Mother Jones Article: Controversial Sex Worker Magazine Spread Challenges Myths About The Sex Trade Industry.
“It’s Not Selling Your Body, It’s More Like Controlled-Access Rental”
— By Titania Kumeh
— Courtesy of $pread
Asked if he’s ever felt exploited as a sex worker, Will Rockwell—the 24-year-old editor-in-chief of the sex worker-operated magazine $pread—replies, “Yes, by the media. Every interview we do is twisted for the purposes of sensationalistic propaganda, whether it’s the conservative New York Post jerking itself off over the Spitzer scandal or Ms. Magazine fantasizing about female victimhood and applying it in broad strokes to people they never really cared to know, and certainly never offered a helping hand free of judgment and surveillance.” He says the sensationalist and often stereotype-ridden depictions of sex workers—prostitutes, exotic dancers, dominatrices, phone-sex operators, and people who engage in informal forms of transactional sex—by media outlets sparked the 2005 creation of $pread, the country’s only magazine developed by and for sex workers.
With a circulation of about 3,000 (“Each copy is passed between 4 or 5 people on average, according to a readers’ survey,” Rockwell asserts), the quarterly magazine includes anything from “product reviews (from false eyelashes to anal lube), to personal essays about weird clients, to news reports on international public policy and events affecting sex worker communities around the globe,” according to its website. $pread’s current “Aging” issue, which is sold online and available in a few independent bookstores, grapples with maturity in a profession seemingly absorbed with youthful appearance (“Strippers in their 40s are hardly uncommon,” Kristen Casey writes in one article).
Rockwell, a male sex worker who’s serviced men for almost a decade, has been the head honcho at the New York-based publication for more than a year; he’s volunteered for the magazine for three years. “I took the [unpaid] job because the first article I read in $pread was in Issue 2.4, named ‘I killed a client in self-defense,'” Rockwell told Mother Jones via email. “It is an entirely matter-of-fact story about a woman working an outcall who was stabbed by her client before she took the knife from him and killed him in self-defense. When the police arrived, they arrested her for the murder of a married military officer, but she was later proven innocent. I was impressed that she described her experience without one iota of judgment for sex work in general—in other words, it wasn’t the job that was wrong, but the world that surrounds it.”
Rockwell answered more questions from Mother Jones about $pread, whether feminists should favor or fight the decriminalization of prostitution, and what he thinks about the Craigslist scandal.
MJ: What are some common misconceptions that people have about sex workers?
WR: That we are all jet-setting call girls. That we are all crack fiends. In truth, we are everyone you can imagine: loving mothers, daughters, husbands, friends, neighbors, drug users, lawyers, tax-paying citizens, and human beings. That we are all in this career and no other—many, many people use sex work once a month to supplement their rent or another expense. That sex workers spend their whole lives either on the street or in the best porn studios—this is a highly mobile profession, and many people change venues and income brackets very quickly.
MJ: How does $pread tackle these myths?
WR: $pread publishes a range of experiences in the sex industry. For some people it’s all a field of roses; for some of us, it was our best option among limited options, and others experienced violence at the hands of the police and a stigmatizing culture. In all cases, $pread provides a forum for sex workers to speak for themselves.
MJ: Why is it important that sex workers have a media outlet?
WR: We are talked about everywhere, in newspapers publishing our death notices, at lawsuits in court, but nowhere will people listen.
MJ: Has $pread ever gotten flak from conservative or religious organizations?
WR: Always, but mostly “feminist” ones, surprisingly. Apparently it’s hard for some people to believe that women, let alone those of us men working, are able to choose sex work over other types of work under post-industrial capitalism. Despite the fact that the sex industry is the only one in which women get paid more than men, and they want to take that away from them!
MJ: How do you respond to feminists who say they could never imagine any person willingly selling their body for money?
MJ: Does your own narrative dispel or confirm myths surrounding sex work?
WR: I’ve long since stopped trying to reconcile the disparate narratives people think about when it comes to sex workers. Victim, whore, whatever, it’s all about circumstance. Until you provide living wage alternatives and affordable housing for everyone in the sex industry, don’t even dare claim you know what’s good for us.
