The Week In Links—May 8th

Possibly cancelled A&E reality TV show 8 Minutes reneged on its promise to help sex workers. Some argue that their lives were made worse after filming. The subsequent backlash has attracted a lot of negative press for the show; representatives from the show don’t seem to be responding to any journalists’ inquiries, including our own at T&S. The good news: the controversy highlighted the endless strength of Whore Nation.

We covered sex worker activist Jill Brenneman’s life altering experience with an unhinged, violent client here. The rest of her life is pretty fascinating, too. Read about it in this poorly written but well-intentioned piece for Salon.

Journalists frequently rely on a sexy, sinister narrative when covering sex work; such is the case with Alix Tichelman, the sex worker that abandoned her client as he overdosed on heroin.

Is anyone surprised to learn that the biggest profiteers of Kiev’s sex industry are its police officers?

Will noted whorephobe and transphobe Megan Murphy get canned from rabble.ca? Probably not, but one can dream.

The director of Shakti Samuha is concerned that Nepal will see a sharp increase in human trafficking in the chaos after the devastating earthquake.

Community groups in Vancouver have combined forces to improve their services for sex workers who would like to leave the industry. For example, they’d like programs to be longer, with more leeway for those that transition in and out of sex work.

Sex workers in Argentina cleverly campaigned for their rights by distributing fake invoices for their services.

The Capetown’s Women’s Legal Centre and sex workers’ rights organization Sisonke came together to create a guide for journalists covering sex workers in South Africa.

It’s like a healthy version of The Story of O; a woman explains what her works means as the head of a fancy hybrid dungeon and bed and breakfast, or “bed-and-dungeon.”

A high school senior writes her capstone on the decriminalization of sex work and is met with some rather unsurprising setbacks:

“My teachers and peers have had two opportunities to provide input on my topic when I presented it to them, either as a slideshow overview or as a paper outline, and I’ve been asked a very unusual question in return.

‘Will your paper be primarily supported by facts or by opinions?’

I have been asked this question both times I have invited feedback on my topic. Despite the fact that nothing in my outline or in my slideshow implied that my paper would be based on opinion rather than fact, a student and a teacher both questioned my ability to support the argument that prostitution should be decriminalized in the United States.

I’m sure neither of the people who asked me this intended to upset me, and I’m sure they had my best interests at heart. However, because of my number of outside experts and wide amount of evidence I’ve presented, this question comes across as doubt from my teachers and peers that decriminalization of sex work could be based on anything but opinion.”

Unicorn Booty has a list of nine sex work movies worth watching, including a few which focus on male sex work. Have you seen any of them? T&S would love your reviews.

This college student learned that her boyfriend is a sex worker, proceeded to make a face similar to The Scream emojii, and then dumped him. Oh, but she turned it into a teachable moment about trafficking.

Looks like Northern Ireland wants to adopt the “progressive” policy of criminalizing clients. Read on for some hilarious yet depressing quotes from “both sides of the issue.”

Seems that since Honolulu police aren’t allowed to have sex with sex workers before arresting them anymore, they’ve decided to use another horrifying tactic—charging them with sexual assault.

Here’s a fascinating recollection of the riot at Compton’s—a trans woman lead rebellion that occurred in San Francisco three years before the Stonewall Riot in New York City.

Paypal, Wepay, Gofundme and Kickstarter are crowdfunding websites that are fundamentally useless to sex workers thanks to their discriminatory policies. Meet CumFundMe, a crowd sourcing site being launched specifically for adult industry workers.

Dutch sex worker union PROUD has filed a lawsuit against the city of Amsterdam after the city closed the window sex workers’ work spaces; they’re demanding that the work spaces stay open and that the workers be compensated for each day they can’t work. T&S covered the Amsterdam Window Protest here.

Here’s a column with two by-lines that’s written in the first person about a dude (and a lady?) who interview a sex worker in Thailand and—shock/awe!—realize that she’s, like, not totally miserable:

“I remember thinking, ‘Damn. This woman is owning her work as a sex worker, and I totally get it. But how do I reconcile this with my pro-women’s-empowerment brain?’ I mean, faced with the reality of supporting my entire family on a ninth grade education, would I really turn my back on a job that pays two to three times more than other ‘legitimate’ forms of work?”