I am an adult, and how I choose to spend my time and money is MY FUCKING BUSINESS. – Rick Pettit
Sex workers on Twitter agreed we couldn’t think of a venue less conducive to selling sex than a state fair:
The New Mexico State Fair draws a huge crowd each year, but Street Safe New Mexico knows it’s not all about fun and games. “You notice during the state fair, there’s new girls out here, right?” Executive Director Christine Barber said. “They’re being brought in by the gangs and being forced to work…(The victims are) 15, 16 years old to anything older…I met a lady yesterday who was 47.” The group says the victims’ pimps like to use the state fair as a hunting ground for willing johns…”Forty-two percent of them are beaten every single day by their pimps or their sex traffickers”…
Coincidentally, 42% of all “sex trafficking” statistics are made up on the spot, and 100% of them are bullshit.
Since last December, activists have gathered monthly in front of St. André Bessette Parish in Northwest Portland in silent witness to the horror of human trafficking…Called modern slavery, it’s just one of the present attacks on the dignity of human life…Among them are abortion, euthanasia, cloning, the destruction of human embryos, genocide, torture, and the direct and intentional targeting of noncombatants in war or terrorist attacks…
I’m not sure it’s proper to use the term ACTIVist for someone who literally stands around, doing and saying nothing.
Monsters
The body count continues to rise:
Just five days ago I wrote about a Black trans woman named T.T. who was viciously murdered in Chicago…Now, a…Black trans woman [named] Crystal Edmonds has been shot in the back of the head and murdered in Baltimore. She’s the 21st trans person that we know of who has been murdered in the United States this year…Police say…they have no suspects and very few leads…[but] reports are saying that people in the neighborhood are complaining about sex workers in their area, which makes me even more worried that this case will not be given the attention it deserves…
Paint By Numbers
Fifty people in teams of five…[followed] clues through various historic landmarks [in Lexington, Kentucky]…to raise money to help women..caught up in the human trafficking industry. Participants raised money to support “Un-Shackled By Love Ministries”…the first group of women to join the program will stay for four months where they will receive counseling. Eventually they will move on to a facility in Lexington the ministry [has not actually opened yet]…
Traffic Circle
Debunking of prohibitionist lies is spreading:
Denise Charlton of the Turn Off the Red Light Campaign…claimed the [new Swedish model] legislation [in Ireland] would protect sex workers by decriminalising them. Does the bill really do that? A group called Ugly Mugs, which facilitates information-sharing between sex workers, argues that the claim is false, and brought it to our attention on Twitter. Claim: The new Sexual Offences Bill would decriminalise sex workers Verdict: Mostly FALSE
- The new bill would decriminalise public solicitation by sex workers, but…
- It would retain the criminalisation of loitering by sex workers, and increase the penalties for it
- It would retain the effective criminalisation of sex workers, under a provision on brothels, and increase the penalties for it.
Served Cold
For a change, it only took the mainstream media two years to catch up with me:
…Operation Underground Railroad…was founded by self-proclaimed “Man of God,” former CIA and Homeland Security official Tim Bollard…The organization receives allocated funding…and makes contact with local law enforcement. An elaborate sting follows…All this is filmed so the [backer]…can watch, in real time and from the comfort of his or her office or home…From the perspective of a victim’s right to privacy, such actions are reprehensible…from a criminal justice perspective, there are even more pressing concerns…Why are police in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Colombia not arresting child sex traffickers if they are so easy to find?…Why is OUR not…raiding the brothels of Amsterdam or London?…Bollard and his rag-tag team would be arrested on the spot. And any court in any [developed nation] would not hesitate to throw out a case that rests on the evidence of an OUR-type raid because of the failure to meet even the most basic standards of supervision and accountability. It’s no surprise that the organization and its fellow travellers limit their activities to countries burdened by dysfunctional criminal justice systems that…in response to pressure from the U.S. government…agree to cooperate…Bollard’s operations say much about the man: they are arrogant, unethical and illegal.
The Last Shall Be First (#624)
Expect a lot more cases like this before potty hysteria is over:
Security attempted to escort a lesbian woman…out of toilets at a music venue after because they thought she was a man. Mary Looper was at a Carrie Underwood concert with her aunt when security attempted to escort her out of the women’s restroom. A female security officer stood outside Looper’s stall demanding…proof she was a woman…She took to Facebook to share her dismay…
SWOP Behind Bars
My friend Mistress Matisse has been applying her indomitable (see what I did there?) efforts to support SWOP Behind Bars, most recently by talking about them on Dan Savage’s Savage Love podcast. Go have a listen! And if you haven’t yet sent a book to one of the incarcerated sex workers in the program, hie thee thither and do so posthaste!
Sales Pitch (#642) 
Remember the creepy Swedish cop who collects used tampons? He’s teaming up with a German neofeminist to spread the Gospel of Violent Busybodiness to Canada:
…Ingeborg Kraus, a [prohibitionist who pretends that]…Germany decriminalized the sex industry…[claims that legalization there has] fuelled human trafficking [and lies that literally]…”No German woman will work in those conditions anymore”…[pervert cop Simon Haggstrom pretends that] Sweden…decriminalize[d] the sale of sex…[fantasizes about a] connection between prostitution and organized crime…[and lies that sex workers who demand our rights] are a small minority within the sex industry…
Allied for Change
I truly hope many more clients are inspired to speak out like this:
My name is Rick Pettit, and I am a client of sex workers. I am in my 60s, divorced, and unattached. I run my own moderately-unsuccessful service business in a small town in New England. I’m just an ordinary person…not particularly well-off financially, and certainly not a hub of criminal activity. I am well-liked by my customers and in my town. I am NOT a “pervert”…I do NOT abuse the women I spend time with. Most importantly, I DO NOT “BUY” ANYONE’S BODY. (There’s not enough room in my closet)…
Pimps Ahoy
You can’t keep a bad organization down:
Courage Worldwide said today that after the appeal process…the organization is in good standing with state regulators and plans to rehire and train new staff to reopen Courage House immediately…“We are gratified that the state has…agreed cell phones pose a real danger to the girls in our care since they link these vulnerable children back to the people who trafficked them. The cell phone is the preferred mechanism of the trafficker to market and sell under-age girls on the internet”…
