• ABOUT
• CONTACT
• SUBSCRIBE
• HOME

Monday, April 30, 2007

Johns Gone Wild: The DC Madam’s Gift to Sexual Health

filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira | 3 Comments

The cats and all their dirty politics and money are scrambling out of the bag after this weekend, with the Big Reveal of the alleged “D.C. Madam” — alleged, in that, on an unstated sex industry technicality, one can only be thought of as a madam if one is involved in prostitution, and we’re not saying, and she’s saying she’s not, and so let’s help a sister out.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey (nice roundup at DCist, who names her a Feminist, Security Expert, and Freedom Fighter) is the former proprietor of Pamela Martin & Associates, and her celebrated forty seven pounds of telephone records and the journalists at ABC now data mining them have now netted their first “casualty”, Randall Tobias, former Deputy Secretary of State, the first United States Global AIDS Coordinator, and administrator of the controversial United States Agency for International Development (Google cache of his position description, now removed). Under his direction, USAID cut off all funds to organizations that did not sign a pledge to the US government that they opposed prostitution. Tobias is likely the choicest john offered up from any black book, period, and especially so for those who truly have the most to lose politically in this suit. By that I don’t mean the other abstinence-preaching Bush appointees and their hypocritical brethren, but sex workers.

Sex workers have been organizing against this policy since its inception, stating that sex workers themselves are the most effective network of people and organizations in reducing HIV/AIDS, violence, and forced labor in the sex industry. By contrast, the US is leading a global strategy around sex work founded on telling people to abstain from sex, to be faithful, and barring that, use condoms (but don’t you dare ask the US to fund those, or education around how to use them properly, or to be tested for HIV if one needs to).

To have the man in charge, literally, fall prey to his own inability to follow his own policy — oh, of course he tells us that he only ever called Ms. Martin’s service so “a few gals could come over to the condo to give him massages” (ABC video), and he tells us this, yes, on his way out the door — is sweet, yes, but it isn’t so much the “sex scandal” the Left (see: Talking Points Memo Muckraker, Daily Kos, et. al.) is looking for to further skewer the Bush administration. No one should have to go down politically because they’ve hired a prostitute, and, newsflash, it’s not like johns don’t exist in Blue States, too. What’s frustrating is that sex workers have been going down, politically and literally, on these guys and their goons for aeons. If we can stop and remember what sex workers know from experience, that money and politics are so deeply embedded in sex as to be impossible to do one without doing the whole team, this moment could be a potential wake-up call for progressives to take on the promotion of sexual health as an agenda item every day, and not just when Ms. Palfrey Goes to Washington.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Oh, Please Don’t Go Getting Your Safer Sex Education From digg

filed under: State of Sex Ed, Web Sex Index, Smart. Safe. Sex. by Melissa Gira | 5 Comments

We’ve tried, we’ve tried, and we’ve failed to keep any regular sexual tabs on digg. Simply put: a) a story on digg needn’t even touch upon sodomy to bring out some users’ inner homophobes-cum-AssholeTeenageBoys (no, that’s not a gay porn); b) when so much sex online is so bad, and then you throw a load of too-much-time (and-god-knows-what-else) on-their-hands digg users at it… yeah; c) this is honestly the kind of thing we would rather have an intern do.

So we’re disdainful and overworked, we admit it — that, and now our expectations for what could be thought of as “smart sex” at digg are astoundingly low.

Which is why I’m rooting for the few sex-positive commenters on this story on a poster of sexual positions supposedly designed as a safer sex intervention for teenagers.

Granted, that a few people would like to engage the otherwise clueless and kneejerk responses with more than a “im in ur girlfriend givn her the aidz” is laudable, but just being jazzed about safer sex does not a peer sex educator make. When that style of “advice” comes couched in comment-jacking bravado and superiority, much like the abstinence-only’s propaganda, any grain of reality possibly conveyed goes distorted and fairly useless.

So, to the aspiring digger looking to so totally pwn everyone when it comes to condoms and fucking: shocking, yes, but Wikipedia is not the end-all be-all resource on sex acts and associated risks. Yes, it has been proven that fear tactics promoting abstinence-only do not reduce HIV transmission. No, if you get HIV, you will not “be dead by your next birthday” — some people with HIV have had the virus for twenty years or more. Of course, this depends on your access to treatment; this other recent digg submission on HIV anti-retroviral drug costs gets into the political economy of Big AIDS Pharma. And yes, condoms are still the most effective way to prevent the transmission of HIV and STI’s. For those of us actually (oh, say it - ed.) having sex.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Sexerati: Cambodia > Arrival, Going It Alone

filed under: Sexerati: Cambodia by Melissa Gira | 3 Comments

Back from two weeks in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, Melissa reports in on the state of sex culture in one of the world’s most significant and significantly maligned political and sexual economies: Cambodia’s sex industry.

