One of the first prostituted women I ever met told me that I had to check the johns’ penises for venereal disease before accepting their trade. Aside from the obvious herpes welts,…
Prostitution
On April 10th, The Girlfriend Experience — a 10 episode long series starring Riley Keough — premiered on Starz. The premise of the show centers around a law school student named Christine…
In case you missed the big news, France has become the latest country to adopt the so-called Nordic Model (or, as some prefer, “Swedish Model”) of prostitution policy. This has led to…
A campaign headed up by Vixen, a pro-prostitution advocacy group in Australia, attempted to shut down Australia’s first abolitionist conference (which doubles as the Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex…
On April 6, 2016, the French National Assembly recognized prostitution as a form of violence against women, voting to criminalize the purchase of sex in France. Under the new law, prostituted people…
How can we talk about “sustainability” without also talking about an industry that sees thousands of women and girls, across the planet, exploited daily? What responsibility do governments have in terms of…
People were turned away from a packed, standing-room only panel, addressing the impacts of various prostitution legislation around the world, on Monday afternoon. Organized by SPACE International, the parallel event, which took…
Over the weekend, around 50 feminists — Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal — gathered at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Center on East Hastings. The meetings, organized by the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network (AWAN) and…
On Thursday, leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn revealed his position on prostitution to Goldsmiths university students, saying: “I don’t want people to be criminalized. I want to be [in] a…
Back in 2014, I co-authored an academic paper published in a graduate journal that sought to discuss the delineation of women in prostitution into mythologized categories: social pariah, abject, and shamed victim…
I am full of sighs today, as one of my very fav radio hosts, Nora Young, has fallen prey to sex industry propagandists. Young, for those who don’t know (or aren’t Canadian)…
In a neoliberal society driven by right wing extremist narratives that ultimately infiltrate even the left, it is not at all surprising to see ongoing attempts to normalize the most horrific forms…
On Wednesday, November 18th, in East Vancouver, about a dozen people from the Kensington-Cedar Cottage neighbourhood attended a panel discussion called Creating John-Free communities. Panel members from Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s…
I remember the moment vividly. I was at the beach in the Dominican Republic with my sister and had just gone up to the bar to get some food when an older…
This week, in Literally The Stupidest Thing I have Read About Charlie Sheen In The Past 48 Hours, is the call to “stop slut-shaming” Sheen. Leading the charge on this one is…