MJ: How do staff members at $pread handle accusations that the magazine is encouraging folks to join the sex worker industry?
WR: We just respond that we don’t invent the fact [that sex work exists], we simply provide a venue for sex workers to be heard. Our articles come from the mouths of sex workers here in the United States who volunteer their stories to the community, as well as sex workers around the world who write in—Taiwan, India, South Africa, Mexico, Australia, and more.
MJ: What obstacles did $pread encounter before the first issue went out?
WR: A number of supposedly professional services such as banking and postal status are hostile to “adult businesses,” despite the fact that we don’t publish nudity and aren’t selling sex in $pread’s pages.
MJ: I’ve read that $pread is completely volunteer-operated. Where does the staff come from and what’s the hiring process entail?
WR: Volunteers write to us and we fit them in—if they are in New York, they start slow, helping pack magazines or pick up where someone else left off in advertising or outreach. If they are outside of New York, we ask them to throw a benefit, promote subscriptions, and, if a sex worker and writer, pen articles for us.
MJ: Does $pread have any competitors?
Flickr/EliyaWR: We are the only by- and for-sex-worker magazine currently publishing in the United States, although Danzine [1995-2005] was the first. For years, however, sex workers have made their own media in the form of “Bad Date Lists,” distributed to help protect ourselves from violent clients and cops. Bound, Not Gagged is an online blogging community that is currently in operation, and Red Light District Chicago produces videos. As for the rest of the world, Stella has the French-language ConStellation in Montreal. China has Flower in Beijing. There is also the Red Light Despatch in India.
MJ: What is the typical production process at $pread like?
WR: A long and arduous process that, with the help of lipstick and elbow grease, blossoms in genius.
MJ: I’ve also think I read that $pread operates solely on donations. Was it hard to find donors for a sex-worker magazine?
WR: We make money mostly from subscriptions, donations, advertising, and distro. Our donors are most often sex workers themselves, contributing $10 to $20 on top of their annual subscription charge in order to help us fight the good fight.
MJ: What uber-relevant newsy topics would you like to see $pread tackle in the future?
WR: The “Craigslist Two” letters being circulated, claiming the site profits off of the trafficking in women. It would be more accurate to say that Craigslist profits off of a culture of policing sex workers that results in heavy fines, phone and credit card tracking that has ruined one of the most equalizing forces in the sex industry in generations.
MJ: Could you explain why you consider Craigslist to be “one of the most equalizing forces in the sex industry in generations”?
WR: Craigslist was the most equalizing force in the sex industry in generations because it allowed anyone with a computer to advertise their services for free, from a position of safety, which allows an opportunity for client screening, and without depending on 50-percent-a-client agencies and other dung flies to advertise for you. Craigslist was responsible for moving many people into safer working conditions, and the transition from Erotic Services to Adult Services instituted phone authentication and credit card registration requirements, which open up sex workers to policing in huge registers and represent an oppressive financial burden. Just before the change, Craigslist announced on its blog that 80 percent of ads had been reduced by phone authentication. The Polaris Project estimates there are 3.65 million adult services ads per year Craigslist, which means 14.6 million posters were pushed to other means of advertisement—most likely more dangerous ones that opened them up to stigma, discrimination, and criminalization. Check out Melissa Gira Grant’s article on Slate, “The Craigslist Sex Panic: How shutting down its “erotic services” section hurts prostitutes and cops.” Melissa is $pread’s “Caching In” columnist, covering technology and the sex industry.
MJ: Speaking of Craigslist, the website raised its adult-services posting fees back in 2008 as a child prostitution deterrent, which really doesn’t make sense to me. (Do they think people who sell kids for sex are broke and won’t pay?) Anyway, this topic is mentioned in the Aging issue, but could you talk a little bit about how decriminalization could help prevent child prostitution—something I’ve heard from various sex workers?
WR: I believe [Craigslist’s] intention was to capture more information to make it available to law enforcement by subpoena or volunteering the information (credit card numbers are captured with the fees). I’m not sure what you mean by “child prostitution,” but the first line of defense against traffickers is sex workers working in the same venues but not subject to the same controls, as well as clients that report the conditions to the police. Only in countries that criminalize sex work do sex workers and clients become a threat rather than a resource in combating trafficking.
