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Monday, October 30, 2006

‘Hot French Student’ Mere Marketing Niche?

filed under: Sexerati Hearts by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

A students’ union in France has released a study showing a rise in the number of French students entering the sex industry:

According to the SUD-Etudiant union, 40,000 students in France - or nearly 2 per cent - fund their studies through the sex trade.

The union says jobs taken by female students include hostess work and freelancing for escort agencies - as well as pavement prostitution. Many, it says, use secure payment sites on the internet through which they offer webcam striptease.

“As a rule, student prostitution is an individual and occasional activity,” said a spokeswoman for the Office Central de la Répression de la Traite des Etres Humains, an anti-slavery group. “It is discreet, difficult to track and not a crime in itself.”

Even les flics are echoing this shift in sex work marketing:

One vice squad officer said there was little the authorities could do to combat the trade and that some young women would always be attracted to the supposed glitter and glamour of the escort world. He added that most student prostitutes did not solicit through pimps but “through small ads, erotic photos and webcams - areas which are difficult to police and which generally are not linked to vice”.

Of course, they aren’t all convinced (or, apparently, hanging out with many grad students these days):

Police are sceptical about the figures quoted by the student union. They say there are many more prostitutes pretending to be French students than there are students selling sex in pursuit of their degrees.

Want more for extra credit? Report back on French sex workers’ support organization Cabiria (English paper here) or this 1968 report on prostitution in France:

The great object of the system adopted in France is to repress private or secret, and to encourage public or avowed prostitution.

I may, however, as well premise by observing that the authorities of Paris by no means pretend to have established a control over the whole prostitution of that city. The concubinaires (kept mistresses) they cannot reach. The large sections of superior professional prostitutes, whom the French term femmes galantes (gay women) and lorettes (women of easy virtue), evade them, as do also vast hordes of the lowest class of strumpets who throng the low quarters and the villages of the Banlieue….

(Hint: la plus ca change…)

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Sister of Sluts of Halloween

filed under: Sexerati Hearts by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

Cover story in Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle: “A scary trend: sexy costumes for young girls.” Cliff’s Notes version: sexy is the new scary, and what is the world coming to, and goodness gracious, how can we protect our collective innocence from the destructive influence of slutty outfits? (Which, of course, the paper will take no pains to protect the reader from in the above image. How can we know who the enemy is if we can’t ogle its hemlines? What I wouldn’t wish for Lexis-Nexis access back the 50’s to search for similar tales of Hallows Eve sock hops gone awry over tight sweaters.)

But putting my bias aside, I spent some time on my flight talking this one out with the writer and mom seated next to me on the plane (it was her paper I read the article in after all). What she sees is a sort of ‘trickle-down’ effect, that Halloween costumes ostensibly sold to young women are actually being purchased by girls (and their parents), and that Halloween in general is becoming more a holiday about sex than spookiness (the longtime pagan in me says, “and this is new?”).

So I recounted my story to her, of wanting desperately to be Cleopatra for Halloween when I was in sixth grade, but my mother stuck me with the Angel costume instead — which, of course, was the same white dress as the Cleopatra costume, just with different accessories. For me, as a much younger woman, “dressing sexy” had little to do with the charge and power of being attractive to men. It was an opportunity to play with what it meant to be a woman (a powerful, attractive one, sure). Never mind the fact that as a young woman also attracted to women, dressing up sexy was a way to figure out what kinds of sexy I responded to in others. On the verge of puberty, I found that my pulse would quicken just looking at illustrations of lingerie. That I wasn’t allowed any didn’t diminish, but only strengthened my turn-on.

All of the “omg, Sluts of Halloween!” column inches seem to really be about questioning the value of dressing sexy, and putting upon women that the only reason that they might dress sexy is to please someone else, whether that’s their man or the entrepreneurial minds at Leg Avenue and the like. The “dressing sexy” that gets sold in plastic at Halloween is almost democratic in its absurdity — really, anyone can do it, no matter how attractive they are “supposed” to be, and honestly, everyone ought to try it, if not just to realize how little it resonates with what actually makes them feel hot.

