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, which is redeeming itself for about a zillion offensive It Happened to Me pieces by giving her a venue.)

There’s no reason the GOP should be discouraged from convening the 2015 Republican Convention in Nevada by legalized prostitution, states Jeremy Lemur, a spokesman for The Resort at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel in Pahrump. Lemur assured convention goers in a blog post that brothel workers could be trusted to keep secrets, and besides, they’re voters, too.

God, we just don’t even know what to make of this story: A  recently created website accused Philadelphia police officer Terra Barrows of running a phone sex business. The thing is, Philadelphia’s finest already knew about Barrow’s old side-job—in 2011, Internal Affairs’ Police Board of Inquiry chose not to punish Barrow based on a competing phone sex operator’s allegations about her moonlighting because phone sex is not “specifically enumerated as prohibited outside employment.” Though now, the Philadelphia Police Commissioner is rushing to close that loophole, since “[t]here are certain types of jobs that are just inappropriate for a police officer.” Barrow states that she got into phone sex to support her ailing father, and that she never portrayed herself as a police officer or revealed her real name while working the lines. Oh, and the reason competing PSO Donna Burns ratted on Barrow to Internal Affairs? She says the cop stole her site designs and her client database and bullied her and other competitiors by telling them she was a police officer working in Homeland Security.

Tits and Sass co-editor Caty Simon gives her take on Heather Lewis’ Notice, an autobiographical novel about a street working trauma survivor, at Emily Books.

Elle Stranger lets readers of Portland’s Thrillist know about eighteen ways to make a stripper furious. An anonymous dancer echoes Stranger’s advice to tip if you’re at the rack in the Portland Mercury, reddit reading fedora wearing comment writers are outraged in response to the very suggestion that they should be compensating people for their labor, and no one is surprised.

Ruth Jacobs reports for the Huffington Post on a Kent police program, Safe Exit, which purports to help sex workers leave the industry but really just sticks them with a damning criminal record. Stay tuned for an upcoming Tits and Sass interview with Jacobs, a feminist activist and former sex worker who recently made an inspiring political transition from industry abolitionism to support for decriminalization.

Does the whole criminalize-’em-in-order-to-save-’em scheme above sound familiar? That’s right, it is very reminiscent of Arizona’s Project ROSE, which sex worker ally Molly Crabapple eviscerated this week in her Vice Magazine column. Wonkette joined the fun.

The Zimbabwe Sex Worker Formative Research Report collected some predictably depressing information on violence against workers in the country.

We hope you never get tired of tales of anti hypocrisy, because we certainly don’t: Sgt. Derek Mellor, the former head of Canadian city Hamilton’s Project Rescue, a “police pilot project created to combat human trafficking and rescue sex trade workers”, pleaded guilty to charges relating to sending dick pics and sexts as well as having sex with sex workers he’d met through the program. Provincial funding for Project Rescue was not renewed in 2013.

And in this week’s hypocrisy—not to mention disgusting exploitation—in the helping professions, a California mental health counselor for teens was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of child sex trafficking.

Policymic’s Lauren Maffeo elucidates “What The Media Gets All Wrong About Sex Work“—the conflation of sex work with trafficking. Haven’t we already gone over this, you ask? Well, this particular lesson never seems to stick.

The Caribbean Sex Worker Coalition (CSWC) officially launched a human rights campaign this Wednesday in Kingston, “to bring into sharp focus some of the issues facing male and female and transgender women sex workers [sic] in Jamaica.”

CNN tells you “How To Put Stripper On Your Resume.” Hey, the column’s author argues, if insider trading convicts can run think tanks, there’s no reason you can’t land a straight job.

Let’s hope this doesn’t expand the list of sex worker stereotypes to include “Satanic murderers.”