To Go Where No One Should Venture

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Chris

There are the good kinds of masochism and the bad kinds. The good kinds involve getting tied up in a barely-lit dungeon while someone torments the hell out of you with floggers, needles, or Wartenburg wheels. The bad kind includes reading anti-porn blogs and watching fundie preachers on TV out of some misbegotten urge to “inform yourself.” Or, apparently, going to see the new movie, 10,000 B.C. While I have engaged in the first two, I will not be engaging in the third, especially since Adam Lipscomb has already done so and blogged about the experience in painful detail. The poor lad sounds traumatized.

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex Work….

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Chris

It’s no wonder it’s so hard to get a rational discussion going about sex workers. Even for genuinely interested, well-meaning people, it’s hard to get any solid information. Before you can even start talking about solutions to the problems that sex workers face, you have to first have to correct the ideas of what sex workers are. Any conversation in the mainstream media about sex workers starts out with icons forged from sensationalism and half-truths, as we’ve seen from the coverage of the Spitzer scandal lately. The images of trafficked junkies who need to be rescued or decadent young women who have had their souls twisted by their lives of deception sell papers and television time better than a nuanced picture full of shades of gray does.

I wrote earlier about Sex Work Awareness, the new activist group founded by members of $pread, SWANK, and PONY to address this very sort of issue in the public consciousness. They’ve just launched a new blog called Sex Work 101 devoted to answering the questions that most people have when they’re just starting to look past the surface. Audacia Ray writes that the idea of Sex Work 101 occurred to her at this year’s Women Action and Media conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Continue reading →

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Good News: That Bear Stearns Stock Isn’t TOTALLY Useless

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Chris

I think I have a crush on Miss Victoria X. It’s true that I don’t patronize pro-dommes, partly because of a budget that, in a particularly profitable month, might allow me to purchase the privilege of a scornfully lifted eyebrow from one as she passes me in midtown Manhattan on the way to beat the hell out of some corporate lackey at the Plaza. However, were I in the market, I think that Miss Victoria X would be on my list.

I found Miss Victoria via another tip from Sarah Jenny. Miss Victoria’s heart, it seems, has been melted by the plight of the poor employees at Bear Stearns, and she’s providing a special offer to employees, ex-employees, and soon-to-be-exes: if you buy a session with Miss Victoria, she’ll give a discount equal to the price of one share of Bear Stearns stock. When she first made her offer, BS stock was at two dollars, which wouldn’t buy you a latté at Starbucks; the discount has risen with the price of the stock, and now stands at $10.85. Miss Victoria, in her utter benevolence, has already come up with several potential scenarios for her clients:

-domestic service training (useful in preparing for future job as a janitor at Goldman Sachs)
-spanking combined with verbal chastising (“Caused!” -whack- “Sub-prime!” -whack- “Crisis!” -whack- “Very!” -whack- “Very!” -whack- “Naughty!” -whack whack whack-)
-78 cane strokes (number chosen to represent the difference between Bear Stearns’ $80 per share book value and the actual current share price of $2)
-interrogation roleplay (I am Coughlin Stoia and you are Bear Stearns. Helpful in preparing for upcoming deposition)
-master/slave roleplay (I am JP Morgan and you are Bear Stearns. Now I own you)

Potential clients will be asked to arrive with $300 cash. The discount will be given in ten one-dollar bills, three quarters, one nickel, and four pennies. The client will receive them one at a time, and will thank Miss Victoria for her generosity after each.

This is great marketing, yes, but it’s also great satire. After looking over Miss Victoria’s blog as a whole, it got an immediate spot on my blogroll and on my daily feed. She has a really wry, sharp sense of humor about sex work and it never takes the snark into the smug self-satisfaction that characterizes a lot of blogs.

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The New York Times Sets It Straight

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Chris

Sarah Jenny Bleviss brought this Editors’ Note in the New York Times to our attention, in which the paper admits to serious reporting errors in its coverage of sex workers. An entire two-thirds of the original article has been deleted from the article, which supposedly profiled three “high class call girls” in New York. It turns out, though, that two of the women were sex workers but not prostitutes:

Continue reading →

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Christian Gene Isolated by Homosexual Scientists

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Chris

Christians are a pain in the ass. Truly. I love seeing the roles flipped in this short videocast below. It’s from the 2002-2003 Australian satire show “The Chaser Non-Stop News Network.” Kudos to the Pink Tiger Institute. I fully support their work.

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Sex Work Awareness: A New Voice in the Media Wilderness

Posted on March 16, 2008 by Chris

The last couple of weeks have brought more news coverage and public discussion of sex work than you usually get in a year. When Eliot Spitzer got nailed because of his hot dates with “Kristen,” the press swarmed onto the story like flies on shit. The beauty of a scandal like the Spitzer story is that it lets the media have the best of both worlds: they can use the sex to sell product as enthusiastically as Joe Francis having a fire sale, but at the same time, they get to stake the moral high ground by pointing an accusing finger at both the client and the sex worker. If Eliot Spitzer’s sin was the hypocrisy of hiring call girls after building a career for himself by putting their fellow sex workers in jail, it was little more than an insignificant blemish compared to the behavior of the press. A good chunk of the editors and writers at the New York Times should just get over their pretensions of respectability and hop on a plane for California, where they can become honest, hardworking pornographers.

