House of Pleasures (also called House of Toleration or L’Appolonide: Souvenirs de la Maison Close in its native France), directed by Bertrand Bonello, is a film depicting the last year of a legal French brothel, a maison close, at the turn of the 20th century. While the film does predictably illustrate the old prostitution-is-inherently-miserable motif, sex… Continue reading House of Pleasures (2011)
Tag: Caty Simon
Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk (2014)
Any book that aspires to be the first history of the sex workers’ rights movement in the United States will inevitably face accusations of exclusion. But despite some unavoidable failures in representation, Mindy Chateauvert’s Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk, is a pretty damn good history of our movement.… Continue reading Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk (2014)
Activist Spotlight Interview: Melissa Gira Grant on Playing The Whore and Policing The Policers, Part Two
Part one of this interview is here. You encapsulate the tired terms of the sex worker debate, in which the token sex worker is asked reductifying questions ad nauseaum: Is sex work exploitative or empowering? Is it violence against women? How can we help women (always women, and always cis women, never sex working men… Continue reading Activist Spotlight Interview: Melissa Gira Grant on Playing The Whore and Policing The Policers, Part Two
Activist Spotlight: Melissa Gira Grant on Playing The Whore and Policing the Policers, Part One
In the early aughts when I was a novice escort and On Our Backs was still being published, I was wowed by Melissa Gira Grant, an internet porn-making, geeky, theory-spouting phenom, even managing to be friends with her despite the fact that she was an Anais Nïn devotee. Over the years I’ve kept in touch… Continue reading Activist Spotlight: Melissa Gira Grant on Playing The Whore and Policing the Policers, Part One
The Week In Links—February 28th
Here’s another reason to not want to get out of bed in the morning—this Wednesday, the EU’s parliament voted in favor of criminalizing the purchase of sex. Instead of following the hype about the “Duke University Porn Star”, why don’t you skip the crap and read what she has to say (in xojane, weirdly enough,… Continue reading The Week In Links—February 28th