MJ: Have you ever been in a scary or dangerous situation while working that you think could have been prevented or helped if prostitution was decriminalized?
WR: I was once shorted out of an entire night’s pay by a client who told me he was going to call security on me if I didn’t leave. I decided against calling the police, because every case I heard of involved the police arresting the sex worker. Instead, I had to let a rape go unpunished.
MJ: What are some other legal challenges that you’ve faced as a sex worker?
WR: While male sex workers aren’t policed in the same “raid and rescue” manner as nontrans women in the United States unless they are considered “underage,” police will use related charges, such as disorderly conduct, loitering, or drug possession, or simply charge up to what they feel will stick, in order to achieve the same effect minus the prostitution charge. In cities around the country, police file nuisance-abatement lawsuits and health code violations in the gay male sex venues where male sex workers work, denying us a safe place to work indoors and receive access to HIV prevention services.
MJ: Beyond having much-needed legal recourse to press charges if you are abused while working, what would you as a sex worker gain if prostitution was decriminalized?
WR: I would be able to stop looking over my shoulder and leading a double life, with fake names and fear of exposure.
MJ: $pread advertises itself as for and by sex workers. In that case, is the magazine concerned with debunking or verifying the judgments that non-sex workers may have about sex workers?
WR: We view the effect we have on civilians as secondary. Our mission is by and for sex workers, and anything else is just butter.
MJ: Why do you think prostitution has yet to be decriminalized in this country?
WR: Sex work has yet to decriminalized in the US because people fear what is most familiar: We know our fathers and husbands are clients of sex workers, and our sisters, cousins, and friends find a way to pay the rent when two or three jobs aren’t enough to make ends meet.
MJ: You’ve said that no US legislator has ever contacted $pread to discuss public policies related to sex workers. But how would you respond to one who did?
WR: Well, would they be a client? It’s a crucial question. We have so many clients in positions of power on this question, but so few who are willing to take a public stand.
MSNBC Article: What Is More Important A University Degree Or Work Experience?
Gen Y: No jobs, lots of loans, grim future
Millennials’ delay in starting their careers could wallop long-term finances
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Javier Manzano / for msnbc.com
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They are perhaps the best-educated generation ever, but they can’t find jobs. Many face staggering college loans and have moved back in with their parents. Even worse, their difficulty in getting careers launched could set them back financially for years.
The Millennials, broadly defined as those born in the 1980s and ’90s, are the first generation of American workers since World War II who have cloudier prospects than the generations that preceded them.
Certainly the recession has hurt young workers badly. While the overall unemployment rate was 9.5 percent in June, it was 15.3 percent for those aged 20 to 24, compared with 7.8 percent for ages 35-44, 7.5 percent for ages 45-54 and 6.9 percent for those 55 and older.
Among 18-to 29-year-olds, unemployment is the highest it’s been in more than three decades, according to a recent report from Pew Research Center. The report also found that Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are less likely to be employed than Gen Xers or baby boomers were at the same age.
Millennials are generally well-educated, but they have have been cast as everything from tech savants who will work cheap to entitled narcissists. The recession has pitted these younger workers against baby boomers trying to save for retirement and Gen Xers with homes and families.
Vote: Do you think Millennials are more disadvantaged than previous generations?
Just ask Michael Barreto.
Eleven months was all it took to bring him from post-graduation autonomy back to his parents’ home in Apple Valley, Calif.
Armed with an undergraduate degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine, and experience from an internship, the 23-year-old Barreto believed he had a better chance than many of his peers to find a job. But more than a year after graduation, Barreto is still struggling to find employment.
“Right now I’m just trying to find any sort of full-time work that would allow me to live on my own and save money for the future,” he said.
Like many of his peers, Barreto left college with roughly $21,000 in federal loans. (The 2008 average for college students was $23,000, according to the College Board.) Barreto’s parents also took out loans to help him afford college.
