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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

HOW NOT TO: Researcher Arrested for Hiring Sex Worker for STI Study

filed under: Do It for Science, Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

He was approved to use human subjects in his research, which is precisely what UMass Medical School’s Dr. Peter A. Rice claims to have been doing when he was arrested for soliciting an undercover police officer in Worcester, MA:

The author of more than 145 professional publications in the area of infectious and sexually transmitted diseases, Dr. Rice said he was “gathering information” at the time of his arrest and was not guilty of offering to engage in sex for a fee, the offense with which he was charged. He has been placed on leave since his arrest, according to a UMass spokesman.

Judge Paul F. LoConto entered a not-guilty plea on Dr. Rice’s behalf, released him on personal recognizance and continued his case to Dec. 17.

According to a written statement filed by police in support of their application for a criminal complaint, a female police officer was working undercover in the area of Main and Grand streets shortly before 12:20 p.m. Saturday when a man later identified as Dr. Rice pulled up next to her in a black BMW.

The officer, who was posing as a prostitute, approached Dr. Rice, who had his driver’s side window down, according to the statement.

“They engaged in conversation and he requested that she provide him with sex, according to the police account. The undercover officer signaled fellow officers in the area and Dr. Rice was stopped and arrested.

UMass administrators are now claiming that they knew nothing about this aspect of his project. You can read between the lines yourself — Dr. Rice’s abstract from a 2005 study is similar if not a continuation of his current study, which is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Extramural Activities.

Only $40, professor? I know sex researchers have trouble enough getting government funding. What do we do now?

Sunday, October 28, 2007

“As Long As We Raise Our Eleven Children to be Strong, Pro-Life Citizens…”

filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Veracfier posts its first On The Ground report from the Values Voters Summit, protecting women from abortion and Americans from The Gay Blood and The Gay Media one voter eleven newly born assumed-to-be pro-life future baby voters at a time.

Update: The New York Times was there, too. But which am I going to spend more time with on lazy morning? The days of passing the big Sunday Gray Lady around the postcoital bed, are they coming to an end?

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Blue Monday: If Sex Educators Could Make a Living Wage, Would We Sue to Protect Our Brand?

filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

In the “Power, Corruption, and Lies” Department: on Monday, October 22, San Francisco based sex educator & author Violet Blue filed suit against porn star Violet Blue, seeking damages for violation of the the trademark “Violet Blue”, filed in March 2007, and to block the porn star from doing business as Violet Blue Inc.

As reported at Wired’s “Threat Level” blog, Violet Blue TM alleges unfair business practices over Violet Blue Inc.’s adoption of her name and her “distinctive, black Bettie Page-style bangs.” How many women involved in sex & sexuality education sport these bangs is beside the point, but really. There are quite a few. What’s at stake for Violet Blue TM is brand dilution; that is, as she wrote in 2006, that journalists would confuse the two Violet Blues, or that Violet Blue Inc.’s brand would be conflated with Violet Blue TM.

Is it damaging that a porn star chose the name of someone else working in sex as her stage name? Or is what’s really telling about the case that, unlike supermodels and actresses whose names are often repurposed in smut, an indie sex writer & educator’s likeliest route of recourse is to file a lawsuit seeking financial renumeration? It’s clear that the press have been confused by the multiple Violet’s in porn question, but then, the press are more or less a mess when it comes to sex at all.

But if the ability of the press to discern the reality of the sex culture, and who is who within it, when such information is so easily searchable, is our measure of how valuable our brand is, then a lot of us sex educators and writers are pretty fucked. How often do they get basic sexual health information wrong? How many times have we had to pitch in substantial research ourselves? (And don’t get me started on the time I was told in an interview that I invented sex work.)

Are our brands so easily watered down, so vulnerable to being tarnished? Is our work of so little value to the mass culture that we have to defend it in court? The total fail here lies not with Violet Blue Inc. being stubborn and/or clueless, or with the media who can’t figure out the difference between a porn star and a porn reviewer, but with the brokenness (and brokeness) in being an independent sex educator, how difficult it is for us to support one another, and how delicate a career built on sex really still is.

Monday, October 8, 2007

Through a Newsroom Sordidly: The NYTimes Child Porn Hoax, Revisited

filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

Remember Justin Berry? Sexerati first covered the former teen webcam operator back in December 2005, when then-New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald published his deeply disturbing feature, “Through His Webcam, a Boy joins a sordid online world” — disturbing, as a portrait of sexual exploitation, carried out in the now forever-intertwined worlds of amateur porn and the mainstream media.

Susie Bright reminds us:

From the get-go, both stories were creepy: the softcore sexy descriptions, the “blame the internet” righteousness, the homophobic ick factor, and the unexplained implication that Eichenwald had looked at piles of this material himself, when by current law, he wouldn’t have that right, no matter how well-intentioned his purpose!

Now, nearly two years later, Eichenwald’s crusade continues to unravel, the latest twist being that the reporter himself was a webmaster on Berry’s webcam site. Initially, the Times defended Eichenwald’s right to have visited the webcam site, but now? When it becomes apparent again that to investigate “child porn” might mean to participate in it?