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Did anyone doubt that my first post back would be about a rape-related issue that is considered “controversial”? If not, you know me well.

This makes me very happy.

. . . Well, almost.

You see, the British Home Office has released this campaign to fight the sex trafficking industry — and from what I can tell, I love the concept (I have a practical criticism later). But, nowhere can I find the full text on the poster or an image large enough to make out the small text myself. As the Home Office has received my criticism before for some pretty terrible anti-rape ads, I’d like to know the full text before I sing its praises. If you find it, please send it on! I’ll be looking for it over the next few days; just be aware that my opinion is subject to change or expand on that basis. But here’s what we know:

Posters will appear in clubs and pubs from Monday warning men against paying for sex in brothels with exploited or trafficked women.

The posters, which will be piloted in men’s toilets in Westminster and Nottingham, will say “Walk in a Punter. Walk out a Rapist”.

They are part of a six-month home office review into tackling the demand for prostitution, which began in January, and aim to point out that trafficked women are forced into selling sex, and that forced sex is rape.

“So if you pay for sex with a trafficked woman what does that make you?” the posters ask.

They also urge Johns “if [they're] man enough” to call Crime Stoppers if they come across something suspicious.

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Former employees have filed a lawsuit against a club where they used to work as dancers for hire, claiming that they were never paid wages for their work. The women are mostly immigrants, many of them Spanish-speaking only, and they were paid a mere $2 per dance direct from the customers while the club raked in profits from the door fee and drinks. They were forced to pay fees to the club in order to work there and were all around treated like shit. (All emphasis mine.)

In interviews in Spanish, several former dancers said the owners often made them pay a $60 or $70 fine when they missed a day of work. Several complained of having to pay an $11 fee each day just to enter the club and an additional $10 if they arrived a half-hour late.

They said that sometimes, after dancing from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m., they had to attend meetings that lasted until 6 a.m. in which the owners held forth, calling some dancers “puta” (whore) as well as ugly and fat. The dancers’ most serious complaint was that the club never paid them a cent for their 45-hour workweeks.

“I never received anything in wages,” said Patricia Gonzalez, a long-haired, leggy immigrant from the Dominican Republic who quit dancing at the Flamingo last June. “In my three years there I must have paid thousands of dollars in fines. And I paid the daily fee of $11 to enter. What kind of job do you have to pay just to go to work?”

The lawsuit raises an intriguing question of law: whether the for-hire dancers were employees, who should have been paid wages for every hour they worked, or independent contractors who, as the Flamingo’s owners assert, were merely renting space on the dance floor.

The owners say they had no obligation to pay wages, asserting that the dancers were entrepreneurs who made a living by keeping the $2 they earned for each dance.

“They’re paying to rent the space so they can make a living,” said Peter Rubin, a lawyer for the club. “They can keep all the money they make dancing. They don’t have to split anything with the house.” The club makes its money by charging the men $5 to enter and $7 a drink.

[. . .]

If the dancers win their lawsuit, it could have ripple effects at the city’s many for-hire dance clubs, latter-day versions of Depression-era joints where men paid 10 cents for a dance. Many of today’s dancers, like their customers, are illegal immigrants who earn their money off the books. Amy Carroll, a lawyer for Make the Road, said it was ridiculous for the Flamingo to suggest that the dancers were independent contractors.

“It seems that Flamingo is doing the worst of both worlds,” she said. “They’re not paying the workers anything, and they’re controlling every aspect of the dancers’ work life. They tell them what days to work, what time to show up, what outfits to wear, what makeup to use. They even make the dancers sign in and out to go to the restroom. That level of control makes them employees, not independent contractors.”

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A few stories I’ve recently blogged about have some updates:

Yesterday, I wrote about a woman who was forced to undergo a painful process of removing her nipple piercings before she could board a plan, apparently for the amusement of the male security officers. The TSA has responded to the situation:

The TSA said Friday in a statement on its Web site that the officers properly followed procedures, but that the procedures must change. In the future passengers can either allow a visual inspection of their piercings, or remove them, the agency said.

The statement stopped short of apologizing to Hamlin.

”TSA acknowledges that our procedures caused difficulty for the passenger involved and regrets the situation in which she found herself,” the agency said in a statement. ”We appreciate her raising awareness on this issue and we are changing the procedures to ensure that this does not happen again.”

Hamlin’s attorney said she accepted the TSA statement as an apology, and commended the agency for taking quick action. The policy change is ”an achievement for the protection of passengers’ civil rights while meeting the security goals of the TSA,” Gloria Allred said.

