After a two year battle, MPs have passed a law that now outlaws paying for sex in France, with a penalty of almost €4,000 for offenders—but unlike legislation in other countries like the U.S., the “offenders,” in this case are clients, not sex workers.
It’s just like your terrible college!
Kink.com, the San Francisco-based BDSM and fetish porn studio at which a portion of the alleged sexual assaults by James Deen took place, has changed its policies in an attempt to prevent future abuses.
Twenty years ago, Friday and Species were blowing up at the box office. Groove Theory’s “Tell Me” and Notorious B.I.G’s “One More Chance (Remix)” were in heavy rotation on my Sony Walkman. I had just graduated from high school in Philadelphia and was finally dealing with my sexuality. This was the summer sex workers…
A sex worker in Charleston, West Virginia shot and killed a man in self-defense who had a list of prostitutes in his pocket and a “kill kit” in his Subaru. Police are now beginning to link the 45-year-old man, Neal Falls, to the unsolved murders of sex workers in the Las Vegas area and in Chillicothe, Ohio.
Only in Washington, D.C. can a former city councilman become a gay strip club impresario. Meet Jim Graham, the 69-year-old former politician with a new start-up touting topless men and screaming patrons at something he calls “Rock Hard Sundays.”
I expected to be criticized for my work — I'm a porn performer — from my classmates at Duke. But from my fellow strippers, denigration for "sitting on a dick for a living" stung, if no other reason than that I didn't see it coming.
When you're playing a game as infectiously compelling as Grand Theft Auto V, it can be difficult to take a step back and reflect on all the wanton acts of destruction in which you've participated.
It’s tough to promote safe sex while also instructing police to confiscate individuals' condoms as evidence that they're sex workers, but New York City has finally figured that out. Almost.
Renting your apartment out on Airbnb? Don’t worry so much about your stuff being stolen; instead, maybe freak out about whether your place will be as virginal as you left it. Prostitutes are using the online room-sharing site to set-up transient brothels.
New research out today claims to offer a window into the massive, murky world of the underground commercial sex economy in eight major American cities, relying on interviews with 250 law enforcement officials, sex workers, and pimps. And, like one might expect, this unprecedented peek inside shows that there's huge…
Brooke Magnanti, the research scientist/former sex worker behind Belle de Jour, is being sued for defamation by an ex-lover, who’s pursuing damages for defamation and breach of privacy, and wondering (quite vociferously) out loud to anyone who will listen, i.e. the Mail, if Magnanti ever really was a sex worker.
Here's one way sex workers can hold clients and cops accountable: videotape them. Raven Nicole Masterson, a self-described "coparazzi," uses her cellphone camera to document how often the basic rights of sex workers — especially those who are women of color — are completely ignored. Masterson's guerrilla tactics…
Man, the Supreme Court wants to go on summer vacay so bad! All it wants to do is head to the cabin upstate, chill at the lake, and make out with its boyfriend (he’s from Canada, you don’t know him), but Dad is being a total knob about driving privileges. “No driving until you finish all your opinions from last term…
Sex workers, anti-trafficking groups, the New York Civil Liberties Union, public health advocates, and LGBTQ organizations are today lobbying the lawmakers of New York state to pass a bill that would make the possession of condoms inadmissible as evidence in criminal prosecutions of prostitution and related offenses.…
Giving new meaning to the Happy Meal (HAR), a 58-year-old New Mexico man was arrested last week after he paid a sex worker in food from McDonalds. Sorry, all I can think of is Wendy on Breaking Bad.
Some of the Bay Area's sex workers are also self-described geeks and marketing whizzes who use Game of Thrones t-shirts ("Winter is Coming") and savvy social media marketing to grow their businesses and establish agency in an industry where workers are too often either victimized or criminalized.
Writer and sex worker Charlotte Shane recently panned cultural historian Betsy Prioleau's Swoon, which promises to reveal "surprising seductive secrets" of men like Casanova, Lord Byron, and Julius Caesar, in Bookforum.
It's hard to write about Chris Arnade's "Faces of Addiction" photo series because I keep getting distracted and drawn in by photos of women like Vanessa, a sex worker and survivor of domestic violence, and Beauty, who has bright neon green pants and hopes to go into childcare because she likes "to make people happy."
Many people who think sex workers are exploited — perhaps even most of them — have positive intentions. But, as Melissa Gira Grant explains in an excellent Reason must-read, the war on sex workers is a war on women that "has actual prisoners and a body count" and is " waged by women who will not hesitate to use their…
