In the first essay in Scarlet Screens, we look at the “University” episode of the Sopranos, where Ralphie murders Tracee. We explore the labor conditions at the Bada Bing Club, Tony’s “humanity,” and how violence against sex workers is used as plot point.
Cat Hollis founded Haymarket Pole Collective to create a place for Black sex workers to feel safe and to organize and advocate for their rights. “We’re oppressed as groups, not as individuals…The truth is that you might lift yourself up to a level with more agency, but that doesn’t remove your marginalization. And it doesn’t necessarily make it easier for people who come after you.”
Dancing around his apartment with a bottle of Dom Perignon in hand, I learned I couldn’t speak for anyone but myself.
Autostraddle recently spoke with Tina Horn via video call to chat about the first volume of SFSX, her myriad influences, building community around art, the sex worker rights’ movement, and incels.
A free world for sex workers would be a free world for people’s bodies, desires, and pleasures — that is to say, a world worth fighting for.
“I’m the first google result for ‘lesbian stripper’ and I’m so fucking proud of that!”
People are coming together around this thing we’re doing – and so many other mutual aid projects – and it’s more powerful and vibrant than almost anything I’d experienced in a decade of activism.
Centering sex workers, and the hard won lessons that come with being a part of this community, are perhaps the most important steps we can take in an effort both to reduce harm, and to rebuild in the aftermath of COVID19.
This week’s Extra! Extra! COVID-19 looks at the pandemic from a few angles: personal experiences of having the virus, how the pandemic is affecting sex workers and how corruption, profiteering and discrimination are alive and well, even during a pandemic.
As Vermont became the second state to introduce a bill to decriminalize sex work, the real possibility of decrim future is on our horizon. But how would decrim take shape in the United States? Would the police still arrest sex workers? Will sex workers get labor rights? And what about human trafficking?
“Cam” screenwriter Isa Mazzei’s new memoir is an accessible and honest portrayal of one woman’s stint in the online sex industry.
When I watch these movies, I find myself writing fan fictions in my head: What details would I change, to make this piece of art truly for me, and for the community that I love? Maybe it’s simply that the sex workers on film would just be a lot more… regular.
If you are out to your friend, or are thinking of coming out to her, and she still holds fast to her SWERF-y beliefs even after you explain how it hurts you, then you have one final choice to make: Stay, or go.
These trans women activists have banded together in support of a city council bill that, if passed, would decriminalize consensual sex work in D.C. for people who are 18 and older, building grassroots power for their own communities.
The very same free speech arguments that lawyers used to attempt to defend sex shops and strip clubs in the late 1990’s are being used to defend against SESTA/FOSTA now — and the fallout is largely the same: erasure of so-called “deviance” for the sake of respectability and supposed “safety.”
Amber Dawn and Justin Ducharme just dropped the first poetry anthology written by self-identified sex workers. Fifty-six self-identified sex workers from across North America, Europe, and Asia are featured. All of them are a different facet to the story that policymakers and social workers and Hollywood never told quite right.
If you can’t handle the titties, get out the strip club, babe. Even if it’s a fictional one.
“Jennifer Lopez’s entrance in Hustlers is better than any of us could have dreamed. But days later, the scene that won’t stop playing in my head happens almost directly afterwards, on the rooftop of the club where Ramona and Destiny work.”
Twenty-Bi-Teen is well underway.
“I identified as a heterosexually-inclined bisexual when I started giving hand jobs for money, and I left more or less a lesbian. It wasn’t the only factor in that transformation, but boy was it a major one.”
Harlots’ second season has five queer women and a story that proves sex worker narratives are uniquely capable of illuminating the restless, uncomfortable gender dynamics and power structures that may experience shifts in style or public acceptance, but never by degrees of import or influence.
