Just as the zombies so popular in recent horror films can be recognized as the people they once were, so trafficking hysteria’s congenital racism is still visible under the gangrene and grave dirt. - “Rooted in Racism”
In June of 2011, my traffic hit a plateau of just over 1000 hits a day and remained there until the following January, after which it began to slowly rise again. More accurately, it returned to the plateau it had occupied since February; most of the visitors from MRA sites which had flooded the blog in April and May apparently got bored and wandered off again, resulting in no lasting increase in readership. The traffic wasn’t the only thing that had settled into a pattern, either; by this point my writing style read very much as it reads now, and most of the recognizable features were in place. Though we were still eight months away from “That Was the Week That Was” (though the updates and miscellanea columns were always multi-part by then) and over a year away from “Links”, Q & A columns (though monthly rather than weekly), holiday columns (this month, “The Summer Solstice”), harlotographies (“Lola Montez”) and fictional interludes (“A Decent Boldness”) appeared much as they do today. June also saw the penultimate installment of the personal biography series (“Grace”) and the precursor of what would later become the long-running “My Favorites” feature.
By June, I had fully developed the hybrid column which has become one of my mainstays: an essay built around a quote from a current news story. “Mind Reading”, “Perquisites”, “Full of Themselves”, “Public Service Announcement” and “If It Were Legal” are all examples of this genre, as are “Because We Say So” and “Delicious Poison”; the latter two are also among my first to cover Asian topics, an expansion specifically requested by Asian readers. Another international column was “Down Under”, which examined a strong criticism of the Swedish model by the Queensland Prostitution Licensing Authority; quotes in that post from the startlingly bizarre Sheila Jeffreys inspired “In Their Own Words”, which put the madness of neofeminists on display. It’s not at all unusual for one column to inspire another in that way; for example, the sheer badness of the first book reviewed in “New Reviews for June” spurred me to pore over the excellent Whores in History again, after which I wrote “Whores in History Revisited”, an extended review. That research in turn inspired me to write “Dirty Whores”, and passages I read during that writing inspired “Déjà Vu” and “Rooted in Racism”.
Rounding out the month were “Handy Figures”, a compilation of linked numbers which I only recently revised; “Blasphemy”, in which I explain that neofeminism is a religion; “Speaking in Prostitute”, an exploration of the way sex workers’ assumptions conflict with those of amateurs; “Here Comes the Groom”, a look at bachelor parties; and “A False Dichotomy”, a deconstruction of the artificial “happy hooker/trafficked slave” dichotomy popular among sex workers fighting “sex trafficking” hysteria.