She’s a bully, and seems determined not to stop until some one is dead. Maybe not even then.” Thankfully, twitter has once again suspended Brennan’s accounts.
The former White House official behind twitter account @NatSecWonk, who notoriously ridiculed the D.C. National Security community, is allegedly also behind infamous escort client twitter account @DCHobbyist. Sic semper hagglers!
In the wake of being raped and beaten by a client, a sex worker in California fights discrimination in victims’ aid.
The Somaly Mam Foundation, named for Kristof’s partner in the Cambodia raid, has come under scrutiny for fraud. This feature in Cambodia Daily talks about woman who was coached by Mam to lie about her trafficking victim history in a documentary. This Metafilter post collects several stories about the questionable financial practices within the foundation, which participates in the unlawful arrest and detention of Cambodian sex workers.
You know what’snews this week? Justin Bieber groping a stripper’s ass. Hands to yourself, Bieber. The stripper in question later tweeted, “I’ve Danced For A lot Of Celebrities And They Normally Don’t Phase Me But Justin just Had Me In Shock !” No, we don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, either.
The University of York’s student paper, Nouse, and the Huffington Post still seem surprised that students often use sex work to fund their education. Yawn. Meanwhile, the former chief constable of the South Wales police spoke out in support of a new study into the extent of student sex work in Wales at Swansea University. We yawned yet again at ex-chief constable’s Barbara Wilder’s specious distinction between students and those OTHER sex workers: “[T]hey [the prostitutes Wilder encountered before] were mainly people who had drug addiction or had mental health problems or in really desperate desperate financial situations. They were often driven into it with no choice. Whereas with students we think we are dealing with a different set of circumstances. They are intelligent, starting their lives.”
Ex-porn performer/current anti porn activist Alexa Cruz/Vanessa Belmond sharedher story on British TV show Date My Porn Star, claiming that, ““[n]obody really wants to date a porn star, stripper or escort. Also the whole family thing and having kids, I’m like ‘who’s gonna have kids with an ex-porn star.’ ” Many of our partners and children would disagree.
The Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, Astitva Sansthan, and other Calcutta sex workers’ rights organizations protest an anti-trafficking law that criminalizes their brothel clients.
