Video Project About Sex Workers And How They View The Disabled.

My name is William Takahashi and I run adult-performer-resources.com. I am working on my second video project about sex workers and how they view the disabled. I am looking for former and current sex workers who would be willing to answer a few questions on camera regarding their experiences and feelings about disabled clients.  The interview would be brief, and I would take no more than 45 minutes of your time. I cannot currently offer monetary compensation, but this is a chance to market yourself to disabled clientele and to gain visibility.

·       What is your relationship to William?

·       To whatever extent you are comfortable please share a bit about your history and how you came to be involved with the Desiree Alliance and/or SWOP?

·       How do you feel about the disabled and sexuality and their right to have sex?

·       What experiences have you had in the past with people who are disabled? In a sexual or professional context?

·       How has interacting with William affected your attitudes about sexuality and disability?

·       Describe your experience at William’s Desiree Alliance seminar last year. Include any thoughts, feelings, perceptions, insights, or interactions with others who attended the seminar.

·       How can the advocacy for education surrounding disability and sexuality, and sex worker rights work together? How are the causes similar or symbiotic? How are they different?

·       As a sex worker/former sex worker/ sex worker advocate, what more do you want to learn about disability and sexuality.

·       Do you have any further thoughts, comments, questions or concerns?

London's 'Belle de Jour' Is a Scientist Who Had Sex for Tuition Money

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The jig is up. Belle de Jour, the former prostitute behind the popular column "Diary of a London Call Girl" and TV series "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" is really British research scientist Dr. Brooke Magnanti, 34. Dr. Magnanti gave the oldest reason for turning to the oldest profession -- to pay for her PhD.

She came forward now allegedly out of fear that an ex-boyfriend might out her. Not even her literary agent knew who she really was.

"It was time. I've felt so much guardedness and paranoia about remaining anonymous recently," Dr. Magnanti told The Sunday Times. "... I don't want this massive secret over me anymore."

But let's step back a moment -- Dr. Magnanti's story isn't anything we haven't heard before. Melissa Beech (not her real name), a college senior from a swanky suburb outside Philadelphia, has written about how a sugar daddy is paying for her schooling in The Daily Beast. Until last fall, a student alleging to be a call girl detailed her experiences at the blog Confessions of a College Callgirl. In the summer, a Knoxville, Tenn., media outlet interviewed a 19-year-old using escorting to pay for massage therapy school. (Stifle that laugh.)

The number of students having sex for tuition money has exploded in Europe, and experts believe it will continue to rise due to the rising costs of education. British researchers found this unusual trend in sex work has grown by 50 percent over the past seven years. In early 2008, France's education minister vowed to increase financial support after a freshman's diary and a book of interviews with undergrads exposed their experiences with prostitution.

It makes sense. There are few jobs you can work while going to school full-time that can truly help you pay for an education. (Read the claim by "Freakonomics" authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner that prostitution can get you the most buck for your bang.)

So since we've heard stories like Dr. Magnanti's before, maybe there's still an outcry because society still can't accept a woman using both her sexuality and her smarts. Why can't a smart cookie give up the cookie as a means to an end? Or maybe it's the fact that Dr. Magnanti went really far in her education that irks us. Commenters are hissing that she's somehow less, her degree somehow not as credible, because she paid for it with carnal currency.

The most shocking part of Dr. Magnanti's story may be that she didn't get exposed before now. With her revelation, maybe stereotypes of exactly what kind of woman engages in the sex industry will start to fall away.

And maybe the next time a highly educated woman admits she did the deed to get a degree, we won't judge her so harshly.

SEX WORKER OPEN UNIVERSITY a film by Ellie Gurney

"Sex workers are routinely portrayed in the media as victims.

At London’s first ever Sex Worker Open University, over two hundred sex workers and allies from the UK and abroad took part in workshops, discussions and actions.

This film presents an alternative and empowered image of the sex worker."

So far the 'Sex Worker Open University' has been screened at the San Francisco Sex Worker Festival and the Berlin LaD.I.Y.fest. I've added the film to Current.com so that its message can reach an audience beyond sex workers and their allies. The more people watch, comment on and vote for the film the more the film's message will get out there.

Current.com is an interactive info network that acts as a source of content for Current’s TV channel. This means that you can leave your comments and vote for the film to be shown on TV!

Here's the link to the film: http://current.com/items/90496517_sex-worker-open-university.htm

Please feel free to share this link with your friends, mailing lists and anyone else you think may be interested.

To vote for or to comment on the film you will need to register with Current.com - a very quick and painless process. Once registered you can vote for the film by pressing the green 'vote up' button next to the film title above the film itself.

