media

I'm going to give a mixed response to Reneé at Womanist Musings today. On the one hand, props on her masterful, passionate analysis of the media coverage of the murder of Elizabeth Acevedo, a 38-year-old disabled woman who worked as a prostitute. Avecedo was fatally struck on the head in the hallway of her apartment building, possibly by a client. And like I say, I have to give props to Reneé for her post, but part of me is pissed at her for ruining my otherwise excellent mood. Acevedo's death is tragic enough in itself, but the coverage of her death is just damn ugly. In particular, the gossip site Bossip describes her death as "comedy gold." Acevedo lost a leg in a train accident several years ago; therein lies the humor of her too-early death, and it seems that newswriters can't use the phrase "one-legged hooker" quite enough, as though 38 years can be summed up in those three words.

There's always been a lot of talk about sex worker happiness, or a lack thereof, and lately the attacks have turned to the sex worker community and its own media bias with accusations that we are so busy romanticizing or defending our happiness that we do not cover "enough" of the "unhappy sex worker" stories. To get to the root of this one must examine two things: the basics of sex work and the nature of activism.

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:

Sarah Jenny Bleviss brought this Editors' Note in the New York Times to our attention, in which the paper admits to serious reporting errors in its coverage of sex workers. An entire two-thirds of the original article has been deleted from the article, which supposedly profiled three "high class call girls" in New York. It turns out, though, that two of the women were sex workers but not prostitutes:

There's typically few things more crass and disturbing than tampon ads in the United States. Honest to god, the coy manner of most menstruation product advertising is only one step away from openly calling it "the curse." This ad for U Tampons from Australia is a refreshingly playful approach to the vagina and its myriad functions. It makes me appreciate the old Aussie saying even more: "Thank god we got the convicts and the Americans got the puritans."

So, it seems that it's official. My favorite fag-bashing fratboy media figure is no more. He's not actually going to die of a fatal disease. It's even worse; Tucker Carlson has had his television series taken away.

If anyone wants to try their hand at dissecting this article , go for it. It certainly exemplifies a lot of the problems we've been discussing this week.

I have a lot of thoughts about the article, but I'm too disillusioned with Creative Loafing (some of you know my history w/ them, including their most recent offense w/ their representation of Steve Gower) to feel up to exerting the effort to write something.

I will say, though, that Rusty and I turned down a potential web development job from Innocence Atlanta (the organization mentioned in the article), because the language on their web site conflated voluntary adult sex work with child sex trafficking. The worst offender for me was a sentence that talked about ways business owners can help, and one of the things mentioned was "hire a reformed stripper."

Human trafficking is happening. Let’s just get that out of the way up front. This is not a debate as to whether trafficking actually exists. I am pro-choice in that all people should have autonomy over their own bodies. I am against slavery, violence, and exploitation in any form against any gender. Forced prostitution is not sex work. It is rape. I understand that sexual violence is just one way that human oppression manifests itself.

To end exploitation we have to consider the many factors that are contributing to this global problem including racism, sexism, poverty, nationalism and the culture of violence that is rewarded and reinforced around the world. One cannot address the full spectrum of issues associated with human trafficking in a single post. This is an analysis of the consumer-driven demand for cheap labor and a call to any human with a conscience to take personal action to end human trafficking.

Dear friend, Amanda Brooks, has an excellent post at Bound, Not Gagged. In it she discusses a certain big blogging kahuna and his ignorance of blogs & websites run by sex workers.  Seems he's never bothered to look, just assume he's cooler than anyone else because he believes in his own 'blogger authority'.

Here's what I have to say about it .