activism

This item  seems to have become so well-distributed since I saw it yesterday that it feels almost redundant to write it up, but for those of you who haven't seen it yet: Bitch magazine is in severe economic straits. They need to raise $40k by October 15 if they're going to put out the next issue of the magzine.

It's kind of stating the obvious that feminism right now would look a lot different if Bitch hadn't been around for the last twelve years. Ms. Magazine has, in my opinion, been irrelevant and out of touch for years, and even though I still sometimes find a certain bourgeois priggishness towards sexuality in some of their articles, Bitch in general has been indispensible in keeping a vital, accessible discussion about gender, politics, and pop culture going. It would be a shame to lose it. Read more here and donate here.

"The sex act itself is neither male nor female: it is a human being reaching out for the ultimate in communication with another human being." -Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon

I learned from Jessie Daniels on Twitter and then from the San Jose Mercury News that Del Martin died today. Del Martin was a lesbian feminist author and activist. She was a founding member of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first out lesbian on the board of the National Organization of Women, and a key organizer in the efforts to decriminalize and demedicalize homosexuality. She dedicated much of her work to fighting discrimination and violence against women.

She and Phyllis Lyon, her partner, were the first couple to be married in San Francisco when same-sex marriage became legal in California on June 16, 2008. They were 87 and 83 respectively and had been together for more than 50 years. Lyon was with Martin when she died today in San Francisco.

Guest Book for Del Martin

What are the political issues that matter to sex workers?

Quite often the ones that matter to most people: Affordable housing, health care, labor rights, immigrant rights, day care, reproductive rights, violence against women, and protection of privacy and civil liberties.

It's no surprise then that sex workers are taking on the "Rock the vote" model and putting on their own voter registration and mobilization efforts, and we applaud and support that grass roots work. Want more information?

From $pread Magazine:

From Sin City to the Big Apple, sex workers are organizing for political and economic justice. It's time to organize our sex worker electorate ito a political force and "Grind the Vote"!

I was shocked when I saw this billboard on I 65 near Jeffersonville Indiana. (Jeffersonville about two hours south of Indianapolis and across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky). The photo above isn't mine - I wasn't quick enough - but is an image of the same billboard from the sponsoring organization's web site. The organization is called Reclaiming our Culture (ROCK) and their mission is to fight adult businesses in southern Indiana and north central Kentucky ("Kentuckiana" in their parlance).

The ROCK web site explains:

The focus of this billboard’s message is the threat pornography and the sex industry pose to our most vulnerable citizens – our children.

As you might expect, their web site offers no specific evidence of harm to communities and no specific data on porn addiction.

It's no wonder it's so hard to get a rational discussion going about sex workers. Even for genuinely interested, well-meaning people, it's hard to get any solid information. Before you can even start talking about solutions to the problems that sex workers face, you have to first have to correct the ideas of what sex workers are. Any conversation in the mainstream media about sex workers starts out with icons forged from sensationalism and half-truths, as we've seen from the coverage of the Spitzer scandal lately. The images of trafficked junkies who need to be rescued or decadent young women who have had their souls twisted by their lives of deception sell papers and television time better than a nuanced picture full of shades of gray does.

I wrote earlier about Sex Work Awareness, the new activist group founded by members of $pread, SWANK, and PONY to address this very sort of issue in the public consciousness. They've just launched a new blog called Sex Work 101 devoted to answering the questions that most people have when they're just starting to look past the surface. Audacia Ray writes that the idea of Sex Work 101 occurred to her at this year's Women Action and Media conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

The last couple of weeks have brought more news coverage and public discussion of sex work than you usually get in a year. When Eliot Spitzer got nailed because of his hot dates with "Kristen," the press swarmed onto the story like flies on shit. The beauty of a scandal like the Spitzer story is that it lets the media have the best of both worlds: they can use the sex to sell product as enthusiastically as Joe Francis having a fire sale, but at the same time, they get to stake the moral high ground by pointing an accusing finger at both the client and the sex worker. If Eliot Spitzer's sin was the hypocrisy of hiring call girls after building a career for himself by putting their fellow sex workers in jail, it was little more than an insignificant blemish compared to the behavior of the press. A good chunk of the editors and writers at the New York Times should just get over their pretensions of respectability and hop on a plane for California, where they can become honest, hardworking pornographers.

As is typical of American discussions of sex, the Kristen/Spitzer scandal didn't turn into an opportunity to talk about the realities of sex work, or the ways that our private desires diverge from our public declarations, or anything resembling a forthright discussion of sexuality. It was just another opportunity to obsess about sex as if it were a particularly ugly scab that just won't stop itching. Nothing demonstrates that better than Audacia Ray's recent post about her interview with MSNBC. The first question the interviewer asked her, point-blank, was: "Have you been a whore?" The supposedly more genteel, public-radio intellectual Brian Lehrer wasn't much better in his treatment of Dacia when he interviewed her on the radio. The entire show had a leering tone to it, as if he too couldn't wait to get the juicy details. And Renegade Evolution got pretty much the same treatment when the media showed up on her doorstep:

Location(s)

Leather Leadership Conference, a once-a-year national event that helps develop and strengthen leadership skills within the SM/Leather/Fetish community, is being held April 11-13, 2008 in San  Francisco.

LLC 12 will  feature nationally recognized presenters including titleholders,artists, activists, authors and some really twisted, kinky people - all with fire and  passion. The opening speaker will be Guy Baldwin, noted author and leather activist. The Saturday  speaker will be Michael Thorn, Editor-in-Chief of Instigator  Magazine. Closing speaker on Sunday will be Patrick Califia, noted author and outspoken advocate for BDSM.

Today is International Sex Workers' Rights Day. Here are two events listed on the Bound, Not Gagged blog:

In North Carolina: SWOP East (Sex Worker Outreach Project East) will host a free movie night to celebrate International Sex Worker Rights Day on March 3rd. Join the Triangle’s only sex workers’ rights organization, as we stand in solidarity with sex workers and allies around the world, to call for full recognition of the human rights of sex workers.

When: Monday March 3, 7:00 PM
Where: Bull City Headquarters (BCHQ), 723 N. Mangum St., Durham, NC

Celebrate Sex Worker Rights with subversive movies, delicious cupcakes, and spirited discussion about the films and our condom project Pledging Action!