[Shakira] Begum is a proud housekeeper, and a generous hostess. It is only if you have lived with her for a few days and catch her anxiously counting slices of bread, or carefully diluting washing-up liquid in a small plastic pot by the sink, or boiling saucepans of hot water to heat deliberately shallow baths, that you slowly begin to understand the full extent of her daily struggle. Poverty manifests itself in small things.

For Begum, and 31,500 other asylum seekers, deprivation is a legal obligation. Forbidden to work, she is forced to live on state handouts. New legislation that came into force last week has frozen benefits for asylum-seeker lone parents at £42.16 per week, instead of increasing it in line with inflation to £44.35. Begum receives an extra £50 a week for her daughter Farzana. Under the same legislation, single asylum seekers aged over 25 have had their benefits cut to just £5 a day. No asylum seeker is allowed to supplement their income, no matter how long it takes the Home Office to process their claim. Begum and Farzana, have been waiting for three years for a decision to be made about their asylum claim. She lives in fear that any day she could receive a rejection letter and will be deported.

Sadder still is the heartbreaking requests of thirteen year old daughter Farzana, who is desperately trying to be seen as normal. After a school friend photographed pictures of her dilapidated home and spread them around school, Farzana only has other friends in similar positions come over to visit. She yearns for birthday gifts like an Ipod, in spite of her mother scraping to pay for groceries each week. Her youthful hopes seem almost cruel when contrasted with their stateless circumstances.

Farzana has been getting straight As in art, and wants to go on a school trip to Paris to see the galleries, but they can't afford it, and her ID card probably wouldn't get her past the border. "Mum says I can't go," says Farzana, "But maybe it will be OK if I just go in with everyone, you know? Maybe they won't notice."

Though their existence is bleak, Begum fled an abusive relationship and an increasingly oppressive religious culture in her native country of Bangladesh. In light of the past trauma experienced by her and her daughter, they are willing to wait for the British government to hopefully grant them citizenship. In the meantime, Begum attends community college and looks forward to a brighter future:

Begum's favourite day of the week is Friday. It is when she volunteers for the Women Asylum Seekers Together (Wast) charity. Unlike most organisations that campaign on asylum issues, it is led by female asylum seekers themselves. Begum helps run the meetings. In Wast's small, overcrowded room, this small, welfare-dependent mother is a leader, welcoming new mothers from Eritrea and the Ivory Coast, fetching them chairs and asking them questions. She has a reputation among the regulars as a mine of valuable information. She knows how much benefit you're entitled to, when markets offer the best deals, legal aid numbers and cheap bus routes. Despite this, she does sometimes go over budget. When she is ill and cannot cook, she gives her daughter money for more expensive ready-cooked food.

Watching Begum at Wast, it is clear that she is not just fighting for herself, or even just for herself and her daughter. "All of us women are a team," she says. "If I get my papers, I will keep coming back here. This is not just about me. This is about all asylum seekers. All of us together."

'We're All In This Together' [The Guardian]

Apparently prostitutes report their income on a 1040 Schedule C, just like I have since I started freelance writing five years ago. Thanks to the Fifth Amendment, they're allowed to avoid incriminating themselves by being vague about what their actual business is — Slate's Brian Palmer says they could write something like "sale of leisure services." But they do have to enter a code for their business — ACORN apparently suggested 711510 ("independent artists, writers, and performers"), which is the same code I use.

Unlike a prostitute, I don't have to worry about balancing the penalty for being caught doing my job against the penalty for reporting income from it (in most states, says Palmer, punishments for tax evasion are stiffer). Nor do I need to know about laws that prevent police from using tax returns as the initial tip in a criminal investigation. But I do have some advice for anyone filing a schedule C — don't report a loss more than two years in a row. The recession may be hitting prostitutes just as hard as it's hitting writers, but if you lose money for a third year, the IRS could determine that having sex is your hobby, not your job — and then your expenses aren't deductible.

If you're a john, though, you could try writing off the money you pay prostitutes as a health expense. A tax attorney recently tried to deduct $100,000 in prosecution and porn expenses as "sex therapy." Unfortunately for him, he lost.

How Do Prostitutes Pay Their Taxes? [Slate]
Tax Court Writes Off Lawyer's Deduction For Prostitutes [Legal Blog Watch]

Candy starts her article in the Daily Mail with the somewhat disturbing claim that, as the editor of a women's magazine, she knows all about young women, "from what they wear to who they want to date" (if that's true, I apparently enjoy putting candle wax in my boyfriend's anus and slapping ruching on everything to give myself a bust). Then she says that today's thirtysomething women "are happiness hunters; they have abandoned career ambition and decided to choose love over work, contentment above the stress of success, marriage and kids above jobs, friends above status."