Despite landing a job at Panera Bread Co. to support himself while looking for a job as a journalist, Barreto drained most of his savings to pay for his living expenses. He was eventually forced to move home and defer his loans.
The high unemployment rate among young Millennials can affect them financially and psychologically throughout their careers, according to a report by the Joint Economic Committee.
“The ‘scarring effects’ of prolonged unemployment can be devastating over a worker’s career,” according to the report. “Productivity, earnings and well-being can all suffer. In addition, unemployment can lead to a deterioration of skills and make securing future employment more difficult.”
Many Millennials have sought refuge back at school from the worst job market since at least the early 1980s. Yet that strategy, too, can backfire as students incur staggering amounts of debt to pay for advanced degrees that might not help them out much in the job market.
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Jordan Hueseman, 25, accrued roughly $100,000 in student loans at the University of Denver earning a bachelor’s degree in international business and a master’s in business administration. On the job hunt, he found his graduate degree sometimes hindered more than it helped.
“At one point, I applied to Whole Foods, hoping they might see some potential for me to move to some type of management position,” Hueseman said. “The e-mail I received from them said I was far too overqualified for any of their hourly positions and as such would not be considered for a position.”
Hueseman said that after one job application, he was told he should leave his degrees off his resume. Hueseman said he was tempted to follow the advice but couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“It’s a personal thing for a couple of us and a bit prideful, but the idea we just spent five years — and a hundred thousand dollars for some of us — obtaining two degrees, to go ahead and wipe that right back off our resume in hopes of getting a $12-an-hour job at Starbucks would really be depressing,” he said.
Even if they did feel inclined to do it, they’d be competing for that job with their peers and with plenty of older jobless workers. About 15 million Americans currently are out of work, 45 percent of them for at least six months.
Competing against older workers with years of experience has put many Millennials on the losing end of job interviews. And while that’s typical of past recessions, the long-term unemployment characteristic of this cycle is forcing many older workers to seek jobs that would have gone to younger workers in the past.
“The average length of unemployment now is almost like six months, which is an all-time high, so the longer people are unemployed and the longer they go without being able to find a job, the more willing they are to accept a job that’s lower paying or for which they’re overqualified,” said economist Marisa Di Natale of Moody’s Economy.com.
Baby boomers also are delaying their retirement, adding to the competition. A quarter of workers postponed their retirement in the past year, with 33 percent of workers now expecting to retire after 65, according to a retirement survey by The Employment Benefit Research Institute.
If they do manage to get hired, younger employees are often the first to be fired in layoffs. And when Millennials do land a job, it probably won’t be as lucrative due to intense competition for jobs. That means that this generation’s potential earning power is likely to lag over the course of their careers.
Young workers who start off in a recession generally begin in lower-ranking positions and have difficulty shifting into better jobs the first 15 years of their careers, according to a study that looked at the experience of workers who launched their careers in the early 1980s.
Young workers on average lost over $100,000 in earnings over the course of their careers due to the recession, concluded the study by Lisa B. Kahn of Yale University.
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When asked if Millennials will face similar income losses, Kahn said it’s somewhat difficult to predict but likely.
“There are a lot of similarities with this recession to the recession of the 1980s in that it was the biggest we’d seen since the Great Depression. It’s affecting educated workers, so my guess would be unfortunately, yes,” Kahn said.
Huffington Post Article: Is Society Hypocritical About Dr. Laura Using The N Word?
Talk show host Dr. Laura (Schlessinger) quickly and predictably bowed to public pressure and apologized for her on air N word laced diatribe. The apology is not good enough for the National Urban League. It demands that Talk Radio Network pull the plug on her show. Dr. Laura is a soft target because she’s a white woman that seemingly sprinted way over the line of racial etiquette. It was a no brainer that the League would rage against her. She got the same treatment that the pack of white celebrities, politicians and public figures that have used the N word.