As is typical of American discussions of sex, the Kristen/Spitzer scandal didn’t turn into an opportunity to talk about the realities of sex work, or the ways that our private desires diverge from our public declarations, or anything resembling a forthright discussion of sexuality. It was just another opportunity to obsess about sex as if it were a particularly ugly scab that just won’t stop itching. Nothing demonstrates that better than Audacia Ray’s recent post about her interview with MSNBC. The first question the interviewer asked her, point-blank, was: “Have you been a whore?” The supposedly more genteel, public-radio intellectual Brian Lehrer wasn’t much better in his treatment of Dacia when he interviewed her on the radio. The entire show had a leering tone to it, as if he too couldn’t wait to get the juicy details. And Renegade Evolution got pretty much the same treatment when the media showed up on her doorstep:

Continue reading →

Posted in Sex Work, activism | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The Question No One Is Asking….

Posted on March 11, 2008 by Chris

In the last 24 hours, there’s been a lot of discussion about Eliot Spitzer, trying to divine his motivations for visiting high-priced call girls and to look into whatever future he has politically. The feminist blogs are filled with speculation about what the hell his wife was doing standing behind him at the press conference and a lot of very predictable moral outrage over Spitzer’s “complicity” in the oppression of women by hiring a prostitute. In all the madness, there’s little talk of the woman who Spitzer hired. Below is a press release from four sex workers’ rights organizations asking the question that seems to get skipped over in all the chaos.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts
Shakti Ziller, Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK), swank@riseup.net 877-877-2004 x 2
Audacia Ray, 718.554.1714
Sarah Bleviss, Sex Workers Outreach Project NYC (SWOP-NYC), swop.nyc@gmail.com
Prostitutes of New York (PONY), pony@panix.com
Desiree Alliance, http://www.desireealliance.org/

WHAT ABOUT KRISTEN?
New York Sex Worker Organizations Respond to Spitzer Scandal


New York, NY - In the last few days, Governor Eliot Spitzer has publicly admitted to being associated with an escort agency and is considering resignation. As sex worker advocates, we are concerned about the representation and fate of “Kristen” and sex workers who are being thrust into the spotlight because of the investigation into the Governor. We also share the widespread concern for Governor Spitzer’s family.

Continue reading →

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Sex Work Forum at SitPS: Day One

Posted on February 25, 2008 by Chris

SitPS Forum on Sex Work, Trafficking, and Human Rights

Anthony Kennerson has gotten Sex in the Public Square’s weeklong forum on Sex Work, Trafficking and Human Rights off to a great start with a long, thoughtful post about men who patronize sex workers, whether through hiring prostitutes or looking at porn. I can see some people seeing it as an attempt to hijack the issues of sex workers and turn it into concern for the privileged, but I think that this is a very important issue to think about in terms of its effects on the welfare of the workers themselves as well as their clients.

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Spongebob is In Your Pants

Posted on February 24, 2008 by Chris

This has to be the most disturbing marketing strategy I’ve seen since the Harry Potter vibrating broom was released and then quickly taken off the market as the people in charge abruptly sobered up and realized what they were doing. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…. the Spongebob Squarepants rectal thermometer.

Spongebob Squarepants Rectal Thermometer

I think that this conclusively proves that the marketing industry has done far more to create hordes of pansexual, sadomasochistic sex freaks than feminism, queer rights movements, or rock ‘n’ roll ever did.  Readers are encouraged to tell us what they’d do with such an item in the comments area.

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Online Forum at Sex in the Public Square

Posted on February 23, 2008 by Chris

SitPS Forum on Sex Work, Trafficking, and Human RightsNext week is going to be an exciting one, online and off. First of all, Tuesday is the kickoff for Cinekink 2008. Cinekink LogoCinekink is always good — far better than it has a right to be, in fact, given that sex often just gives indie filmmakers one reason to ramp their egos and pretensions up to eleven and beyond. I shudder to imagine what reams of crap Lisa Vandever has to comb through just to get quality programming for one week together. The GF always work the events as volunteers, and it’s a great time for anyone with a dirty mind and an artistic bent.

On a more personal level, though, we have a really important event of our own starting up at Sex in the Public Square. My partner and co-conspirator, Elizabeth Wood, is always looking for ways to come up with ways that we can take the pro-sex dialogue from spinning our wheels in the mud, and this time she came up with a brilliant one: rather than play the same old game of sex-work bingo with the cast of usual suspects, she’s assembled a bunch of the smartest activists and writers in the blogosphere today and invited them to participate in week-long online discussion on the themes of sex work, trafficking (and “trafficking”) and human rights. I’m all cranked up like a kid waiting for Santa Claus, except that in this case, Santa isn’t just my parents making shit up. It’s actually going to happen, and we’ve really got some great people who have committed to making it happen. There are so many things to say on these subjects, and so little of it ever gets said because we on the sex-poz side are busy just trying to hold ground from people who want to demonize us as haters of women, rapists, or just sling shit at us in childish ways by calling us “sex-poxes” or some other ridiculous thing. It’s going to be public, but that doesn’t mean it’s an open forum; comments are going to be strictly moderated, and people who want to play games like that don’t get to have their say this time around. That means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel once more by making the case that no, not all sex workers are victimized, trafficked, or acting out toxic scripts left over from childhood sexual abuse. Sex worker bingo is not allowed. I highly recommend everyone who’s interested check it out, especially if you want to contribute in a courteous, meaningful manner. Everything kicks off on Monday the 25th. The formal press release, complete with our contributor list, is below the fold.

Continue reading →

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