The Legal Side of the Sizzlin' Chicago Sexpo

Source: http://chicagoist.com/2009/05/04/the_legal_side_of_the_sizzlin_chica.php
By Kate Gardiner in News on May 4, 2009 1:20 PM

There are a variety of reasons one goes to Chicago’s Sexpo: pretty mostly naked people, the women’s lingerie show, adult entertainment networking or, oddly enough, legal counseling.

Speaking at Wednesday’s affair at Excalibur, attorney JD Obenberger said that he thinks sex workers in Chicago are easy targets - and that’s why they’ve become scapegoats for politically-ambitious Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. Obenberger spoke to a tiny group of people high in the rafters above the gyrating dance floors late Wednesday night and said one of the bones of contention in Chicago’s adult entertainment industry right now is Dart's federal lawsuit against the erotic services section of Craigslist.

"Dart's picking on Cook County prostitutes," Obenberger said. "Because he can with impunity. It's still embarrassing to be associated with prostitutes in the main stream, and if he looks like he's enforcing the laws, he'll get the headlines. And he hopes to get elected."

"But if he's going to enforce that law, why not enforce all the other laws [related to sexual practice]?" Obenberger continued. "In Cook County, adultery is still a crime, as is criminal fornication. He never picks on the people who are committing adultery - and they never complain."

“What Dart’s doing is tyranny and un-American,” Obenberger said. “When my Sicilian grandmother came to this country, she did not come here to judge others on their morality or their decency. She came for liberty. And to earn that liberty, you have to accept each others’ differences.”

According to Obenberger, prostitution has only been illegal in Illinois since 1961. “In the 1870s, they said no persons under the age of 16 in bordellos,” he said. “In the 1910s and 20s, they banned street walkers and brothels. But it wasn’t until 1961 that they banned the prostitutes.”

He argues that criminalizing prostitutes for participating in sex work does more harm than good, if only because the participants cannot defend themselves from violent clients and theft, or call the cops for back up in dangerous situations. But Obenberger seems to expect a long wait, something that Adult Performer Educators organizer William Takahashi said he doesn’t want to hang around for.

"We don't really have any statistics about how many disabled people use adult services," said Takahasi. "But we're trying to reach more people about the problem," he continued. "Part of the problem with adult entertainment venues is that they need to make themselves more disabled-friendly." Takahashi said he hopes his organization will help to educate more people about how to best work with disabled clients. "There's a great need for more adult entertainers who understand how to work with disabled people," he said.

The adult entertainers - three floors of them - seemed unaware of Takahashi’s wheelchair-bound plight. But, he said, he hoped the event informed a few more people about the problems his fellows face.

Article from Foreign Policy in Focus

http://www.fpif.org/fpifinfo/ 5970

Sex Trafficking: The Abolitionist Fallacy

� � � 

Economic hardship, discrimination, and violence have driven millions of women to work in the sex sector around the world, and their numbers will increase as a result of the current global economic crisis. Unless the underlying factors pushing women to opt for selling sex to support themselves and their families are remedied, many women will continue to have few other options.

Yet the Bush administration, supported by the evangelical right-wing and some radical feminists, spent eight years promoting laws to criminalize prostitution and clients as the means to abolish prostitution and stop human trafficking into the sex sector. The ideology-driven approach is notable for the absence of any concrete evidence that it works. Proponents of such an approach have also failed to demonstrate that it avoids harming women or provides other livelihoods for those it aspires to help. It reduces all adults in the sex sector (even highly paid "call girls" and those working legally) to victim status and considers all prostitution to be a form of trafficking.

Unfortunately for many of the women who are objects of this policy, the ensuing crackdowns have meant prison, violence, forced "rehabilitation" and no means to earn an adequate livelihood. At the same time, the policy has not achieved its goal of reducing the incidence of trafficking, prostitution, commercial sexual exploitation of children or HIV/AIDs. The only responses to date from the new administration are President Barack Obama's affirmation at the Saddleback Presidential Forum that human trafficking "has to be a top priority" and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's statement at her confirmation hearing that she takes "very seriously the function of the State Department to lead our government through the Office on Human Trafficking to do all that we can to end this modern form of slavery."

The Abolitionists

The most politically active abolitionists in the United States are Michael Horowitz (Hudson Institute), Janet Crouse (Concerned Women for America), Donna Hughes (University of Rhode Island), Equality Now, and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. They have worked successfully over the last eight years to bring about many of the anti-prostitution legal and policy changes regarding human trafficking and HIV/AIDs.

