Opinion

As it seems you have some misunderstanding of the terms "sex worker," "human trafficking," and "victim," Mr. Viersen, I thought I would take this opportunity to help educate you on some of the pertinent terms you use in your discussions around the topic of sex work in this country.

The reasons for her resignation appear to center around lacking a concentrated platform and her stance as cop-turned-politician. From the LA Times: "After an initially dazzling debut, the charismatic former prosecutor had fallen hard from the top tier of Democratic candidates in recent months."

The drive to create social hierarchies in order to improve how individuals are perceived by others is intoxicatingly pervasive. It’s even permeated the sex industry, presenting as a class system colloquially referred to as “the whorearchy.”

What "50 Shades" does is create a reduced, commodified, and wholly saleable product purporting to be kink that can be manipulated to a one-size-fits-all template of BDSM; the reductionism of kink to a product makes a faded photocopy of the experience of it.

It's wonderful. It's liberating. It's healthy. It's arguably necessary, especially for those who don’t have the time for or interest in traditional romance and conventional relationships. It also creates an opening for bad actors.

Risk is a word that is loaded for marginalized communities, particularly ones in the sex industry: high-risk, risky behavior, at-risk. But a new podcast episode out by Planet Money details a new kind of baseline risk only sex workers can demonstrate.

Thank you for your willingness to speak about your past as a survivor of domestic abuse, history as a sex worker, and pride in who your experiences have helped you become. But this is also a request that you make use of your platform to advocate on behalf of those constantly spoken over and silenced

As if providers don't have enough to worry about in this time of FOSTA/SESTA, now there's one more threat to their livelihood: a potential banking freeze. Here's a way to keep your money safer.

Podcasts are a beautiful format for narrative storytelling, which often leads to political action (because empathy is created when a listener or reader imagines themselves in the shoes of the character/situation)...

In May, Susan Sarandon tweeted this to the world: "Sex work is a job just like any other, but its criminalization exposes sex workers to discrimination, abuse & exploitation. ...decriminalization is the only way to implement safeguards to protect those in this industry." Oh.

According to New York Times culture writers Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, sex in popular culture is notably absent: "Sure, there’s sex in film and TV," they write," but in recent history, there has been an absence of content that treats sex not as an aside, but as the main event."

Anti-porn rhetoric has had a major influence on FOSTA/SESTA in that moralism has been the crux of savior-complex fueled stratagem for time eternal. Reductionist conflations of sex work and sex trafficking permeated public discourse, becoming a mainstream (read: SWERF) feminist torch to carry.

Her history is the very thing that we are holding her to, and we don't have any hope that she plans to evolve and change her policies around decriminalization should she be elected. She simply hasn't given us a reason to believe she will.

Presidential candidates like Harris aren’t going to differentiate between sex work & sex trafficking. And in an era where liberals are falling right-of-center in order to moderate the wiles of Trump’s tantrums, rocking the boat in order to save sex workers just straight up isn’t going to happen.

It’s getting close to the 10th Annual Feminist Porn Awards, an event I enjoyed last year and was looking forward to again this year. I bought my ticket to Toronto, excited to

ETA: Here’s a bunch of articles that have come out since I wrote this piece that I concur with, so some of your vitriolic comments can be spread out to all of

Dear Internet, Surely, by now, you know all about the Duke University pornstar freshman who was outed by a classmate unconsentually and then chose to fiercely advocate for herself and other sex workers

Surprising research seeks to debunk porn-addiction myths, and highlights the benefits of enjoying adult videos. But is that really all that's at stake in this conversation? Sorry, Joseph Gordan-Levitt, recent evidence is cropping

If you’re anything like me (which is either highly unlikely or exceptionally true, depending on the circles you run in), then you grew up with a certain set of bogus advice circling

It’s a typical day in the land of limitless Internet. The digital trees are bearing lush fruits of news-worthy information, your friends have planted thick fields of baby and engagement photos on

The Huffington Post reports in “Kinky Boots Performers Have Amazing Response to Macy’s Day Parade Outrage”by stating “Homophobia reared its ugly head in response to the supposedly cheerful Macy's Thanksgiving Day

We live in incredible times. These days, practically anything is possible thanks to evolutionary technology, location-mapping, and the internet. You can meet your soul mate without the awkward mess of small talk due

Though gender-based conversations about sex/shame nature versus nurture have been ongoing since Radcliff Hall’s Well of Loneliness, the jury is still apparently out for many scientists about whether or not sex-related

“Lesbians love love,” Felice Newman said to me over the phone one beautiful August morning. “But we also wanna fuck!” The conversation, which came at the beginning of an interview I conducted with

I sincerely doubt that very many sex workers ever get used to the really dumb, clueless pronouncements that outsiders make about sex work. And I don’t mean the intentional falsehoods spread by