By JIM DWYER
Last year, New York City health workers gave out 37.2 million condoms. That works out to an average of 70 condoms every minute of the year. The city got into mass-scale condom distribution to help prevent the spread of debilitating and deadly diseases.
On the other hand, the condoms are also used to mark people for arrest on prostitution charges.
“Last Rescue in Siam” is the first film ever made by sex workers in Thailand. It is a short black and white movie inspired by the tradition of the old silent movies.The film accompanies the Empower research report “Hit & Run” available on facebook, and can be found on the website www.empowerfoundation.org.
Click here for a page detailing 100 countries’ policies on prostitution, brothel ownership, and pimping. (Spoiler alert: 50% of the countries have legalized prostitution)
via Greta Christina at free thought blogs.
If you work, or have ever worked, in the sex industry — as a prostitute, a stripper, a pro dominant, a pro submissive, a phone sex worker, a porn actor or model, or any other area of the industry — what was your experience?
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT COMMENTS: The comment policy for this post is different from my usual one. It’s at the end of the post. Pay careful attention to it. Violators will have their comment disemvoweled, and may even be banned.
If the pursuit of pleasure is good, how can it be bad for sex workers, people who are professionally steeped in sexuality? Well, it’s complicated. Over the past several decades, a contingent of feminist, sex positive sex workers have emerged, and they have claimed their right to experience the pleasures of sex and share those pleasures with others, including paying clients.
… If only women were replaced with robots!
Click here to read the full story, “Sex machine: How robotic prostitutes could turn an a crime-ridden industry into a respectable ‘guilt free’ business.” The article discusses a futuristic world, replacing sex workers with robots… so that men can have a “risk free” and “guilt-free” sexual experience. Oh and they’ll probably be made, marketed and profited off by men too, but of course the article doesn’t mention job loss and displacement for women.
By Neal Hall, Vancouver Sun
Fifteen groups, including aboriginal organizations, plan to boycott the policy forums next month of the “flawed’ Missing Women Inquiry.
“The commission has lost all credibility among aboriginal, sex work, human rights and women’s organizations that work with and are comprised of the very women most affected by the issues this inquiry is charged with investigating,” the groups stated Tuesday in a letter to Inquiry Commissioner Wally Oppal.
by Kitty Stryker via Huffpost Gay Voices
“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a door mat or a prostitute.”
–Rebecca West, “Mr Chesterton in Hysterics: A Study in Prejudice,” The Clarion, 14 Nov. 1913, reprinted inThe Young Rebecca, 1982
I, like most feminists-in-training, have seen this quotation before. I heard it before when I was young and just beginning to come into my own with feminism. But only recently did I learn that “or a prostitute” was part of the sentiment expressed. Lovely — ’cause prostitutes and feminists are on opposite sides, right?
As I mentioned a couple days ago, Taslima Nasreen has now joined Freethought Blogs, and I (and the rest of us) are well and truly honoured and excited to have her. I really do have an immense amount of respect for her.
But yesterday she wrote a post that I find I absolutely can’t leave unexamined. As much as Taslima may be a hero of mine, I can’t allow that to excuse what I consider to be deeply problematic (and potentially destructive) statements. One of the great beauties and strengths of atheism and skepticism is that we have no popes or saints. Our heroes are at all time available to be questioned, and their assertions always available to be critiqued. And sometimes those assertions demand such critiques. This is one of them.
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