Uh huh. Well call me difficult to please (you wouldn’t be the first), but I do find it a little odd how the TSA website already said prior to this statement that “If you are selected for additional screening, you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search.” A pat-down search was never offered to Hamlin, and was in fact refused to her when she made the offer herself to show her nipple piercings to the female guard in private — the same guard who had to look at her piercings anyway as Hamlin went through the excruciating process of removing them. So I think that TSA will have to try again. Changing a policy is totally different from beginning to enforce one that is already in place. It was previously indicated that Hamlin was considering suing if she did not receive an apology. I think that it will be a shame if a lawsuit doesn’t go through, and after all of the trouble, TSA gets off the hook with a slight wag of the finger.

I’ve also recently blogged about how Al Sharpton and the NAACP are supporting leniency for the Dunbar Village rapists. Now, Sharpton’s organization (NAN) and the NAACP are furiously denying, changing their stories and pointing fingers at each other. Sharpton has tried to rewrite history and is blaming the “misinformation” on the women of color bloggers who have raised awareness and interest about this issue, without noting that the information came from numerous objective and mainstream news sources. In other words, he’s not only ignoring the fact that women of color deserve rights equal to those of men of color, but is now also blaming his own disgusting mess on women of color rather than taking responsibility for his actions. Nice. Also, while reviewing the denials and backpedaling, check out this flier. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of who produced it, but according the the Dunbar Village blog, it was passed around at the NAN and NAACP join press conference on March 11. And even if they didn’t produce the fliers themselves, the fact remains that putting together an event with this type of bullshit propaganda being openly distributed isn’t exactly the best way to prove that you’re not supporting the rapists (and neither is standing on a stage with the rapists’ families).

Keep those letters coming, folks.

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Well you’ve certainly fucked things up, now haven’t you?

I was at the FPA conference in the Empire State Plaza, yesterday. That’d be Family Planned Advocates of NY State. You may remember that you were scheduled to speak there that morning, though with so much else going on, I wouldn’t be surprised if it slipped your mind.

You spoke there last year, and I was honestly very impressed. You were by far the most famous public official whose presence I’ve ever been in, but much more than that, you were unwaveringly pro-choice and pro-woman. Of course, you were at a conference for family planning supporters. But the media was there, and I’ve heard that other prominent speakers have not taken the opportunity to make a statement nearly as dramatic and affirmative. Frankly, I was very happily surprised with your display of enthusiasm and dedication. I’m almost embarrassed to remember how lucky I felt to have you as a governor. I thought “for a politician, this guy is pretty great.”

When you didn’t show up this morning, we were told that you had a “last minute emergency” that needed attending to. And I suppose that you did! Of course, you didn’t tell organizers the reason, and the news hadn’t broken yet, so we spent the whole morning talking about what an amazing governor you are. All of the legislators and other speakers invoked your name a lot of times, and I’d say that despite your absence, you probably got the most applause of the entire morning! That made us look and feel pretty foolish.

But don’t worry. That’s not why I’m mad at you. I have far more important and rational reasons than that.

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As I briefly mentioned earlier, yesterday was International Sex Workers Rights Day. I missed it; I didn’t know that it was going on until I’d already posted for the day, and I just didn’t have the time for a second post. So I planned to write about it today instead. I felt slightly guilty about that, but now that I’m well aware that the issue didn’t get nearly as much coverage as it should have, I feel really guilty. I tell you this not only by way of explanation, but also to say that if you blog, I know it’s easy to miss things and to not blog about something when you should. And it’s not too late to make it right.

That being said, to those who purposely avoided blogging on the topic, I understand why. Talking about sex work causes fighting, and not the feminist vs. troll kind, but the feminist vs. feminist kind. Positioning yourself in that argument isn’t a fun thing to do, particularly if you think that each side has at least a couple of good points, and it’s easy to avoid the question all together (this is of course, what we call “privilege”). But that doesn’t make avoiding it right. I’m fine with everyone voicing their opinions, but I do want to let everyone know up front that I will not allow things to get ugly, personal or insulting. And while I’m not going to insist that everyone post from a pro-decriminalization standpoint, I do insist that comments come from a perspective that promotes rights for sex workers — however you believe that those rights are best obtained. I’ve never had to ban a feminist before, or even ask one to stop posting; please don’t make me start today.

So. Why sex workers’ rights? Well, it’s pretty simple. Even those sex workers who enjoy their jobs get a hell of a raw deal. All around the world, sex workers are: investigated and arrested for making a living, deported even when there is evidence of non-consent, left without any form of job security, gang-raped and abused by their bosses but left without recourse for fear that they themselves will be arrested, and arrested for mere suspicion of prostitution, including carrying condoms (which only discourages safer sex).

