This Instagram photo from a friend is too good not to share!
The editors of The Coast apparently have a rich fantasy life, but the original story is pretty interesting, too.
(via meluka01’s Instagram)
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mcchris: This Instagram photo from a friend is too good not to...
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Pole Dancing Doesn't Make You A Stripper, Twerking Doesn't Make You Black
Pole Dancing Doesn't Make You A Stripper, Twerking Doesn't Make You Black:
As strippers, we perform on stage for one to three songs per set. Sometimes routines are choreographed well to music and other times it’s short and sweet and then it’s over. When it comes to twerking, it’s about more than just having a big round booty. I’ve seen white women and black women and every color in between shake it well on stage. There’s no huge thought process behind it but it’s hard when you don’t know what you’re doing, just like any other dance move. When (most) strippers shake it, we know it’s for entertainment, so it should be good which can mean extra tips on stage and off stage in terms of lapdance sales. When Miley shakes it, it’s because she’s trying to shock us with her uncoordinated hip wiggles. She’s not like the strippers in her song lyrics. I’ve seen those women, and they are much better than she will ever be.
The show was much like her video, complete with human accessories. I wasn’t shocked that there were big booty black women dancing on stage with her. It wouldn’t be the first time people have accessorized with black women (or women of any race) for entertainment. Countless hip-hop and rap videos use black heavy-bottomed women as accessories. As a black mixed woman, I’m offended by Miley’s choice to do this. I’m not sure what she’s trying to prove or say by hiring black women to act as her friends in the “We Can’t Stop” video and on the VMAs. It’s more than the bad pancake booty twerking. It’s the selected parts of black culture she attempted to portray though her song and dance. There’s more to black and hip-hop/rap culture than what she is picking apart and glorifying. She only glorifies ideas from the way black and hip hop/rap culture is portrayed in the media—grills, twerking, big butts, getting high, being surrounded by hot women and acquiring money. Her performance and song lyrics show that she is completely unaware of what actually defines black and rap/hip hop culture…
[…]
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Husband tells of his life married to a sex worker
Husband tells of his life married to a sex worker :
But does he think this openness means couples are happier than those who play it straight?
"I don’t know if people in our circle are any happier. Life is a big complicated thing and sex is just part of the big complicated thing. But our experiences are unique and they’re amazing. Sometimes just like what you see in films, and sometimes they’re not."
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Video
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"Sex work can be liberatory or oppressive work. This is not because sex work is liberatory or..."
“Sex work can be liberatory or oppressive work. This is not because sex work is liberatory or oppressive but because work is liberatory or oppressive–but typically more oppressive for those with little social power. But if you would like to introduce me to all the liberatory and non-oppressive industries we can be a part of, I’m so keen to hear about it! Especially all the options that are accessible to undocumented people, LGBTQ youth and trans women of colour. Like medicine or law where only documented people who can afford a million dollar tuition can be in practice? Like athletes who’s bodies are traded back and forth and then dumped when they are injured? Like the trades where women and people of colour are systematically excluded? Didn’t think so. All workers deserve to be free and respected, including sex workers.”
- “So why did you get into it?” 14 Ways Sex Work Is Real Work | Born Whore
- “So why did you get into it?” 14 Ways Sex Work Is Real Work | Born Whore
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Joint UN Programme Against HIV/AIDS has some wise things to say
“During negotiations of the UN Trafficking Protocol [to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children], states rejected including prostitution as a form of trafficking. Equating sex work with exploitation ignores that… and stalls anti-trafficking efforts.”
An example of this “marketing”, activists say, are “end-demand” programmes worldwide designed to punish people who pay for sex work, which have been criticized as an ineffective way to fight trafficking that has also harmed sex workers’ rights.
“`End demand’ initiatives are often either the product of punitive laws criminalizing sex work, or the approach used by those wishing to see punitive laws introduced. These laws do not reduce the scale of sex work, but they do make sex workers more vulnerable,” according to the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
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Prose & Lore Issue 2 got spotted in the wild by a friend who...