But Dr. Laura is not of that ilk. In fact, she got it right about the word, or more particularly who uses it, condones it, and even glories in it. And that’s the legion of black comedians and rappers that have virtually canonized the word. They sprinkle the word throughout their rap lyrics and comedy lines; and black writers,and filmmakers go through lengthy gyrations to justify using the word. During a panel discussion at the Summer Television Critics Association tour in 2005, Aaron McGruder, creator of the popular comic strip, Boondocks, defiantly told the audience that he’d use the N’ word as much as he pleased in his comic strip and in his series on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. If folks didn’t like it, well tough, said McGruder.
N word users and apologists serve up the lame rationale that the more a black person uses the word, the less offensive it becomes, which is precisely the point Dr. Laura picked apart. They claim that they are cleansing the word of its negative connotations so that racists can no longer use it to hurt blacks. Comedian-turned-activist Dick Gregory had the same idea some years ago when he titled his autobiography, Nigger. Black writer, Robert DeCoy also tried to apply the same racial shock therapy to whites when he titled his novel, The Nigger Bible.
The black N word apologists tick off an endless storehouse of defenses to justify use of the word. They claim that that it is a term of endearingly or affectionately. They say to each other, “You’re my nigger if you don’t get no bigger.” Or, “that nigger sure is something.” Others use it in anger or disdain, “Nigger you sure got an attitude.” Or, “A nigger ain’t s….” Still, others are defiant. They say they don’t care what a white person calls them since words can’t harm them.
They forget, ignore or distort one thing. Words are not value neutral. They express concepts and ideas. Often, words reflect society’s standards. If color-phobia is a deep-rooted standard in American life, then a word, as emotionally charged as nigger, will always reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes. It can’t be sanitized, cleansed, inverted, or redeemed as a culturally liberating word. Nigger can’t and shouldn’t be made acceptable, no matter whose mouth it comes out of or what excuse is tossed out for using it.
There are still dozens of daily examples where whites (and other non-blacks) taunt, and harass blacks by calling them nigger, spray paint the word on their homes, businesses, churches, physically assault and even murder blacks. In the FBI’s annual count of hate crimes in America, blacks still make up the overwhelming majority of victims.
The N word reigns supreme at the top of the stack as the favorite racial epithet hurled at blacks during these crimes. Even when the word isn’t used, the sentiment is that blacks are still fair game to be abused and dehumanized, and the N word reinforces that belief. The word nigger is and will always have grotesque and deadly meaning to them. And, even if some blacks do occasionally go off the deep end and wrongly harangue whites for using the word, maybe that’s because nigger, pricks agonizing historical and social sores.
A handful of black activists have waged war against the N word. Their target is those rappers and writers that have turned the N word into a lucrative growth industry. They have been the exception. Blacks have been more than willing to give other blacks that use the word a pass. The indulgence sends the subtle signal that the word is hardly the earth-shattering, illegitimate word that black and white N word opponents brand it.
Dr. Laura gave no public hint before her spew of the word that she is a closet bigot who routinely uses the word in reference to blacks. But she didn’t have too. The obsessive use of and the tortured defense of the word by so many blacks gave her the license to use the word without any thought that there’d be any blow back for doing it. She was wrong and got publicly called out for it. But that doesn’t make her rationale or her explanation for using it any less valid. Dr. Laura got it right about the N word.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts a nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk show on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Times Of India Article: Actress Nandita Das Gives Birth To A Baby Boy!
It’s a baby boy for Nandita!
Vickey Lalwani, MUMBAI MIRROR, Aug 12, 2010, 11.32am IST
An elated Subodh told Mumbai Mirror, “We are very happy. Nandita and the baby are fine. Our families are rejoicing.”
Subodh said that they haven’t thought of any names as yet. However, the couple was baby-shopping quite a bit since the past few months. “Shopping toh bahut chal hi rahi thi,” Subodh said rather nonchalantly.
Did they want a son or a daughter, we asked? Subodh says, “There were no preferences. We just wanted a healthy baby.”
Subodh is an industrialist and Milind Soman and Shahana Goswami introduced him to Nandita. It was love at first sight for both.
Read more: It’s a baby boy for Nandita! – News & Interviews – Bollywood – Entertainment – The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/bollywood/news-interviews/Its-a-baby-boy-for-Nandita/articleshow/6297801.cms#ixzz0wWXORGOG
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