US Embassy, Outside My Hotel, Phnom Penh, Election Day

It was well en route from Taipei to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city, that I first spoke with other young women traveling without men. On the flight from San Francisco, I had quickly become — as one of the youngest women on the plane without an older companion, and likely (it was a 747, I can’t say for certain) the only white woman by herself — an object of attention for any man my age, being offered a vacation on the beach in Vietnam by a businessman, and a few days at a hotel in Hong Kong with a competitive kickboxer. In the small, spare moments between pushback from the gate and takeoff, the two Khmer women seated with me shared their makeup mirror and, without us knowing more than a few words in common, compared the contents of our tiny travel vanities with one another. Lip gloss, the great equalizer: I am sure 1970’s feminists would approve.

I hadn’t planned to, but after having been so fixated upon by single men, I started to scope out the other passengers for some pure amateur ethnography: how many 40something white men, for example, had 20something female companions? How many of those female companions were of Asian descent? Of those, how many were Khmer, Korean, or Thai? How many were dressed in designer labels? Even as a mover in sex worker NGO circles, I found myself caught up in a fruitless game of Spot the Sex Tourist, completely aware that there’s no way to know for sure, that sex tourism is more complicated than Oprah and Lifetime would have us believe. I know better, and yet, I knew there was no way not to sit with these questions wherever I went.

Landing — again, by myself — in Phnom Penh, I handed US$25 and my passport to Customs, nearly missing that they’d processed me for entry as I argued in good humor with a Dutch entrepreneur about the role of NGO’s in Cambodia (he had had enough, clearly, of public health types trying to hold onto the one shred of civic life without privatizing it, and I had no sympathy for his “I can live here for a year what it would cost me to live in Amsterdam for…” frame of reference). “Don’t pay more than $2 for a ride to town,” he warned, and I sassed him back that my organization had sent a driver, and so with that, and a quick pose for Immigrations’ webcam, I was winding my way through cab and tuk-tuk drivers more aggressive than anything I’d seen stateside (even at JFK at 4am, preying on the red eye passengers) and somehow, far more relaxed. Standing ten deep, friends and loved ones of travelers waved flowers and signs, but my driver was, of course, not among them. I let myself get talked into the equivalent of a gypsy cab by a man claiming that he was the president of the Khmer Midwife Association.

In the cab’s front seat, I tried not to pull anything Hepburnesque as I wiped sweat from my brow with my scarf, as we crossed the dustier, signal-free streets out by the airport, past women at roadside stands with small children selling petrol from old glass Pepsi and liquor bottles, rumbling along by crumbling French deco and nouveau buildings, all fleur de lys and colonial flash. Motos and boys and girls in facemasks riding them two and three at a time wove around the car, even as we turned about the rotary bordering Wat Phnom, the temple for which Phnom Penh is named. The Western tourist hotels are a few minutes from there, as well as the US Embassy, much larger and more fortified than I would have imagined. White Toyota pickups circled lazily, some bearing People’s Party banners or men on megaphones. Election Day was in two days, and later that evening, all SMS service in Cambodia would be turned off by the govenment. At that moment, though, I was still Twittering and marveling at that.

I don’t know why I was so surprised: at the edge of the park surrounding Wat Phnom, there were internet cafes, and cell phone stands, and even:

And no, not a single white guy, let alone a sex tourist in sight.

It would be so much easier to be here and be an extremist, to think I was here to save someone, rather than just admit that I’m a foreigner who is going to need a few days to learn how not to get ripped off by drivers before she even imagines getting on to the bigger questions.

Monday, April 23, 2007

I Hate Hipster Naked.

filed under: Sex Pop by Lux Nightmare | 12 Comments

I was at a party the other week — the kind of party I rarely go to anymore, in a downtown bar full of hip kids. The kind of party with a camera set up in back, the kind of party where hip kids pose and preen for the camera, where photographers smile pretty and use every ounce of charm to talk said hipsters out of their clothes.

That’s when I realized: I hate hipster naked.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the phenomenon: suave young photographer (say, Merlin Bronques or Nikola Tamindzic) hits up parties populated by the young, beautiful, and painfully hip. Suave young photographer takes “nightlife” photos, making sure that “nightlife” includes plenty of photos of nubile young hipsters in various states of undress.

I hate hipster naked because it tends to be coercive: a sort of “Girls Gone Wild” for the hip set.

“You should totally kiss her,” the photographers tell you, camera in hand. “That would be hot.”

I hate hipster naked because it preys on insecurities. You want to be famous, right? You want to be popular and pretty, right? You want the hipsters to adore you, right? All you have to do is make sexy for the camera.

All you have to do is get drunk and flash your tits.

I hate hipster naked because it’s exploitative: Merlin Bronques gets a book deal and all those hot naked chicks get… cred. Get notoriety. Get naked on the Internet with no payment.

Oh, and I hate it because it’s illegal.

A while ago (more recently than I’d like to admit), I found myself at Rated X (more naked than I’d like to admit). Caught in front of the camera, caught in the lens of Last Night’s Party, a single thought echoed through my head:

“I’m making porn. And I’m doing it for free. Fuck.”

Yeah: I hate hipster naked.