The Week in Links–March 8th
by suzyhooker on March 8, 2013 · 8 comments
in The Week in Links
photo by the African Sex Workers’ Alliance
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day was this week, on March third, and it came with a whole slew of links. Maggie’s Toronto, The Toronto Sex Workers’ Action Project, produced a press release for the occasion in which street workers demand full decriminalization of their lives. Many sex workers honored the day by creating a hash tag on twitter, #whenantisattack, in which we dished about the worst things anti-prostitution activists have said and done–blogger Jemima, of It’s Just a Hobby, collected some of the best tweets. Commenting on this twitter activity, The Guardian seems to have just gotten the memo about widespread whorephobia in feminism. International Sex Workers’ Rights day was founded in India in 20001, when the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a Calcutta based organization, sponsored a sex workers’ festival which had more than 25,000 attendees. Thus, it was about time for the day to be observed in the Indian state Mizoram for the first time, in its capital, Aizawl. On yet another continent, sex workers and human rights activists marched in Johannesburg on International Sex Workers’ Rights Day to protest the continued police abuse sex workers face and the criminal justice system’s failure to prosecute the perpetrators. Sex workers in the other four major South African cities will take to the streets today, for International Women’s Day, to make the point that the majority of sex workers are women, and this police abuse should be recognized as a form of gender based violence. Sisonke, the only South African based organization by and for sex workers, also took the occasion to argue for decriminalization of prostitution in South Africa.
The Red Umbrella Project writing workshop’s literary magazine, Pros(e), will be free on Kindle all weekend. Jessie Nicole and I’s upcoming review of the volume is gushingly positive, so, please, snatch it up with our blessing.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is how the Swedish model works: Police in Stockholm were surprised on Monday to find that a man they had arrested for buying sex from a prostitute was the duty prosecutor to whom they were obliged to report the crime.
Bitch Magazine interviewed Margo St James, founder of COYOTE, the first US sex workers’ rights organization. The interviewer, Anne Gray Fischer, is writing a book called Bodies on the March: How Prostitutes Seized the 70s. I kinda wish she was already done writing the book so I could be reading it.
SF Weekly calls for accountability for racism within “alt” communities, citing porn mogul Joanna Angel’s use of yellowfacing in her latest porn movie and the queer community’s support for the blackface caricature of “Shirley P Liquor”. The magazine’s blog also covered local sex worker activist Siouxsie Q’s decision to resolve her conflict with Chicago Public Media and Ira Glass by changing the name of her podcast from “This American Whore” to “The Whorecast”.
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Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work by Kim Price-Glynn (2010)">Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work by Kim Price-Glynn (2010)
by Mona Salim on March 7, 2013 · 2 comments
in Reviews, Strippers
In the midst of Girls Gone Wild culture, in which stripping is made to seem effortless and women’s naked bodies are cast as easily replaceable, Kim Price-Glynn enters the Lion’s Den. The Den, a seedy strip club in a small, white, working-class town in the Northeast, is a far cry from the glamorous media images of low lights, glamorous makeup, and dazzling stage sets. Quite the contrary, the Den’s physical layout—run-down and in serious need of repair—mirrors the niche its strippers occupy as the exploited and expendable employees of a club centered around male desire and profit.
Strip Club: Gender, Power, and Sex Work is an ethnography by Price-Glynn in which she explores what she calls the “gendered processes” underlying the organizational structure at a strip club. While working as a cocktail waitress, Price-Glynn turned her attention to the formal and informal processes by which strip club employees, dancers, and customers exercised authority and had their needs and desires fulfilled. Who “wins” when it comes to stripping? Her answer, while attentive to the ambiguities, suggests that males—customers and employees—“win.” Strippers get the short end of the stick.
Price-Glynn doesn’t believe that strip clubs need to be shut down, nor that strippers are caught in cycles of abuse. Instead, she places the “blame” for the exploitative conditions experienced by Lion’s Den dancers on a larger culture of misogyny. Rape culture, the permissibility of violence, and the unique intersection in the club of racism, ageism, and sizeism are overarching social realities that converge to enable the Den’s brand of sexist exploitation. [READ MORE]
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A Nation of Sex Workers: An Interview with Tracy Quan
by Caty Simon on March 5, 2013 · 2 comments
in Activism, Interviews, Prostitution
photo taken by Stanton Wong
I’ve been reading Tracy Quan since before I was a sex worker, when a prequel to Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl was serialized on Salon.com, and I’ve been chummy with her online since 2003, when she graciously replied to my e-mails. I’ve learned so much from Tracy, her callgirl comedy-of-manners novels, and the quirky takes on sex work, relationships, and public figures in her articles. I imagine many of us have.
