Erroneous prejudices…can only survive in a climate of ignorance; exposed to the light of truth they tend to wither away. – “A Whore in Church”
January 2012 was the last month before the onset of several changes that would result in layout and procedures which continued essentially unchanged for three years. The reason the change became necessary is obvious if one considers the number of miscellanea/ update columns this month: The two-part “First Updates of the Year“, the two-part “The Beat Goes On” and the single-part “We’re Not Done Yet” easily could have been organized as five weekly columns instead, and I no longer remember why I didn’t arrange them thus from the beginning of the year instead of waiting until February and then doubling them until I caught up. That change didn’t drag out nearly as long as the transition from a monthly Q&A column to a weekly; though it was beginning already, the weeklies didn’t actually appear for another year. Naturally, some things remained unchanged; there were four holiday columns (for New Year’s Day, Twelfth Night, Little Christmas and Friday the Thirteenth), plus a harlotography (“The Princess de Caraman-Chimay“) and a fictional interlude (“Palindrome“). But even in January, the changes were already starting:
“2011 in Review” was the first calendar-year statistics column; “Rockin’ Robin” announced my arrival on Twitter; and essays like “Universal Criminality“, “Rhinoceros” and “Objectification Overruled” not only read like my current output, but also discuss points that I still refer to quite often.
Of course, those three weren’t the only ones you’ve seen cited and linked often since then; “Crystal Ball” set forth my prediction for the likely timetable of the collapse of “sex trafficking” hysteria, “Scapegoats” became my heading for bestiality articles, “Moloch” turned into the one for stories of young people being sacrificed to the machinery of American “justice”, and “Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark” is the title that appears above items discussing studies which “prove” things everybody already knew. The latter is also an example of a type of column which disappeared entirely just a few months later, namely the “sequel” column generated by my “One Year Ago Today” feature (which ended it July). The other examples from this month were “Symptomology“,
“Welcome To Our World Again” and “Sleazier Than Thou“; though “Not for Everybody” and “Safety in Numbers” were certainly inspired by the essays they followed, they weren’t direct sequels.
Rounding out the month were “Living in Truth“, an introduction to a classic anti-tyranny essay; “The More the Better“, in which I express pleasure at the growing number of “ordinary” women coming out about doing sex work; “A Whore in Church“, which debunks the weird notion that sex workers can’t be religious; “An Angel of Mercy“, which contrasts one nun’s ministry to sex workers with the more common “rescue” type; and “Sex, Lies and Busybodies“, which looks at three examples of outsiders sticking their noses into sex workers’ business. 
