Sex Work

An interview with Ash, a personal trainer and male escort featured on Showtime’s deliriously entertaining Gigolos...

Best quotes from Ash:

The beautiful thing of working in this industry, especially in America, is that it can be so many things. We’re contracted for our time, not necessarily our bodies. We’re not required to do anything sexual, ever. Once you understand the nature of your job, you can create a safe space for yourself, while also creating a wonderful experience for your client.

Sexually, the problem in our society is that we’ve grown up on porn. It’s all a projection in our minds of what sex is, and it’s all body parts. People don’t know how to connect with each other, and the most important thing about sex is exactly that connection. You have to create a safe enough environment with trust between two people so you can talk about what’s arousing to you, what feels good to you, and all your fantasies. Women have as many fantasies as guys do. Maybe more. It’s just creating a space where they feel they won’t be judged as a terrible whore, or that it’s completely safe to open up and share everything. Trust is a huge thing. By listening, you engage trust. When you have trust, you have intimacy and presence. When you have intimacy, you can have fun.

A Canberra man with cerebral palsy wants the services of sex workers to be considered a legitimate need for people with disabilities in the NDIS bill.

...He calls for the bill to address the emotional needs of disabled people, which includes their sex life.

A NEW non-governmental organisation has discovered that around 85 per cent of sexually active teens in the Bahamas are engaging in some kind of transactional sex.

Officials at the Bahamas Urban Youth Development Centre have also found that whatever the conventional wisdom on the matter, the majority of middle and high schoolers in the Bahamas are not sexually active. But of those who are, the majority are involved in risky behaviour.

“Say if we have a group of 30 students 25-30 per cent are sexually active and of those, 85 per cent are involved in some type of transactional sex,”  president and CEO at Bahamas Urban Youth Development Centre Prodesta Moore told The Tribune yesterday.

Transactional sex relationships are created when gifts, money or services are given in exchange for sex. It differs from prostitution in the sense that only a portion of the needs of the person providing the sex are met through the practice.

Ms Moore said that young Bahamian women can often create for themselves a network of “regulars” – several men who they can count on to fulfil a number of their needs, ranging anywhere from school supplies, exam fees or lunch money.

“Many young people put themselves through high school and college in this way. They see it as a means of taking care of themselves, that’s the culture. They feel that if a man wants to deal with them he has to pay in some way and they are not prostituting themselves by doing this,” Ms Moore said.

But the familiarity between the young women and the persons they sleep with creates a worrying situation which places teens in the Bahamas as one of the groups most at risk for contracting HIV/AIDS.