Zahia - from sixteen year whore to haute couture!

Read all about the former underage sex worker, now barely legal high fashion darling, here.

Headless Hooker of the Southwest #428

Today the New York Times Book Review featured an essay by Tony Perrottet, “Guidebook to Babylon”, which describes the delicious pleasure of reading about local sex workers. He cites publications dating back as far as 1565 – “The Catalogue of All the Principal and Most Honored Courtesans of Venice”. Great essay by someone who clearly appreciates the whore’s cultural and corporeal contributions.

He cautions current day escort reviewers to “tweak their Rabelasian prose and keep one eye on posterity. Who knows what historian in the distant future will pore over their words, imagining our era’s wicked ways?”

Demesha Hunt, 24, and Renisha Landers, 23, were found deceased on December 19th. On Christmas morning at 1am, two more women, as of yet unidentified, were found in the trunk of a burning Buick.

I’m sure the group of 45 attorneys general who last August sent Backpage.com a letter requesting they stop running escort ads will use this as support for their cause. The attorney general of Michigan was among those who signed on to the Backpage missive. Similar tactics successfully convinced Craigslist to discontinue erotic service ads.

Sex work is largely tolerated and to varying degrees legal at the state level in Mexico. In “tolerance zones” workers are required to submit to regular health checks and to carry health cards.

Pictures by Carlos Jasso, Reuters.

Swanee Hunt - has trust fund, boards Melissa Farley's crazy train.

On their End Demand website, the foundation backs up their panic with “statistics”, “studies” and “reports” from none other than that most unethical “expert” Melissa Farley, who has been removed as an expert witness in the Canadian courts because of her biases and unreliable research methods and has been reported to the American Psychology Association for grave errors in her scholarship.

If you haven’t yet read Farley’s work, it reads like something from the Victorian white slavery panic – immediately recognizable as fiction.

It should come as no surprise that Melissa Farley’s johns study was funded by the Hunt Alternative Fund. Swanee Hunt, who heads the fund is an accomplished advocate for women and a Democrat. That she bought into Melissa Farley’s bad science is evidence of the power of our cultural assumptions around woman and sex. Even very wise people can’t believe that the majority of women in sex work in the U.S. are sex workers by choice and that the majority of our clients are decent, respectful men.

We can’t save those who truly need to be saved if we don’t tell the truth. The numbers of “victims” may be in the hundreds – not the hundreds of thousands contended by Farley and others – so what? Tell the truth and save those few hundred women and girls instead of wasting millions of dollars arresting consenting adults. De-criminalize sex work so that employers are accountable, bad clients are accountable and women who choose to be sex workers are safe.

End Demand – really? You can no sooner end demand for intimacy whether it’s tender kisses or blow jobs than you can end demand for food.

In sunday’s L.A. Times, Jane said, “Hey, you grow up as an artist in a big city, as James Dean said, you’re going to have one arm tied behind your back if you don’t accept people’s sexual flavors. You know, when I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless, I didn’t have any money and I was living in my car. I was 18. I wasn’t averse to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a sandwich. Know what I mean?
…You’re a lot more open to experimentation as a young man. And for me, being a young artist and broke in Los Angeles, I was exploring my sexual identity. And probably because of my middle-class, white blue-collar upbringing, I would have never had the opportunity to confront some of my own fears and prejudices had I not been hungry enough to be forced to challenge myself in that way…”

Love it. Love it. Love it. The show, not so much. Thomas Jane – crazy about him.