First of all, like so many articles about opting out, balancing family and career, and the like, this ignores the many women who have to work at jobs that are not necessarily high-powered careers, and don't really have a choice between friends and status. Secondly, the idea that career is about drudgery, dues-paying, and obligation while true happiness comes only from family and friends is kind of a strange one coming from Candy. Why did she and her 40-something friends bother "climbing the career ladder" if it didn't make them, in some way, happy? This is an article about women with the luxury of choosing between a fun personal life and an intellectually demanding job — is she really saying only one of those choices is fulfilling?

It's also not true that everyone has to choose. Candy acknowledges that the 30-year-olds she talks to don't "believe a woman's place is with her babies or her boyfriend" — they just want a balance between family and career. And she points out that women her age may have been afraid to ask for such a balance. She says, "I didn't tell my bosses that I was pregnant until I was nearly five months gone, so worried was I about the response." She and other women her age and older "have probably paved the way" for younger women to ask for reasonable hours, family leave, and the like. Candy and those who came before her proved something that shouldn't need proving — that women can work just as hard and well as men. If women truly feel that they don't have to prove that anymore (and unfortunately, we doubt that this is always true), it doesn't necessarily mean their priorities are different from those of women before them — it just means they feel more comfortable expressing them.

So there's really nothing strange about the 30-something "happiness hunters" Candy describes. Everybody wants happiness. And the freedom to balance work and family is good for everyone, even if you pick work. We should be striving to make this freedom available to more women — and men too. When people get a little flexibility in their lives, we shouldn't be surprised when they exercise it — and we shouldn't assume that their desire to take a day off means they only care about love.

Why I envy Generation Me who choose love over career - and children above status [Daily Mail]

photo by Ben Lister for the Daily Mail

The anonymous blogger says that while the quantity and "quality" of call girls has not changed, there seems to be higher price elasticity of demand — i.e. the more a call girl charges, the fewer clients she can expect. The post continues:

On the Eros guide (warning contains explicit content), the central clearing house of escort services in the New York area (of course, I only visited the Eros cite to research my forthcoming article on the subject), some of the "VIP" providers are offering "Wall Street adjusted courtesy rates". A non trivial number of the women also claim to be formerly employed in the "financial services industry".

Behind the blogger's I'm-so-naughty gags (he [or, to be fair, she] also writes that "there may be some guilt-ridden bankers in New York looking to get spanked") is the interesting observation that more people may enter sex work during a recession. These are usually people who were "already on the fringe of the industry" — the blogger cites a one-time kept man who became a rent boy when the economic crisis drove his benefactor out of town.

But talking about prostitutes like they're sacks of sugar — with supply, demand, and price elasticity — ignores larger questions about the social position of sex work. Swedish academic Susanne Dodillet had such questions when doing her comparison of Swedish and German prostitution laws. Germany recently legalized brothels and made prostitutes eligible for all the benefits of other skilled workers. Sweden, meanwhile, passed a 1999 describing prostitution "as an unacceptable expression of society's genderised power structures." Dodillet says Swedes are more trusting of their government to provide moral guidance, while Germans remember the Third Reich. She also writes,

While Swedish prostitution policies are based on a normative view of how equality should manifest itself for women and men, the German left emphasises that there is a large range of sexual identities and modes of expression. According to this way of thinking, selecting some as more equal and thereby superior to others entails discriminating against deviants.

Will a recession make us more accepting of prostitution as more people enter the industry? Will greater trust in our government after the departure of Bush II actually pave the way for stricter prostitution laws? Or are we just going to keep treating sex work with a combination of tacit acceptance and occasional persecution? Unfortunately, history suggests the latter.

Sex workers in the recession [Economist]
Is Sex Work? [EurekAlert]

The behavior? Verbal abuse, job sabotage, misuse of authority and destroying of relationships. Explains Klaus: "While women have come a long way in removing workplace barriers, one of the last remaining obstacles is how they treat one another. Instead of helping to build one another’s careers, they sometimes derail them — for example, by limiting access to important meetings and committees; withholding information, assignments and promotions; or blocking the way to mentors and higher-ups." And yet, writes Klaus:

Despite all the money spent annually on women’s leadership conferences and professional development programs, you’d be hard-pressed to find a workshop on women mistreating one another at work. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge proponent of women’s leadership programs. But teaching career skills is not enough if we ignore one of the most important reasons for holding these events in the first place: learning to value one another so we can all get ahead.

It's also interesting that recent research shows that girls who are bullied at a young age are more likely to remain victims than boys. In other words, if you're getting beaten up at age six, you're probably going to be teased and verbally threatened at age ten. What are the chances some of this stays with you when you're 22, or 32?

