“Liberal” and “conservative” have become mere insults for political imbeciles to hurl at each other, nonsense words with about as much meaning as “poopyhead” or “cooties”. – “None So Blind”
Though I made a big change in my procedures this month, it was largely invisible to my readers: given the chance to join my husband in New Orleans for a few days (the first time I had been away overnight since starting the blog), I had at last figured out how to schedule my columns for automatic posting. Since I usually posted my columns soon after breakfast (between 9:30 and 10:00 Central Time) I set the automatic posting up to that time as well; it wasn’t until the following April that I switched to the fixed 10:01 UTC posting time I use today. That New Orleans trip spawned “They All Axed for You”, an essay on the Crescent City’s dialects; another one-day trip with two other whores produced “Weird Sisters”. But aside from those two trips, it was business as usual; August saw the usual Q & A column, a two-part update column, a two-part miscellanea column, and a fictional interlude (“Ghost in the Machine”), but no harlotography; by this point I was publishing those columns roughly every five weeks rather than once per month, and since “Aspasia” was on July 31st the next installment (“Lulu White”) had to wait until September 3rd. That allowed it to be a quasi-sequel to “Storyville” one year before; the only August column in that category was “Blackball” (sequel to “Nuisances”).
“Sex trafficking” hysteria had become a major topic by this time; “The New Victorianism”, “One Size Fits All”, “It Looks Good On Paper”, “Spotlight”, “Crying for Nanny” and “Law of the Instrument” all cover various aspects of it. But I didn’t ignore other aspects of sex work: the two-part “In Denial” looked at sugar babies; “None So Blind” and “Part of the Picture” bizarre anti-porn rhetoric; “Business Opportunity” anti-stripping hysteria; and “One Born Every Minute” scams targeting sex workers. “Crying Wolf” and “Inevitability” examined the degeneration of feminism, “Droit du Seigneur” the way cops and politicians think they have sexual rights over women, “Saving Them From Themselves” teen sexting hysteria, and “Counterfeit Comfort” the failure of “sex offender” registries to do what they’re supposedly intended to do.
Only four columns escaped easy categorization this month, and three of them describe personal matters: in “Leaving the Life” I tell the story of my first attempt at retiring from escorting; in “Top Ten” I rank my “top” columns to date in various ways; and in “The Fur Is Flying” I describe a brouhaha between two activists. The odd man out is “Follow the Leader”, wherein I point out that government actors often do things they would arrest and cage individuals for.