Donate before June 8th to Tits and Sass contributor Mariko Passion’s Whoriffic Cabaret at the Hollywood Fringe Festival on June 16th. Read trans and sex workers’ rights activist Ava Talley’s tribute to Mariko’s work and the upcoming festival here:
“Sex/Love workers of all persuasions will have the opportunity to showcase their talents at Whorrific Cabaret, a musical storytelling event that has been produced by Mariko Passion many times in different spaces, which aims to bring together sex and love workers, allies and clients who have talent and an opinion. This cabaret happens June 16th, 5:30pm at Three Clubs in Hollywood and is part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival: an annual, uncurated, open-access, community-derived event celebrating freedom of expression and collaboration in the performing arts community.”
AB 1576, the bill requiring condom use for all porn productions shot in CA, passed the CA appropriations committee. The concept of “forced consent” was repeatedly invoked. ‘“I don’t know what that means and how that can exist, but in what other industry would we accept forced consent as a concept?” an attorney from Mind Geek asked.’ Not to be all Inigo Montoya, but I do not think that means what they think it means.
Really tragic: Alyssa Funke, a young porn performer, killed herself after cyberbullying from ex-high school classmates about her sex work.
This Newsweek profile on Somaly Mam is a rebuttal to every hysterical trafficking narrative ever. She auditioned girls to be the faces of fictional trauma-narratives, and fabricated her own past. “‘If your goal is fundraising, you actually have an incentive to pull out the most gory story,’ Papi explains, ‘and so we get completely false realities of the world.’” Between this and the study on youth sex workers the popular trafficking narrative is taking some blows.
Despite partisan gridlock in Congress, Democrats and Republicans can at least come together on an anti-trafficking bill. Although you’d think CNN might notice that the story they linked to, about sex trafficking during the Super Bowl, also pointed out that local law enforcement in other Super Bowl host cities doubted “whether a spike in activity was real” and that even the organization behind the statistics about sex trafficking, prostitution, and the Super Bowl “has no idea how its former president, Ernie Allen, derived the number” of instances of trafficking.
The latest in a grand tradition of sociologists making claims about sex workers that they have no real basis for, Lisa Wade, PhD in sociology, thinks Cinderella’s new shoes look like stripper heels. Lucky us, the commenters on thesocietypages.com are ready and willing to call bullshit. (One of the tags on this is “Gail Dines”. Oooooohkay.)
Right-wing Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott winks as a retired woman explains that she’s been forced to work for a sex chat line in order to make ends meet. Not because he’s a creep, but because everything is going according to plan…Meanwhile, another sex worker gives her take on sex work. It’s a job that people do for the same reason anyone works any job: money. “No one is ringing up saying ‘look at me, I had to resort to being a trolley girl.’”
“Girls come here because they want to feel wanted.” Which is not at all the reason that men go to strip clubs. There are so many reasons to see Joe Mangianiello’s La Bare documentary: the gender essentialism, the rare opportunity to exoticize men, but most importantly, the Confederate Banana Hammock.
Nightline makes the shocking discovery that there are COLLEGE STUDENTS who STRIP to PAY for SCHOOL.
Some good coverage for Eden Alexander about WePay’s shameful treatment of her: first Kitty Stryker, then the Verge, and then the Daily Beast picked the story up.
This is a hell of a headline and if anyone subscribed to the Times wants to let us know what followed it, please do!!! “Strip club manager whose fate was sealed by love for bin Laden.”
Sex worker profiles seen on Tinder. So Mindy Kaling gets to phunk with my heart and use Tinder to advertise, but not sex workers? Luckily the ACLU got our back (sort of).
Toronto’s strip clubs are dying out. The title of this is “Why dancing naked at a bar is a declining profession in Toronto” but really it’s only happening faster in Toronto. The pictures are great but probably the real winners here are the commenters who think $20 lap dances are the problem: “Lower the price.” And now we know why stripping is a dying industry.
A woman in St Louis County has been arrested for running an underground strip club in her basement.
The Vancouver Sun is doing a series on unsolved murders; this segment is about the murders of sex workers. “As required by the policy, VPD spokesman Const. Brian Montague said enforcement of the laws against sex trade workers or johns ‘is often a last-resort tool because it may have unintended consequences.’”
A thoughtful editorial by a Montreal male escort: “Consider for a moment who we are criminalizing when we criminalize clients. So often the client is imagined as male. When we understand that women, like men, seek out the services of prostitutes, and for similar reasons—company, relief, intimacy and fun—we can see that those who want to criminalize clients to protect women are also criminalizing women.”
An academic on why she prefers stripping to academia: “please see my paid off credit card bill”. That wasn’t going to happen on an academic’s salary.
FaceTime girls are the new webcam girls and FaceTime is like the last not-fully-tapped market for sexualized services. Love to hear about new ways to make money! Gives me hope.
Over at CityLab Melissa Gira Grant does it again, talking about the ways sex workers are deliberately made invisible and their voices discounted.
More missionaries delivering makeup and ministrations to women in the adult industry. Just what we needed, amirite? “‘We are in there saying, “You are loved, valued and cherished, and you are not alone,”’ said Wright, founder and executive director of We Are Cherished, a faith-based organization that regularly visits more than 50 adult entertainment venues throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area.” It’s like they all have the same script. To heck with your love, support our quest for labor and human rights.
Making your young female clients tell traumatic stories to the cameras – true or false – is outright abusive.