Sex Work

The vibrant Red Light District in Amsterdam is one of the most important, but also one of the most controversial tourist attractions in the Netherlands. On all but two small streets, women sell their bodies for sex. In the Barndesteeg and the Bloedstraat, one can find transgender or transsexual prostitutes. Men are nowhere to be found behind windows. Instead, they operate in parks, gay bars, gay clubs, chat rooms and illegal brothels.

Male prostitution is hardly discussed in the Netherlands, but it is out there – in every province, region and city. It is therefore important to raise awareness about the existence of these boys and men. During our quest to paint a picture of male prostitution in the country, we were often surprised by the helpfulness of the community even while being shocked about some of the details of the business.

Male prostitution is characterized by three major taboos. First, receiving money for sex is not generally accepted (from either male or female clients). Second, homosexuality is still stigmatized. And third, men are not “supposed” to be the victims of prostitution or sexual abuse, which often leads to their not seeking professional help when they need it (Repetur, 2011).

François Ozon, whose terrific Jeune et jolie (Young and Pretty) chronicles a year in the life of a teenage girl who becomes a prostitute, drew fire for his comment in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that "it's a fantasy of many women to prostitute themselves." Yikes.

...U.S. filmmaker James Gray's period piece The Immigrant, starring French actress Marion Cotillard (in her first American lead role), Gray regular Joaquin Phoenix, and Jeremy Renner.

The 44-year-old, New York-based Gray is a bit of an oddity in U.S. cinema: a writer-director of dark, unironic melodramas and crime films that combine a polished formal classicism with noir-ish flourishes and plots straight out of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy.

...The Immigrant is in many ways Gray's most ambitious film yet. A costume drama set in early 1920s New York, the film's story, in which a Polish immigrant (Cotillard) is lured into prostitution by a Jewish cabaret director (Phoenix) and tentatively romanced by his magician cousin (Renner), goes to the roots of themes that have always fascinated Gray: the grimy underside of the American melting pot, and the ways that family, community, and the dogged pursuit of the American dream can pull individuals toward excruciating choices with often dire consequences.

Overall, there was an obvious dividing point between the older members of the panel like Kopita and Daughn and the younger panelists of Blue and Lani. While the older panelists were grasping at anything to claim as technological innovation on porn’s part or lamenting the money lost by piracy, the younger panelists discussed that a change in perception of what porn is and how people experience it needs to happen for the industry to thrive.

What if being bad could do some good? That's the question asked by Come4.org, which describes itself as "the first user-generated, nonprofit pornography site devoted to funding charitable and ethically driven projects."

The site is being unveiled with help from the Paris office of TBWA agency Being, which crafted an explicit 90-second short film, "The Lover," introducing Come4's first charitable initiative—helping to fund the Asta Philpot Foundation, which is committed to raising public awareness about the sexual rights of disabled people. (Philpot, an American living in Britain, advocates the right to an active sexual life for people with disabilities, even if it means paying for sex.)

The adult film industry has always been replete with drama and taboo. Brent Corrigan's role in that continuing story is always evolving. Like the Corrigan character, actor Sean Paul Lockhart started in the industry when he was only 17 years old and has never looked back.

ChicagoPride.com first interviewed Corrigan in 2008. At that time he was producing and directing his own adult films. Today, Sean Paul Lockhart is involved in completely different work.

The actor, writer, producer and former adult star talks to ChicagoPride.com about his past, his future and his return to Chicago Memorial Day Weekend for the Grabby Awards.

A recent prostitution sting in Oakland has turned up a surprising new trend, some prostitutes are being forced to rob their clients when they don't meet their quota.

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According to police, if a prostitute has not made enough money, her pimp will force her to target her clients, taking the crime to a whole other level.

“And that level is robbery,” said Oakland Police spokesperson Johnna Watson. “They’ll take their wallet, money out of the ATM, and also their car.”

There is also a new twist. Pimps have been discovered selling whatever is stolen to the next john.

“Looking to capitalize from every angle possible,” Watson said.

Decriminalisation, it is claimed, would also guarantee better working conditions, and allow sex workers to report brothel owners involved in such crimes as trafficking or exploiting children as sex workers. Furthermore, the commission argued, sex workers would also have to declare their earnings and pay tax - which would give a fresh impetus to the perennial complaint of being screwed by SARS.

Anyway, there was such an egalitarian wholesomeness to all this - and who’s not for giving everyone some of that human dignity? - that reporters were duly dispatched to street corners to speak to whoever they found there on the game. The story they came back with was not so much that the activities of, let’s say, Lebo (“not her real name”) or Lola (“not his real name”) should be decriminalised, but rather that we must do all we can to keep the police away from these people.

The Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Task Force - which scares the horses under the very unappealing acronym of Sweat - recently completed a national survey of sex workers and found that 76 percent of them claim to have been robbed, raped and unlawfully arrested by the police. Given that there are more than 150 000 sex workers in the country, that’s a pretty large chunk of alleged rape and robbery.

Long Island’s hot-dog hooker is back to selling her buns, cops said today.

People have always bought and sold sex, sometimes risking shame or punishment. But these days, simply helping a sex worker can have costly legal and financial consequences.

'None of my clients know who I am completely. There's always an air of fantasy and mystery.'

For adult webmasters and bloggers, the real ruckus started when Tumblr prepared itself for a Yahoo buy-out by appearing to purge itself of adult content. The micro-blogging site did this quite effectively when it dealt a dirty blow to Tumblr users by using robots.txt to exclude the search engines from indexing sites labeled as “adult”. This was reported in accurate detail by Bacchus at the long-respected ErosBlog. (it must be noted that Tumblr does not seem to be using the Robots Meta Tag. Do you know about robots.txt files and Robots Meta Tags?)

This was reported by Bacchus before anyone even had an idea that Yahoo & Tumblr were in talks. Just days later, Bacchus again discussed issues for adult bloggers at Tumblr, i.e. how difficult it became to even search your own Tumblr blog & how to back-up your Tumblr site. By this time, the rumors had become official news: Yahoo had purchased Tumblr.

Porn star Chanel Preston says that when she attempted to make a deposit into her new account, she learned it had been closed because of “compliance issues.”

She says that the manager who had helped her set up the account explained that the bank was worried about the live cam shows on her website and had decided to close the business account.

...Meanwhile, a former softcore porn producer in California is suing JPMorgan Chase after the bank refused to underwrite a loan for “moral reasons.”

The plaintiff — who actually sold his company several years ago — says it was the bank that had originally approached him about refinancing the loan, but after the refi got bogged down in months of delays, he eventually learned the truth.

In the suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, the plaintiff states that Chase VP “finally informed plaintiff during a telephone conversation that plaintiff’s loan application was refused due to ‘moral reasons,’ because of JPMorgan’s disapproval of plaintiff’s former source of income and occupation as an owner of a television production company that produced television programs that dealt with the subject of human sexuality.”

He says the bank told him that Chase would be taking a “reputational risk” by going through with the loan.

“JPMorgan purports to be so ashamed of nudity and human sexuality that it cannot process a refinance of a home loan of plaintiff, secured by plaintiff’s house, because plaintiff’s source of income six years ago included production of television programs that contained nudity and human sexuality,” reads the complaint.

Porn on Google Glass? Porn MADE with Google Glass? Until now, previews of Google's new eyepiece have revolved around ziplines, roller coasters and skydives, but the upcoming release of Glass (TBA) could find the product in places the sun doesn't shine. Talks of utilizing the cutting-edge gadget in the pornographic industry have circulated, as both porn directors and actors have poked around this idea.