The latest entrant to this crowded field of abolitionists is Siddharth Kara, a former investment banker and business executive who has written the book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (2008). Kara traveled to India, Nepal, Albania, Moldova, and elsewhere to research his book. But like his fellow abolitionists, he too falls short of producing evidence that criminalizing demand will stop trafficking or abolish prostitution. He supports criminalizing clients, in part, based on a visit to The Netherlands where prostitution is legal (but not to Sweden, where it is illegal and clients are criminalized) . He quotes Suzanne Hoff of La Strada, an anti-trafficking organization, as reporting that the majority of the women selling sex in Amsterdam are trafficked. But, as Hoff told me, she did not and could not make such a statement "for the simple reason that there are not � and have never been � reliable figures on the number or or percent

of women being exploited or forced into the sex industry."

"If I had to choose a policy today," he writes, "I would choose the stance of the U.S. and Swedish governments: the criminalization of prostitution, including the purchase of sex acts and the owning, operating, or financing of sex establishments" because this approach "has a better chance of curtailing demand for sex slaves." Wishing won't make it so; neither is it a basis for sound policymaking.

Like similar travelers, Kara is deeply touched by the victims' stories and wants to mount a campaign to bring justice, assistance, and hope to the women and girls. The centerpiece of his campaign is the destruction of the economic basis of the trafficking business. The economic model he erects is built on several unexamined assumptions and unattributed statements of fact and data. The most seriously flawed assumption he makes is to equate human beings � trafficked persons and sex workers � with commoditiities. His economic model treats women as passive objects that are pushed and pulled by exploiters using forced labor to lower costs to meet demand, and ignores the poverty, discrimination, and violence that compel women to make risky decisions. Adults who make rational choices from among limited options are actors who don't fit a neat supply/demand economic model, and so they are factored out of the equation in order to situate trafficking as a

commodity business.

Some of Kara's proposed solutions are dangerous, unworkable or unrealistic. For example, he advocates for private citizen community vigilance committees to go into brothels undercover to locate trafficked women and girls. But he was unsuccessful in going undercover and even chased away from one brothel area. He recognizes, on the one hand, that up to a third of victims are rescued by clients, and opines on the other that clients are looking "for a way to act out violent, racist, pedophiliac, or other antisocial traits."6 Yet, by opting to prosecute all clients, he ignores the fact that women and youth like those he met will continue to migrate and sell sex, no matter how many men are imprisoned. At the personal level, Kara also equivocates: While he advocates for raids to rescue trafficked women and girls, he nonetheless leaves a woman he believes has been trafficked in the United States to her fate because she "needed the money for her family and there

was a threat of violence against her parents."

All of his proposed solutions suffer from a lack of input from the people who will be primarily affected: trafficked persons and adult sex workers. To develop effective, evidence-based, do-no-harm policies, advocates and policy makers must work collaboratively with persons who may be helped or harmed by the proposed laws and policies.

What Works

Effective change comes from the bottom up, within the affected community where the persons who are the most knowledgeable and motivated live and work. The only way to build sustainable movements for change is to empower and support a vibrant civil society. This is particularly important when the issues have social, cultural, and economic bases that are highly resistant to any attempt at regulation by criminal law. Sex worker organizations in the United States, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Mali, Brazil, South Africa, and elsewhere are the front-line actors, who have first-hand knowledge about how raids, anti-prostitution campaigns, "vigilance" committees, and law enforcement approaches impact their lives and undermine efforts to combat trafficking, child prostitution, and the spread of HIV/AIDs.� 

Instead of harassing and stigmatizing women in the sex sector, governments and civil society should recognize and value their accomplishments — such as removing children and trafficked women from brothels, creating adult literacy programs, organizing micro-enterprise programs so women can find other sources of income, setting up schools for their children, and raising awareness about HIV/AIDs and health issues.

The Obama administration should reject the ideology-driven policies, practices, and programs of the past eight years. Specifically, it should base all programs and policies on proven results and sound ideas derived from objective evidence. It should take into consideration the concerns and ideas of sex worker groups when developing new programs and policies. The administration should stop applying the anti-prostitution pledge in a way that prevents the funding of U.S. and foreign organizations that work with sex workers. Civil servants who have been trained to carry out the anti-prostitution agenda over the last eight years must abandon that agenda and operate under a new, more open and inclusive policy based on rights and evidence. And the government should remove all of its materials related to human trafficking, sex work, and/or HIV/AIDs that are inconsistent with the above recommendations from websites and distribution.

In this way, the new administration can create progressive, non-judgmental, rights- and evidence-based strategies in partnership with sex worker organizations and other experts to ensure that U.S. goals to stop human trafficking and the spread of HIV/AIDs are accomplished without causing further collateral harm.

"I’m not sure you’re actually making a point, so let’s put it in parentheses for now shall we?"

~~Professor Raymond Tallis