Of course, you'd think that if there are multitudes of women out there who have experienced sabotage and abuse, there would be a a horde of women willing to speak out against bullies in the workplace. Except that means admitting a woman mistreated you, Klaus explains. "We fear that bringing our experience into the light and talking about it will set us back to that ugly gender stereotype we have fought so hard to overcome: the one about the overemotional, backstabbing, aggressive (and you know what’s coming) bitch."

So what's the answer? A push for females to be kinder and gentler in the workplace? Or a course called Dealing With Bitches 101?

A Sisterhood of Workplace Infighting [NY Times]
Girls Twice As Likely As Boys To Remain Victims Of Bullying [EurekAlert]

Lilly Pulitzer herself had a textbook background: Chapin, Miss Porter's, marriage to a publishing scion, and a youthful life of wealthy eccentricity (Pulitzer is famous for going without shoes and undies and for keeping a menagerie as a young wife.) Then came anxiety attacks, a stay in what she terms "the nuthouse" - “I can’t really remember how long I was there, but my cousin was there too, so that was nice” - and depression that led to the start of her "hobby," running a juice stand that called for a practical uniform of shift dresses that wouldn't show stains.

The rest is, of course, history: the gaily printed shifts became a sensation with the Palm Beach society set, former classmate Jackie Kennedy wore one in a magazine spread, and Lilly Pulitzer became a household name, selling not just pink and green dresses, but embroidered trousers and capris, sarongs, and all manner of sportswear. Pulitzer is often credited with creating the concept of "resort" - or, as she blithely put it, "it’s always summer somewhere.” Although she closed up shop in the businesslike 80s, she sold the brand in 1993 and has continued as a creative consultant in its new incarnation. The line currently has 20 boutiques, plus department store collections. According to today's WWD, "brand extension is a significant part of the growth strategy for Lilly Pulitzer as it begins its second half-century."

Of course, was Lilly Pulitzer really ever anything but a lifestyle brand? Did people ever really love wearing luridly-colored monkeys and sea-horses? Yes, the prints were cheerful, but when you see a Lilly Pulitzer, you think "Lilly Pulitzer" and that has surely always been the point. To wear one of her dresses was to momentarily be a part of a world where sporting goofy, unflattering clothes is a mark of dashing, privilege-bred confidence, the very definition of the uniform of an insider. Its appeal now is nostalgic. As W puts it, "the Palm Beach social swirl that Rousseau recalls—in which counts sat next to carpenters at her dinner parties and, as she relishes telling, Kennedy spoon-fed John-John on her kitchen floor—has an almost mythic quality, one she laments no longer exists." But to most of us, the nostalgic appeal is at least as much for a character like Pulitzer's as for anachronistic high society. She was, of course, inseparable from that privilege, and hers was a success inexplicably linked with her connections, friends, and lifestyle. But the old-fashioned no-nonsense sense of entitlement is also what allowed Pulitzer to build a successful business in a man's world, divorce her husband and move out on her own, where many women would have been happy to leave dresses as a pleasant sideline to a socialite's life. She took her lifestyle and made it a business. Everything about her story — from the world that inspired it, to the entitlement that encouraged it, to the scope of the achievement — is part of a long-gone world. This, as much as the unapologetic silliness of the clothes themselves, is a fascinating glimpse to another time for the rest of us.

Lilly Land [W]
All the Details: The Lilly Lifestyle [WWD]

Whereas for years we've been in a dress-code limbo forcing us to balance "professional" with "creative" with "young" with "mature" now - except in the most creative of industries - a suit no longer feels stuffy. Says one headhunter, in these competitive times, “We are back to a time when every company expected both women and men to wear suits and we didn’t have a Casual Friday..They are looking for a sharper style. I recommend a strong suit that says you are collected and ready to work.” (Here's hoping Mad Men's smart suits are a contributing factor.) Sure there are those stalwarts who bought a suit straight out of high school and dutifully dressed up like a mini exec whenever they wanted to be taken seriously, some of us - especially those who are prone to looking young anyhow - always felt uncomfortably like we were dressed in business costumes.

I remember the agony of dressing for interviews, and the discomfort of feeling overdressed in a room full of jeans, like I had "Interview" written across my forehead. As such, any dictate like this, however arbitrary, is a boon. Of course, there's still the issue of skirt or trouser; color; underpinning (in fact in my opinion the article goes on to list so many variables that it's more confusing than ever) - but really the expectation of conformity is comforting. For my own part, I can't wear a suit and not look like an ass, and so swear by a good jacket and an A-line (I do have a couple of vintage suits, suitable for church etc.) And whatever you wear, remember, this is key:
T-tailored to fit you
L-lint-free
C-clean.

