Prohibitionists and Consequences

Do the prohibitionists realize, or care, that their campaign to “end prostitution” actually ends rights?  A recent very poor experience with a client could have had a different ending.   Or perhaps not happened at all had there been sex worker human rights.    With sex worker rights and full decriminalization, I could have gone [...]

Desiree Alliance 2.0

Since this year’s conference is going to be a week-long event, I know that many sex workers/conference attendees will be Tweeting/blogging/whatevering about their time in Las Vegas. For those who want to follow what’s going on from their own computer, I encourage everyone who is attending DA and publicizing it to add their names and [...]

$pread: Raids and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church

By Monica Shores. Cross-posted from $pread magazine’s new blog. Check it out! When, in response to charges of pedophilia, Belgian police conducted search and seizures in Church offices and the home of a former bishop, the Vatican released a statement expressing “shock” and “indignation” over the act. To make the situation even more surreal, Church [...]

Prohibitionists’ comparing sex work and straight work: they are dead wrong.

Authorization to repost granted, except if material is used to replace an actual interview with one sourced by this. Prohibitionists’ comparing sex work and straight work: they are dead wrong. There are people who believe ending sex work (abolishing prostitution, pornography, and other forms of erotic labor) will end harm being done to women in [...]

Denial of Service: Sex Workers Confront Dr. Eric Goosby and Protest the Anti-Prostitution Pledge

Since the opening plenary for the International AIDS Conference (IAC) on Sunday, July 18th, the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) has been a vocal and visible presence at the conference. NSWP members have challenged both policy makers and funding agencies to break with the status quo, which perpetuates institutional violence and violation of [...]

Editorial on evaluation of Swedish anti-prostitution law, translated to English

Svenska Dagbladet, a major Swedish newspaper, published an opinion piece by me and Louise Persson on Thursday, critiquing the government evaluation of its anti-prostitution law. This is not an ideological rant but a social-scientific analysis demonstrating that the evaluation was so poor it proves nothing about the law. This is important given the international media’s [...]

Behind the happy face of the Swedish anti-prostitution law

Wherever I go, wherever I live, I always meet people with critical, original and non-conforming views, and Sweden is no exception. Today’s special post comes from Louise Persson, whose book on ‘classical’ feminism came out last year and who has been blogging at Frihetspropaganda since March 2004. Her allegiance is to libertarianism, and she likes [...]