Sex Work

A tweet last week by Carol Fenton led me to an article in the Vancouver Province by Nathan Griffiths which begins with a seemingly shocking statistic:Roughly 40 per cent of online ads offering escort and sex work services in B.C. included language indicating child sex trafficking, according to a new pre-print study from SFU.The article also includes this blurb from the … [Read more...] about No Ground Truth: Sex Trafficking and Machine Learning

June 2nd was International Whores' Day (or International Sex Workers' Day, if you prefer) and Mistress Matisse was pissed:International Whores' Day commemorates the occupation of Église Saint-Nizier church in Lyon, France by a bunch of sex workers who were even more pissed off than Mistress Matisse. Forced to work in secrecy by the police, they were increasingly the … [Read more...] about Prohibitionists’ Hollow Remembrance of Sex Workers

Oh dear God. I saw a tweet from Mistress Matisse, wondered what the heck she was talking about, and made the mistake of clicking on the tag, and now I've discovered a whole new world of idiocy in something called #ThotAudit.First of all, I had to learn a new word: "thot." Apparently, it means something like "slut" or "whore," but it's a relatively new word that showed up … [Read more...] about #ThotAudit Is Really About Ethics in Tax Collection

I'm a big fan of Reason writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown, but I think I disagree with her take on this development:https://twitter.com/ENBrown/status/1047984875779883008Some people were upset that Brown was apparently applauding an attempt to shut down advertising by sex workers, through the now-familiar subterfuge of claiming to be fighting "sex trafficking." But … [Read more...] about Facebook Lawsuit Isn’t Going to Help Sex Workers

A while back, I stumbled across a series of posts by New Orleans sex worker Annie Calhoun on the subject of screening clients who contact her through the internet. I was especially struck by the degree of sophistication she shows in her thinking about security.I realize that sounds condescending, but I don't mean it that way. Corporate IT security managers would be thrilled … [Read more...] about Courtesanal Access Protocols