Prose & Lore Issue 2 got spotted in the wild by a friend who was browsing at McNally Jackson in SoHo! Oh yeah, you can totally buy our lit mag in a real live bookstore.
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Sex Work & Religion
Sex Work & Religion:
Estelle, Mistress Gala, Nada and Christian Vega are all sex workers of diverse religious background. They get together to discuss belief and work.
This is really, really beautiful from beginning to end. Please give it a listen if you can and follow VixenHour on Twitter @VixenHour
sw17
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“This sticks out more than that!” seethed the famed gay porn...
“This sticks out more than that!” seethed the famed gay porn director as I stood before him, shirtless. He eyed me with a tyrannical scrutiny, a hard hateful gleam pouring from his eyes. Lyle Mucus was a beauty, externally: glowing skin, a muscled statuesque physique, thick expensively-trimmed brown hair. But needlessly cruel to the stable of boys under his wrath, he conducted himself imperiously. A foul-tempered, x-rated empress. It was this behavior that made his ugliness shine forth, his beauty eclipsed by his demeanor. Horrid beestung lips projected outward from his face and made him look gluttonous, a sullen sneer etched on permanently pouting lips. Eyes that radiated contempt for all they saw. It was perhaps this contempt which lent him the balls to come from across the world to launch his gay porn empire. The mask of beauty was a thin facade. The wretched, fetid rot of his soul could not be concealed by all the haute couture and spray-on tan in the world.
Read more of Brandon Aguilar’s Skin Deep, originally published in Prose & Lore Issue 2, at HOOK ONLINE
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Atwood’s description of the sex work done by Ren, while...
Atwood’s description of the sex work done by Ren, while including fantastical technology outside the scope of the real world, is some of the more accurate and less problematic descriptions of the trade in fiction writing. What do you think? -Emma C.
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Open submissions for Issue 3! Full details here. We are looking...
Open submissions for Issue 3!Full details here.
We are looking for stories about people’s experiences within the sex trades, told by the people who lived it. We welcome written stories and we are also interested in interviews. If you have a story to tell but don’t want to write it, we can record your story or do an interview. We welcome prose, poems, or interviews/oral histories. You can also interview someone else who wants their story to be told. We are flexible on how long the final story should be – we’ve published stories that are one page and stories that are 25 pages. If you have a story you’d like to tell - let us know by October 14! We’re not looking for finished pieces just yet - we’ll work with you on getting your story into publishing shape.
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Op-ed: Marching on Washington and the Issues We All Face @ Advocate.com
"It was — and still is — about choosing who does and does not have the power to pursue the American dream. It’s about systematically cutting off certain groups of people from the right to vote, to earn a living wage, to make choices about their own bodies, to recognize and provide for their families."
Read more
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Today, September 5 (till midnight PST)! Prose & Lore Issue 2...
Today, September 5 (till midnight PST)! Prose & Lore Issue 2 is FREE on Kindle.
If you don’t have a Kindle device, there are free Kindle apps for lots of different devices. Learn more about them here.
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Caribbean Sex Workers Coalition
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"The nation’s only unionized (SEIU since 1997) and dancer-run adult entertainment business closes..."
“The nation’s only unionized (SEIU since 1997) and dancer-run adult entertainment business closes September 2 after almost forty years in business. Landlord Roger Forbes, a Nevada-based real estate magnate who bought the building in 2001, declined to negotiate with the cooperative when they weren’t able to make the May rent. The Lusty fighting spirit was vanquished, and as a former Lusty, I find myself unexpectedly sad. It’s not so much the passing of a phase in my life, and in the life of the many friends I made there, but rather, the end of a means to an end in a city that historically always found a way to support its freaks.”
- What It Was Like to Work at the Lusty Lady, a Unionized Strip Club - Lily Burana - The Atlantic
- What It Was Like to Work at the Lusty Lady, a Unionized Strip Club - Lily Burana - The Atlantic
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is it the weekend yet?
is it the weekend yet?
