Please donate to and share this fundraiser for a memorial for Angelia and Tjhisha, two young strippers who were murdered and left by the side of a road last week to very little outrage or coverage.
This fundraiser to support Miss Major, Black trans woman elder and sex workers’ rights proponent, to recoup her losses after her house burned down recently, is also worthy of everyone’s attention.
The first national study of sex workers has destabilized many of the arguments being used in favor of C-36 (which is in the report stage); at Maclean’s, Rachel Browne interviews the researchers behind the study. After decades of research and then this particular five year study, Cecilia Benoit (half of the husband and wife research team behind the study) says, “I realized just how similar they were to us.” It’s amazing how, despite existing apart from human society in a rarefied bubble, we still manage to be so similar to them, isn’t it?
Seventeen facts from the report.
In the wake of a documentary about underage sex workers in Malaysia, critics are saying it’s wrong to call them sex workers: not because of issues of consent or trafficking, but because there isn’t enough of a sex industry in Malaysia to warrant calling anyone in it a worker. That happens in Thailand. Oh.
Greg Lundgren’s movie CHAT looks like it will either be appalling or amazing: a one camera, one take film about a cam girl, unfortunately from the point of view of her clients (who cares about them) and even more unfortunately, facing an unknown future: CHAT has “only screened once before, and no one really knows if it will screen again.” I hope it does.
File under nauseating: councils in New South Wales have been left with “no other choice” but to hire middle aged men to sleep with workers in unlicensed brothels, all as a part of busting the operations. Though New South Wales has decriminalized sex work, a loophole regarding local council regulations renders this legal.
Noah Berlatsky reemphasizes what Daniele Watts’ arrest has highlighted: the racist and racialized stereotyping of black women’s sexuality is toxic to black women, sex workers, and sex working black women.
The national conversation around sex work in Vietnam is still using the most antiquated of phrases, “social evil” to discuss sex work, the quaintness of the phrase barely distracting from the extreme whorephobia of the concept. Vietnam has made some two-steps-forward, one-step-back progress however: sex workers are no longer sent to detention center “rehab”; now they are simply fined while regulation is under discussion.
The Baltimore City Paper has a short review of Playing the Whore and a longer interview with Melissa Gira Grant in preparation for her appearance at Red Emma’s Radical Bookfair Pavilion at Baltimore Book Festival on the 27th.
Vice continues its excellent reporting on sex work issues with a brutal article by Terra Jones about the terrible position of Alaskan sex workers: laws that criminalize any attempt to work safely and corrupt and inefficient law enforcement.
The children of some Sonagichi sex workers have formed a musical group and debuted their first album, Nijhum Raater Taara, yesterday.
A Bulgarian sex worker working in Lucerne, Switzerland (where prostitution is legalized and regulated: remember the sex boxes) has been murdered, her body discovered in Lake Lucerne.
Sex worker groups SWEAT and Sisonke, in Cape Town, South Africa, are still insisting on the humanity and human rights of sex workers, meeting with local public health and women’s rights organizations to discuss ways to establish and secure these rights.
Irish reality show Connected has added a sex worker to its lineup, amid much shocked noise. Kate McGrew says she wants to show what sex work and sex workers are really like, that it is a job, done by people.
Drugs and sex lift Spain’s GDP by 9 billion euros.
A charity in Derby, England, has been awarded 500,000 pounds to expand on its “Under the Radar” program, which works with marginalized populations of women, like sex workers and victims of domestic violence.
HIV rates have declined among sex workers in the Indian state of Jaipur, with the highest infection rates cropping up among brothel workers rather than street- or home-based workers.
Ruth Jacobs writes about the many facets and realities of sex work and interviews sex worker activist Jemima for Women’s News Network.
The Atlantic has discovered the sugar bowl, to predictable effect.
Sex workers in Surabaya have surprised everyone but other sex workers by persisting in their sex working ways. This article is worth reading for its Victorian notions alone: despite being offered severance and jobs in “lower-paid but more feminine” vocations like the garment industry,
only 476 sex workers bothered to claim their $400, taxpayer-funded severance package, which was cashed out for the last time on July 25. Additionally, there has been very little follow-up on those who accepted the compensation: whether they are now flourishing in womanly industriousness – or wallowing in shame and destitution – we simply do not know.
Emphasis added.
In yet another example of why legalization and regulation is oppressive, a legislator in Buenos Aires is pushing for regulation of the local sex industry, beginning with government registration of sex workers.
The Chorley Guardian talks to their local-boy-made-good Alex Feis-Bryce, who runs the Ugly Mugs program, in a very sweet and noticeably proud interview.
More from the Belle Knox documentary: she debunks myths about porn!