The 58th meeting of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women took place in New York over the last two weeks, and on Wednesday hosted a sex work panel, “Sex Work is Work: Making the case for the promotion of health and economic rights of sex workers.” It was sponsored by the American Jewish World Service (which published this pamphlet on sex workers’ rights last year), the Urgent Action Fund for Women, and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice.
It seems the recent outing of Duke student Belle Knox has revealed that porn workers are REAL PEOPLE, just like you and me! They come from a variety of backgrounds and have mixed feelings about their work, just like you and me! Knox has taken this whole ordeal in stride, appearing in front of America’s panel of Certified Pearl Clutchers—the ladies of The View. She wrote this column for XOJane, in which she opines that, yes, one can be a sex worker, a kinkster AND a feminist. And now other porn performers are talking, too: talking about how hard it is to talk about working in porn.
OF COURSE Honolulu police want to preserve the provision that allows them to have sex with prostitutes. By the way, did you know that police in Honolulu are allowed to have sex with prostitutes? No, it’s cool, they do it “as part of investigations.”
Question for VICE magazine: where the hell do you find your reporters? Mr. Pichaloff, did you fabricate the quotes in this story? Did an editor even read this?
Michelle Chen postures that anti-trafficking efforts are often misguided and use coercion to fight coercion.
Use sex work to put yourself through law school so sex work can later be used against you
Life is hard and isolating for the the sex workers in Guatemala’s red-light ditrict. But not everyone has abandoned them. Enter the MuJER Empowerment Center: it provides vocational training, workshops on human rights and self esteem, and seeks to generally build a stronger trust with the sex workers of Guatemala.
“…the biggest problem is that stigma has increased dramatically.” Fast forward to about 12:30 to hear a surprisingly nuanced debate about the decriminalization of sex work in the UK.
Pye Jakobsson is a Super Activist.
Did you guys see that ridiculous study that the Urban Institute recently published? You know, the one that says that prostitutes make as little as $5 per service while some pimps are making up to $33,000 (!!!) a week. Seems a little off, doesn’t it? Let’s see what a real sex worker’s deconstruction of that mess looks like, shall we? Melissa Gira Grant thoughtfully pointed out that only 36 sex workers were talked to for the study. Laura Agustín, Crystal DeBoise, Jes Richardson, and Dennis Hof made appearances on the Huffington Post to discuss its failings.
A strip club manager beat out a strip club owner for a seat on the Canoga Park, Los Angeles neighborhood council.
Australia’s Thunder Down Under found a rather creepy guy with a gun rifling through their clothes in their dressing room — and attacked him!
Project Backpage collects phone numbers from sex workers’ ads and sends them text messages like “Want out? There is hope.”
Hearings were held Monday on Alaska SB 170. From sex worker and sex trafficking victim’s advocacy organization Sex Trafficking Alaska. Watch the whole thing here, starting around 28 minutes.
When I was doing research for a paper about laws surrounding exotic dance in Canada I looked at a case where the owners of a strip club in Montreal were accused of running a bawdy house. Several police officers from the morals division were considered experts at the trial because they had visited over 100 strip clubs to gather “evidence” in the 5 years preceding the trail. Interesting, that. I’ve also heard that in some parts of the US undercover police go to strip clubs, purchase dances all night, then fine the dancers for not having pasties that are big enough or thongs that have enough square inches of fabric. And here I thought our governments were all about pushing the nordic model and criminalizing the buyer instead of the sex workers? I guess there’s an exception for law enforcement! I can just imagine a cop coming home to his wife and telling her about his day at work going to see strippers and/or having sex with women so he can “save” them (I assume the cops are going to be hetero men soliciting female sex workers…would they let female cops have sex with male sex workers to save them I wonder?).
The club that was busted in Montreal was actually a swingers club called L’Orage and the case went all the way to the Canada Supreme court which ruled in favor of the club in a 7-2 decision.
Yeah, I’ve heard of that case, but the one I’m talking about is R. v. Tremblay, a case involving a strip club called The Pussy Cat Club.