The rest is all gravy. And yes I just invented that. Believe me, we're going to be covering all this in my Arbitrary Guide to Style Mostly Inspired by Vintage Career Romances, coming soon. "Shrimp-colored knits" figure prominently, I do assure you.

The Return Of The Interview Suit [New York Times]

If you are selling your time, undivided attention, and the (unspoken) offer of sexual entertainment, you're an escort. If you're selling a specific sexual activity for a certain amount of money, you're a prostitute. If you won't have sex with the man you're dating unless he buys you an expensive dinner, you're a (relatively cheap) prostitute.

Guides To Call Girl Work Out [The Sun]
Related: The Internet Escort's Handbook

Perhaps those posts will lead Ms. Kirchner's mother to a deeper understanding of the oldest profession and her daughter's reasons for choosing it. But, says Morgan Winter on the Utne Reader's website, "There seems to be two basic motivations for writing about one's tenure as a hooker, neither educational. The prostitute either wants to glorify or vilify the industry and its consumers. Either of these seems simplistic and disingenuous. After all, not only are we talking about the oldest profession, we're also trying to understand arguably the most complicated physiological aspect of nature—sex—through books about themes that, if authored by anybody other than former prostitutes, would fall under the 'teen' section in the local library." Even with a more nuanced view of prostitution, I can't imagine any mother would be particularly thrilled to discover that her daughter was a hooker. I got an awkwardly scolding phone call from my mother when I wrote about foreskins. I can't even imagine what she'd say if I told her I touched them for a living!

Insanely Sane Conversation With My Mom [Bound, Not Gagged]
The True Stories Of O[Utne]

Related: Young Beauty Sells Her Body, Breaks Our Hearts
a href="http://gawker.com/5006394/diane-sawyer-rats-out-hooker-to-her-parents">Diane Sawyer Rats Out Hooker To Her Parents

But according to Professor Roger Matthews, the life of a prostitute is anything but glamorous. "It's abuse and a life of hell," Matthews, a professor of criminology at London's South Bank University tells the Guardian. Matthews has been studying street prostitution for almost two decades and has just published a book called Prostitution, Politics and Policy, outlining his arguments against so-called "liberal" approaches to the sex trade. The "liberal" approach, explalins the the Guardian, "is to think of the trade as simply another form of work, to be 'non-judgmental' in dealing with it, and to set up areas, such as 'tolerance zones', where women can work without fear of arrest."

Matthews disagrees with this viewpoint because he believes that it continues to encourage johns to buy sex and that prostitution, no matter what, is a lose/lose scenario for almost all the women involved. "The women involved in prostitution - particularly street prostitution - are not only among the most victimised group in society, but many of them are multiple victims. If the term 'victimisation' is to have any meaning, then those involved in prostitution must be prime candidates," he argues. He's even against brothels like the Bunny Ranch, because, "When governments are seen to be endorsing prostitution, it leads to a massive expansion of the trade, both legal and illegal." Adds Guardian writer Julie Bindel: "Women working in legal brothels in Nevada, for example, have spoken about how prostitution under such a regime feels like 'legalised rape', and that no laws can remove the stigma of selling sex."

So what does Matthews suggest governments do in order to help prostitutes? He wants to decriminalize prostitution for the women, make consequences worse for the johns, and fund programs to help women find jobs so they can leave hooking behind altogether. He also wants to start studying the men who pay for sex, about whom very little is known. ("The available research indicates that the motivation of many men is relatively low, and that in the vast majority of cases it would not take much to deter them from paying for sex," he says.) Regardless of the available research, I have a hard time believing that prostitution will disappear, no matter what kinds of legislation is passed. While decidedly unglamorous in its gritty reality, prostitution still retains that odd patina of glamor, and sometimes people [men and women alike] want no-strings-attached nookie. It ain't the oldest profession for nothing.

Whorehouses And American Nostalgia [Economist]
'It's Abuse And A Life Of Hell' [Guardian]

Anyway, psychologist Ellen Klosson says, "Women have been aware of the time pressure to establish themselves in a career before starting a family, because of the difficulty of starting this task in their thirties and forties. I think what we are seeing in this study is the solidification of this trend." Yeah, no shit. But isn't it interesting to think — that despite the Kardashians, Paris Hilton and Bratz — a young generation of girls don't see their boyfriends as the only thing in their futures?

Young Women Choosing Careers Over Love [CNN]

[Young married women] usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they are less likely to be flirtatious.

When you have to use older women, try to get ones who have worked outside the home at some time in their lives. Older women who have never contacted the public have a hard time adapting themselves and are inclined to be cantankerous and fussy.

And this!

Experience indicates that 'husky' girls - those who are just a little on the heavy side - are more even tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters!

Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day.