“Show us your humanity!” is more belittling and damaging than “Show us your tits!” – Conner Habib
Because ordinary English words can emit sex rays, too!
After being taken out of his classroom for two months, a famous Los Angeles teacher, Rafe Esquith, is filing a claim against the L.A. Unified School District…Esquith…was removed from the classroom and put on paid leave…while the district investigates him for misconduct…[because] he made a joke to his class that prompted a complaint from another teacher…that if the class couldn’t raise enough money for their Shakespeare play then they might have to perform some of it naked, like the king in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn…Superintendent Ramon Cortines [said] that the inquiry includes “serious issues that go beyond the initial investigation”…Esquith is well-known and renowned globally. H e is the recipient of the president’s National Medal of Arts and is the only K-12 teacher to receive that award. Many of his books, such as Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire, are bestsellers…
A former police chief, an attorney and six other area men are facing gross misdemeanor charges of soliciting prostitution…following a sting…Baxter Police Chief Jim Exsted…said the operation…is the first step toward uncovering the major players in sex trafficking in the Brainerd lakes area…
The idea that a Backpage sting could “uncover the major players” in anything is so hilariously stupid it’s almost unbelievable. But down in Florida, it’s a bit different:
A woman is facing a felony prostitution charge after she was found in a hotel room with a Tallahassee Police Department sergeant…Afton Chewning…was found with 49-year-old TPD Sgt. Brian Davis in a Days Inn motel room…Davis turned himself in…on a misdemeanor charge of solicitation…[and] has filed a plea of not guilty…
Felony for her, misdemeanor (which he’ll certainly escape) for him. Nice.
Check Your Premises
The fact that one of the “traffickers” really did rape and abuse one woman doesn’t change the incoherence of this first part of the article:
Four sex traffickers who brought more than 50 Hungarian women into the country and sold them as part of their highly lucrative vice empire…in…London are facing years behind bars. Most of the victims came into the country voluntarily to work in the sex industry, promoted themselves on adult websites and kept half of their earnings…
A Tale That Grew in the Telling
This story on another creepy facial-recognition surveillance tool contains the following incredible claim: “In the United States, more than 800,000 children are reported missing every year, and nearly half end up living on the streets. Seventy percent will become sex trafficking victims, most within their first 72 hours of living on the street…”
Surplus Women
Chillicothe, Ohio…has crept…into headlines…[as] the place where women go missing and wash up dead. In little over a year, at least six women have disappeared from the town of only 21,000. Four of their bodies have been found, almost all of them dumped in creeks or streams flowing away from the town…Most of them were hooked on drugs, and many moonlighted as prostitutes to fund their addictions…Some of them even knew one another. The similarities between the victims and the crime scenes have Chillicothe terrified that a serial killer is on the loose…
Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic
In a new book, Sex Addiction: A Critical History, New Zealand academics Barry Reay, Nina Attwood and Claire Gooder claim that porn addiction is mythical; a product of “social opportunism, diagnostic amorphism, therapeutic self-interest and popular cultural endorsement”. Reay argues that there’s little scientific basis for the classification of porn use as an addiction. Instead, our sex-negative culture, click-bait media and flourishing therapy industry have combined to create a fanciful and frightening condition…
Above the Law 
“An Amarillo [Texas cop] was fired…after investigators determined he had…sexually assaulted her…[the] woman reported…Micah Meurer…had sexually assaulted her in her…home…”
Chauvinism
Conner Habib has written year’s best essay about prohibition so far:
I’ll refer to anti-sex-work and anti-porn campaigners here…as “anti-sex bigots”…because sex is what makes sex work so special for them. Sex makes this line of work a singular profession, mystically distinguished from other jobs. But…there is no substance to their arguments. Their tactics are strung together not with understanding or data, but with hate. Their bigotry is visceral, and their goals are clear:
1. Distort and destroy consent.
2. Create a framework of good vs. evil.
3. Cherry-pick voices.
4. Play the victim while holding the power.
5. Create apocalyptic urgency.
This list might sound like an exaggeration to outsiders. To sex workers, it’s exhaustingly and overwhelmingly familiar…
Mumbo Jumbo
Apparently it isn’t just whores who have the power to grant demons “permission”:
Pat Robertson…told a woman her son’s “hatred and mental issues” might be brought on by demons, which in turn were brought on because she brought a Ouija board home one time. “You can open the door to demons…There was one lady I heard about who was demon-possessed [because]…she had gone to an X-rated movie and done all these sex things”…
Challenge (#402)
Tits and Sass has a pretty good rundown of the key players in the recriminalization of sex work in Rhode Island. Well worth your time on the principle of “Know thine enemy”.
O, Canada! (All Traffick, All the Time)
At least Canadian media have the sense to put “rescue” in scare quotes:
Windsor police “rescued” two sex workers from harmful situations as part of a provincewide investigation into the sex trade…On June 17-18, human trafficking and vice units from more than 20 different police services across Ontario investigated whether sex workers were involved in human trafficking or exploitation…This latest investigation was the third phase of Operation Northern Spotlight, which is designed to open up lines of communication between police and sex workers…
Buttons, Bags & Banknotes (#423)
Bindel can’t possbly be as delusional as she pretends to be; her slipshod list of “pimp lobby” members proves that. So what is she really up to?
Julie Bindel is…now raising money for a book she’s writing, to…“outline the emergence of a powerful lobby — the sex workers’ rights movement — that works in favour of a total decriminalisation of the sex industry”…Bindel’s project is…part of anti-sex-work eradicationists’ ongoing drive to paint all sex workers speaking out for their rights as pimps and punters in disguise. (A reporter who attended one of Bindel’s talks at a Stop Porn Culture conference last year wrote that her “presentation on ‘the politics of the sex industry’” was “a succession of tabloid-style personal attacks on pro-sex industry activists, academics, escorts, and performers, complete with photos seemingly lifted without permission from their social-media profiles”)…