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Outcasts Among Outcasts: Drug-Using Sex Workers in the Sex Workers' Rights Movement, Part 2
Outcasts Among Outcasts: Drug-Using Sex Workers in the Sex Workers' Rights Movement, Part 2:
(You can find part one of this discussion here) Caty: I’ve seen former drug-using sex workers like Kate Holden write that trading sex for drugs directly with a dealer was “just tacky,” and in my sh…part 2! we really get into the nitty gritty of drug use and sex work here. intense!
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Reading List for an Imaginary Class on Sex Work and Sex Workers
Reading List for an Imaginary Class on Sex Work and Sex Workers:
Course Description
Whether we know it or not, each of our lives is intertwined with the lives of sex workers. This course looks at how that happens, by situating sex work in the broader contexts of culture and society. The course offers an overview of the sex industry in a variety of theoretical and material contexts, as well as an in-depth focus on prostitution in the Canadian context—a timely issue, considering the recent appearance of three Canadian sex workers at the Supreme Court of Canada to argue for the decriminalization of prostitution.
Taking “The Prostitute” as the tropic image through which all sex workers are regulated, this course examines conflicting images of who prostitutes and other sex workers are, and how those images developed. In addition to reading key texts by scholarly experts on the sex industry, we will hear from sex workers themselves about their jobs and about their guidelines for students and scholars researching the sex industry.
Students will learn to analyze sex work as work through a variety of theoretical lenses, and to identify similarities and differences in legal and policy positions that respond to feminism, queer theory, critiques of neoliberalism and globalization, postcolonial praxis, and progressive legalism. In the final third of the course, we will look more closely at the areas in which labour policies affect sex workers, including occupational health and safety, the roles of clients and third parties in the sex industry, and sex workers’ labour organizing.
Learning Objectives
On successful completion of this course, students will:
- be familiar with the scope and modern history of the sex industry
- understand critical and participatory approaches to research ethics, and be able to apply them to study of marginalized workers
- be able to identify sex workers’ labour conditions, including areas for improvement in safety, income and stability
- be able to identify key mainstream, feminist, queer, postcolonial, anticapitalist and labour positions on the sex industry
- be able to identify the aims and structure of the sex workers’ rights movement
- be able to discuss and debate the roles of clients and third parties in the sex industry
- be able to discuss and debate how questions and problems of class, race, gender, sexuality, nation, and belonging are combined and expressed in policy related to sex work
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The poses of the people are questionable but the message is on...
The poses of the people are questionable but the message is on point. - D.S.
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Red Umbrella Diaries Storytelling Events Venue Closing
Last Thursday, the Red Umbrella Project got news just minutes before the start of our Prose & Lore: Issue 2 Book Launch at Happy Ending that the venue would be closing its doors for good in two weeks. For such a joyous event, sad news like this brought the reality quickly to the surface: this event would be the last Red Umbrella Diaries at the Happy Ending Lounge.
The Red Umbrella Diaries journey started almost four years ago and blossomed into an amazing event, organization, and collective community - with more than 100 storytellers gracing the Diaries stage over the years. With the end of our run at Happy Ending, we have decided not to seek a new venue for monthly Red Umbrella Diaries events in NYC. Instead, we will produce events at a variety of venues to celebrate issues of our literary journal Prose & Lore as well as other storytelling projects. We’ll be releasing more details in the near future.
The Red Umbrella Project would like to thank you - everyone who came out the first Thursday of every month, to hear stories from voices rarely heard, to bear witness, smile, laugh, & cry with members of our community. We thank you, and will continue to thank you for your support as we journey into our new programs & events.
In celebrating the amazing journey that was the Red Umbrella Diaries, we’d like to invite you to Save the Date for our Red Umbrella Diaries Gala event that will be held at Joe’s Pub on November 14th. We’ll be celebrating four years of storytelling with some of favorite storytellers & including a special theatre performance from our Trans Women’s Improv Theatre Troupe.
When one door shuts - another one opens because there are *always* more stories that need to be told.
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