The Week In Links—January 3

The Lusty Lady’s vacant space will be reopened by Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield, who own the cafe next door, as a cocktail bar which “will pay homage to what the Lusty Lady was…the wonderful seediness, and the dying breed of seediness.” Apparently, “initial design ideas include…a riff on peepshow windows ‘wherein a customer inserts a dollar and then a window opens to reveal a bartender—instead of a stripper.’ ” Holy hipster gentrification, Batman.

The Game told TMZ he writes off strip clubs and medical weed on his taxes.

Rebecca Woodard, one of Eliot Spitzer’s escorts, was pimped by the city of New York: “Manhattan prosecutors insisted she continue seeing clients while working undercover—and then forced her to turn over all of her earnings and gifts.” Oh, and Spitzer  wanted to pretend to be a self-defense instructor testing a student by attacking her. Yay gubernatorial role play.

Former Chicago cop Steven Mandell was secretly taped vacillating over which strip club owner he should murder in order to most easily take over their business. Decisions, decisions.

Honduras Redtrasex, the Network of Sex Workers of Honduras, demand justice for the murder of four local sex workers on December 30th, when five Centre City San Pedro Sula sex workers were shot, including one heavily pregnant woman. One woman survived and is in the hospital in stable condition. RedTrasex’s statement also noted another recent sex worker murder on December 15th.

Melissa Gira Grant lists her picks for 2013’s Best Sex Work Writing. Tits and Sass is honored to have so many of our posts, as well as outside posts by our contributors and co-editors, included.

New regulations came into effect on January 1st  in Saskatchewan which allow bars in the province to feature strippers. Anticipating this provincial change in liquor law, Saskatoon’s city council voted to isolate strip clubs in heavy industrial zones, legislation in the same spirit as the adult services bylaw they passed in July 2012, which requires escorts, massage parlor owners and anyone working in adult entertainment to get a business license. More tut tutting and talk ABOUT sex workers from city officials without any input FROM sex workers is covered in the Star Phoenix.

Meanwhile, new federal Canadian laws which went into effect on Dec. 31st ensure that labor market opinion applications from employers seeking to hire foreign workers in the sex industry will no longer be approved. These rules come almost seven years after the federal Conservatives first promised to put an end to the “Liberal strippergate,” in which temporary work permits were issued to hundreds of exotic dancers by the previous government. “Strippergate,” seriously? Hiring migrant workers is somehow a scandal worthy practice?

The Good Men Project does it again, contributing to the flourishing genre composed of I Am A Non Sex Working Middle Class White Woman And Here Are All My Tormented Feelings About Strip Clubs pieces.

File under “Not News to Sex Workers”—an op-ed in the Irish Times ponders the unholy alliance of the religious right and radical “feminists” in their attempt to criminalize sex workers’ clients: “By indulging in this pseudo-philanthropic meddling (‘we know what’s best for you, you must be saved’) these ideologues, both secular and religious, also deprive sex workers of the second most important and hard-won freedom after the right to say no: the right – if they so choose – to say yes.”

And to answer a rhetorical question, Sweden’s Laws—Do We Really Want Them In Northern Ireland? No, you really, really don’t. Swedish sex workers’ rights organization Rose Alliance’s Pye Jakobsson, whom Tits and Sass interviewed about the state abetted murder of Rose Alliance member Petite Jasmine, is quoted extensively in this editorial.

Who won in Canada: Pimps or prostitutes? No comment, but we think this should win Most Unnecessarily Inflammatory Headline of the Year, early as it is.

More coverage, this week in the New York Times, about the City of Houston’s deal with strip clubs to stop enforcing pastie/no-touch laws in exchange for clubs funding the city’s anti-trafficking task force.

Here’s a personal essay in The Gloss’ Harlotry about a sex worker and her friend who landed in an exploitative situation and got out of it by their wits alone: The Time I Accidentally Got Trafficked (part two is here.) Although it’s a good reminder that if you can help it, don’t fly to Florida to make “fetish videos” on the word of a sketchy dude without enough money to get home, it’s also the sort of situation industry abolitionists could help with rather than collaborating with rescue raids and arrests.

Both UNAIDS and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria posted obituaries for sex worker activist leader Andrew Hunter, honoring his work for them.

This is a remarkably progressive Christian look at prostitution and trafficking. “How you feel about the selling of sex is likely to depend on how you feel about selling and how you feel about sex.”

The New York Times picked up the Guardian’s story from a couple of weeks ago about Asia Catalyst’s report on Chinese sex workers having to pay for human rights violation filled jail time.

A great piece from the Conversation we missed last month about the politics of male sex work in Ireland: “Put simply, we tend not to take the issue of male sex work seriously.” Man, we just love the Conversation, really–in another December post they empirically demolish the Swedish model of criminalizing sex workers’ clients.

What Porn Stars Do When The Porn Industry Shuts Down: Susannah Breslin interviews adult movie producers, directors, performers, editors, and tech companies on how the HIV moratorium on shooting last month affected them.

Here’s a great magic trick: make a stripper pole appear.