What gets lost in these more mainstream ‘cautionary tales’ of the dangers inherent in sex, even just sexy clothing, is that by encouraging people to avoid taking on sex culture, that doesn’t do anything to disrupt all the stupidity about sex out there. It’s only by getting in there, getting our hands dirty, and by making mistakes that we learn, that we’ll find the desire to go out and make something hotter.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Sex Books on a Plane

filed under: Sexerati Hearts by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Open up my little 1960’s stewardess-chic traincase, TSA, and find these this morning lurking beneath my tiny toiletries:

Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex, Patrick Califia. Galpal and queer writer Gina de Vries lent me this for my flight today, and I’m so avoiding going up to the gate to remian curled up around tight prose like this: “Like camp, promiscuity is the pink badge of queer courage, our defiant way of whistling past all the graveyards that, for us, dot the heterosexual landscape. And we do know where the bodies (and live naked dicks) are buried. Every cocksucker is well aware that the same man who puts on a badge to arrest him probably just gets his blowjobs at a different truck stop.”

The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, Rachel P. Maines. I picked this up in Seattle a few weeks back to dig into on the way home to San Francisco, but of course ended up cracking the cover early and lapsing into eager undergrad summary-mode to my host (“So the vibrator was one of the first consumer electronic goods to be marketed to women, as early as the turn of the last century, in ladies’ magazines and doctor’s offices, but once blue movies in the 20’s cast vibrators as sex aids, that all began to disappear. Did you know that all the early electrical engineering trade publications used to track vibrator sales? But the Smithsonian didn’t have any in their collections even in the 90’s? Here, let me show you these… schematics…”) as we drove around Capitol Hill (and ps, “C.C. Attle’s”? Worst. Gay bar name. Ever.)

The Leather Daddy and the Femme, Carol Queen. A classic, if there ever was one. I added this back into my carry-on for my flight to Philly, and it’s remained a constant companion — and truly, this book has been, for just this side of a decade. No one else writes genderfuck sex so good, so passionate, so raw. Normally I’m far more turned on by critical theory than your average erotic antho, but this is no average bit of smut. In fact, it’s likely the closest thing there is to a mashup of the two that there can be, and still be devastatingly hot. Begs the question, Miranda/Randy (the femme/boyfag protagonist), great queergirl hero of futuresex, or greatest queergirl hero of futuresex?

Friday, October 27, 2006

The Sluts of Halloween

filed under: Sexerati Hearts by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

The inimitable Rachel Kramer Bussel points to this ABC news piece on what seems to be the perils of Halloween sluttiness (short version: the one day a year any woman can be a slut and get away with it… or not?) but is really one of the better critiques of Ariel Levy’s backlash-tastic blockbuster, Female Chauvinist Pigs.

Snip:

…in its October issue, Jane magazine addressed the trend toward skimpy, scanty Halloween costumes. In “Enough With the Slutty Costumes,” Stephanie Trong writes, “Girls love to dress like sluts on Halloween. Whatever their costume, they always find a way to stipperfy it, no matter how ludicrous the concept. Like ’sexy cop,’ ’sexy zombie,’ ’sexy Army cadet,’ or … ’sexy shoe saleswoman.’ It’s always one big pleather, vinyl and fishnet stockings fest everywhere you turn.”

(N.B.: none of those sound particularly ludicrous to me, but then again, I used to be a dominatrix.)

Somehow, the whole thing comes together with this, as close a rallying cry towards sex-positivity as ever found in the mainstream. Clip this one for the fridge next to the Dear Abby’s warning of razor blade apples and other forbidden fruits:

A culture of sex doesn’t have to be accepted in its entirety or not at all. Women can partake in what they like and ignore what they don’t. They can wear a French maid outfit one Halloween and a rabbit suit the next. They can get comfortable in a culture of sex because they can handle it.

I’ll let RKB have the last word, and not just because I’m hot for her brains for this one. (No, that doesn’t mean I’m going as a Theory Zombie for Halloween. But you never know… a Susan Sontag costume would be slutty, right?)

“Sex equals power” does not a feminist manifesto make. There are so many ways our sexuality is powerful, and that goes for men as well as women. Power is not inherently bad, and it’s not necessarily “power over.” We don’t need to fall into the “empowerment” vs. “objectification” debate for the umpteenth time either. It’s about choice.

(Image: powkang, via Flickr)