This is new: a hyperbolic clickbait article about a rise in gay male sex workers. Apparently—contrary to the hysterical Australian articles of a few months ago—hookup apps are facilitating paid sex, and not driving it out of business. Whew!
The workers at Nevada’s Bunny Ranch are campaigning for Hillary Clinton under the slogan “Hookers for Hillary.”
Two very determined runaways who engaged in survival sex work have been caught by police and are being touted as trafficking victims. One managed to escape, while the younger one was sent back to the family she ran away from.
Given the recent protests by South Korean sex workers to have the Special Law on the Sex Trade repealed, here’s a history on sex work in South Korea.
This for-profit company is claiming it can help trafficking victims by allowing law enforcement to skip the subpoena and instead pay Rescue Forensics for the online histories of sex workers. But, as Melissa Gira Grant points out,
In the eyes of advocates who work to support actual trafficking victims who may need emergency legal help, housing, or medical care, Rescue Forensics is a product built to solve a poorly defined, if not entirely nonexistent, problem: the lifespan of an online ad. “The assumption that advertising websites do not maintain information,” [Kate] D’Adamo explained, “or that this kind of advertisement is not accessible to law enforcement is not only absurd, it is a willful ignorance.”
In what makes a good tie-in to Lime Jello’s earlier post on Tits and Sass about studying sex work, Noah Berlatsky writes about the unique and necessary perspective sex workers bring to sex work research—when they’re allowed to do it.
A client has pled “not guilty” to charges of raping and assaulting a sex worker.
Why doesn’t anyone want to talk about the culture of impunity that exposes sex workers to ongoing violence, preferring, instead, to focus on myths of international gangs of traffickers? Good question!
Speaking of ongoing violence: the international police tactic of using condoms as evidence of prostitution is a brutal violation of human rights, not to mention a huge public health hazard. The latest city to feel the sting: Edinburgh, where police crackdowns on saunas and use of condoms as evidence is leading to rising rates of STI infection among sex workers.
A study of sex work in New Zealand found that Christchurch is safer than Auckland for street workers.
Don’t miss Alana Massey’s awesome takedown of whorephobic pole hobbyists!
Though strippers exist in the public consciousness as punch lines, we live in a society that is actively hostile to all women in the sex industry. It is a society in which a man can try to use the Public Records Act to find the names and addresses of strippers to harass them. It’s a society in which teenage strippers can be murdered and have their case largely ignored by the media, because society doesn’t value their lives.
Even in Amsterdam sex work is still stigmatized, as the former supervisor of the Dutch National Bank can attest.
Another movie about a sex worker needing protection, this time from her pimp boyfriend. Tina Belcher groan.
Policing Sexuality, a new book on the Mann Act, studies the history of government surveillance and links it to national fears about sex workers and venereal disease.
A new church on the Upper West Side serves sex workers and other socially marginalized groups.