One of the first of the sex worker literati, Tracy was also one of the first to successfully transition from out sex worker and sex workers’ rights activist to in-demand freelance writer, modeling a career trajectory that helped bring our voices to the mainstream. Yet, her street cred as part of the sex workers’ rights movement is unimpeachable. After reading about the history of PONY (Prostitutes of New York) collaborating with ACT-UP in the 90s, I asked Tracy to talk about her involvement with PONY’s work during that era, as well as many other things.
You started working quite young, at 14 years old, as a way to gain financial independence from your live-in older boyfriend and your parents. Nowadays, there’s a whole lot of tangled discourse about youth sex workers, from a law in NY state that may be able to retroactively erase youth convictions , while another NY State law diverts those now arrested into “state protection”, to anti-sex work feminists shrieking fallaciously that the average age of entry into prostitution is 13, to the sex workers’ rights movement trying to figure out a way to help homeless queer and trans youth who subsist on survival sex. As a former teenage sex worker, what do you have to say about all this?
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Satisfaction (2007-2010)">Satisfaction (2007-2010)
by Fusionista on March 4, 2013 · 3 comments
in Prostitution, Television
Image via SocialistJazz
When I heard about the Showtime Australia drama Satisfaction, set in a swanky Melbourne brothel, I think I elbowed an old lady out of the way to check it out of the library. Yep, library: they take sex work much less negatively in Australia than they do in the United States. It’s legal, although to varying degrees of decriminalization, normalization, and support depending on what state you’re in. West Australia, where I worked, had a variety of irritating laws designed to prevent women from working outside of brothels: they weren’t allowed to hire support staff, like drivers or security, and often had to file taxes in a totally ridiculous way. In Melbourne, across the country in Victoria, sex work is legally licensed and regulated by the state: workers have licenses, regular mandated medical check-ups, and can work independently or through brothels.
Satisfaction is a super swanky TV show about a super swanky brothel, and I absolutely loved it. I’ve never been to a Melbourne brothel, but I have to assume that the glittery hanging curtains, ornate gilt decor, and licensed bar of 232, the Satisfaction home base, are probably not par for the course. They smell more of “movie set designed to make you impressed” rather than “actual working brothel.” The script, though…the script treats sex workers as real human beings, with dignity and respect, facing a variety of issues unrelated to their jobs. Sometimes they hang out together after work; sometimes they have problems unique to sex work; but for large chunks of every episode, the show discusses human dynamics among a group of women who are working for themselves and doing it by choice. There is no coercion here, and the all-too-frequent stereotype we see on US TV (“Debbie couldn’t pay her rent, and now she’s giving blow jobs for crack in some dude’s Pinto!”) is notably, refreshingly absent. [READ MORE]
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The Week in Links–March 1st
by suzyhooker on March 1, 2013 · 2 comments
in The Week in Links
Hajra, Mumtaz, and Sheinaz take a break from fieldwork in a red-light district in Solapur, South Maharashtra. The three women work as peer educators with SAI, an NGO based in Mumbai. Photo by Helen Rimell, in Vice magazine.
Vice mag contributor Helen Rimmel did a photo essay on South Mumbai sex workers who are peer teachers on HIV, STDs, and women’s rights in the community. Ignore Rimmel’s offensive attempts at a narrative—”Life in the red light districts is…pretty much like living in a giant toilet bowl full of syringes and awful people”—and enjoy the photos of these heroines.
Somebody finally did it! A Cincinnati man arrested for soliciting an undercover officer is challenging the case, based on the assertion that making prostitution illegal is unconstitutional.
The Salvation Army calls sex workers cum receptacles now, apparently. Sex isn’t work, and it’s definitely not what God made you for, ladies (unless you’re having babies). Jury is still out on whether this is better or worse than being called a toilet.
In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Pivot Legal Society and Sex Workers United Against Violence are handing out pocket-sized cards to spread the word about the Vancouver Police Department (VPD)’s newly declared Sex Work Enforcement Guidelines. The new approach mandates that police prioritize sex workers’ safety, and these cards remind sex workers of their new rights re: the police.
In this weeks “sex workers saying typically intelligent things about their own lives” section, stripper memoir writer Ruth Fowler is exhausted by whorephobic, classist, and racist feminists, and Tits and Sass contributor and SWOP-LA director Jessie Nicole writes about the urgent problem of a dearth of sexual assault survivor resources for sex workers. Jezebel features Dylan Ryan’s piece in The Feminist Porn Book, and Born Whore takes well meaning but myopic sex worker allies to task.
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