The Week In Links—September 6th

This story by Missy Wilkinson about the business slowdown in New Orleans strip clubs during the summer nails that “bad season” feeling so common in hot climates: “It’s also a time when she experiences a phenomenon she calls ‘bad-busy’: a club crowded with people who may pay the cover charge and buy a drink, but who won’t spend money on dancers.”

The Caribbean Sex Worker Coalition Conference ended this week with the Montego Bay Declaration, demanding human rights for sex workers from the Caribbean states.

NY Magazine interviewed Mark Kunich about his nonprofit gay porn studio, Boystown, the proceeds of which will be donated to the Russian LGBT community. The first release is called “Put It In Putin.”

Stopthetraffik.org’s video, in which a Janet Jackson-esque dance routine in Amsterdam’s red light district is supposed to Teach Us a Lesson about trafficking, seems to be everywhere this week. Eithne Crow explains why it should go fuck right off to where it came from.

SF Weekly ran an excellent profile of Siouxsie Q James’ new play, Fish Girl, and her work on The Whorecast.

Police evicted about five hundred sex workers from one of Bangladesh’s oldest brothel districts last week after hardline Muslims from the local Islahe Quom Parishad group attacked women working at the site, injuring thirty. An op-ed in a local paper records the sex worker community’s response.

The National Organization for Men Against Sexism apologizes for not having censored Emi Koyama’s anti-anti-trafficking discourse talk sooner.

Liquid Lapdance Pants to store strip club customers’ jizz? Really? Strippers the world over groan collectively.

Jezebel and Mammamia have discovered that porn stars get their fans to buy them things on Amazon wishlists, and they are shocked, SHOCKED. (Yeah, and that’s been happening since Amazon’s inception, keep up.) Jezebel’s Tracie Egan Morrison jeers at sex tape star Farrah Abraham for asking for a for a $52 crib mattress and $12 mattress cover: “It’s like, either keep your kid out of your weird sugar daddy arrangements or at the very least, get her the good, expensive shit.” Yeah, shame on that slut for not wanting to spend hundreds of dollars on baby stuff that quickly becomes useless as the kid grows out of it. Typical rude slut behavior.

The Wall Street Journal profiled the weekly meeting where Atlanta’s influential strip club DJs gather to discuss which songs to put into rotation: “The strip-club DJs won’t accept just any song. They vet potential clients at their weekly meetings, inviting a handful of artists each week to play their best tracks.”

A second actor for Kink.com, Rod Daily,who dated the first one, Cameron Bay, announced Tuesday that he tested positive for HIV.  The adult film industry’s trade association, Free Speech Coalition, issued a moratorium on shooting following Bay’s diagnosis. Her last shoot with Kink.com was on July 31, and all her onscreen partners have since tested negative for the disease, Kink.com divulged.

W Magazine tracks Zahia Dahar’s progress from center of a French underage prostitution scandal to successful fashion designer.

Another tiresome piece in the New Statesman about the supposed incompatibility of feminism and sex work—the argument here seems to be that because a client friend of the author’s is an asshole, sex work is based on women’s subjugation.

The Ugly Mugs smart phone system, launched last week, allows British sex workers who have encountered dangerous people to report the incidents and issue a warning to other sex workers. The system then automatically screens incoming and outgoing calls, text messages and alerts from individuals listed on the database to workers in the sex trade.

A couple of articles highlight sex worker responses to the murder of two escorts in British Columbia, plus safety tips handed out within our community.

PSNI Detective Superintendent Philip Marshall, the man in charge of tackling human trafficking and organized prostitution in Northern Ireland, opposes proposals to make it an offence to pay for sex, denies that human trafficking is a bigger problem in that country than elsewhere, and states that men purchasing sex have sometimes reported human trafficking to the police.

Not deterred by the fact that street sex work is decriminalized in New Zealand, Christchurch city councillor Aaron Keown took matters into his own hands and paid for and installed a bunch of faux municipal signs that read “NO STREET SEX WORKERS AT ALL TIMES” on Manchester Street.

Is Los Angeles still a porn hub since mandatory condom law Measure B passed?

In the Things We Already Knew file: IRIN News reports that “Sex Workers Bear [The] Brunt of the War on Trafficking“. Meena Saraswathi, director of  SANGRAM, Liz Hilton of EMPOWER, and other sex worker/human rights activists are quoted on police abuse in and out of the context of rescue raids and the conflation of sex work and trafficking.

Five women who used to work at Grand Junction are suing the Denver strip club in a class action lawsuit over their supposed independent contractor status.

The Atlantic/Tealeaf Nation used the arrest and detention of well-known Chinese angel investor and social media celebrity Charles Xue on suspicion of soliciting a prostitute as a jumping off point to discuss the stigma and violence Chinese sex workers face.

A recent Cape Town policy discussion meeting attended by sex workers’ rights organization SWEAT, GLBT rights group Free Gender, and top police management focused on building trust between the police and the sex worker and GLBT communities.