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I’m having quite a shitastic morning, and so I unfortunately will not be able to get up a real post until this evening.

But in the meantime, in case you haven’t seen them already, the 54th Carnival of Feminists is now up, and so is the 42nd Carnival Against Sexual Violence.

In the less highly publicized realm, yesterday was International Sex Workers Rights Day. I missed it, but it’s what I plan on blogging about tonight. Ren has some links to other blogs that took part as well as information about sex worker outreach groups.

Also, I thought that this post was cool: you know when you’re feeling really masochistic and for some reason  get yourself involved in a debate with an asshole rape apologist, and you wish you had all of the various statistics at hand to shove down their stupid, misogynistic throat? This post compiles a lot of studies that it’s good to have around. (The second link in the post is broken; hopefully the blogger will fix it, but until then it is here (pdf).)  Bookmark it!

Got something else you think should be shared? Whether it’s an article, someone else’s blog post or your own, leave it in the comments — but pretty please, use HTML for me.

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A man in London has just been arrested on charges of drugging and raping women he picked up in his taxi cab. Though there are countless published stories about the case, the information is exceedingly limited in all of them. Here is the gist:

Up to 35 women may have been drugged and raped by a London taxi driver, police said on Monday.

Thirty women have come forward after a man was arrested last Friday in southeast London on suspicion of rape.

Police were initially investigating five attacks in which victims were picked up in a black cab near Oxford Street, King’s Road or London Bridge.

The suspect is accused of attacking his passengers after offering them spiked glasses of champagne which he said were to help him celebrate a lottery win.

The most recent reported attack took place on February 5 after a 33-year-old woman was picked up near London Bridge Station.

“Every case is being linked,” a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

Knowing full well that the Mirror is about as far from a reputable news source as you can get (don’t worry, the facts are the same in every story), I chose to use their article particularly because of the confounding nature of the first sentence. “Up to 35 women.” Well, 35 women in total have come forward. And instead of reaching what I would deem to be the logical conclusion — that if 35 have already come forward, just think of how many others there are — the Mirror has apparently determined that when 35 women come forward with rape allegations, that’s the definitive total, and at least a few have to be liars.

It’s funny, because it seems to be a theme recently. No, not just calling rape victims liars, since that’s pretty much a theme of living in the world as a woman. I’m talking about women being raped in cabs — and then having it implied that they are liars or to blame for the assaults.

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You may have already heard about the senseless murder of Sanesha Stewart. Stewart was a trans woman of color who was stabbed to death, apparently by a male sex partner.

In the wake of this tragedy, the media has not only failed to show respect for a fellow human being whose life was cut short, they’ve been downright, outlandishly offensive. Stewart has been called a “hooker,” despite any actual evidence that she was a sex worker and claims from her neighbors that she was not. Her appearance has been commented on repeatedly. She has been referred to by masculine pronouns and her masculine birth name, with her legal feminine name referred to as a “nickname.” Here is one infamous article from the NY Daily News. It was originally called “Fooled john stabbed Bronx tranny,” though after GLAAD made some noise, they changed it to the oh-so-improved “Cops: Ex-con slays Bronx transsexual ‘hooker’.” A warning: the language below is extremely disrespectful and upsetting.

A transgendered prostitute was stabbed to death in the Bronx Saturday by a customer who was apparently surprised by the hooker’s true sex, police sources said Saturday.

The victim - a 25-year-old man who dressed like a woman - was identified by sources as Talib Stewart, who often went by the feminine nicknames of Nesha or Sanesha.

Stewart was stabbed multiple times inside a Belmont apartment building about 6 a.m. Saturday, police said.

A 37-year-old man was later arrested inside the second-floor apartment, police said.

Though the suspect’s identity was not immediately released, the sources said he was the prostitute’s john who became enraged when he learned his partner was not a woman.

Stewart, more than 6 feet tall, was known to wear stylish, provocative outfits with towering high heels, neighbors said.

Stewart also apparently had undergone surgery to give him larger breasts and other female characteristics, neighbors said.

“She looked like a girl but when she turned around, you knew it was a man,” a 17-year-old neighbor said. “She had a big jaw and an Adam’s apple.”

Neighbors said Stewart was a friendly and flirty presence on the block and was rarely hassled for his appearance.

“She’s always been Nesha to me,” said a friend who just gave her first name, Janelle. “She’s funny and outgoing.”

“It’s a shock - nobody should do something like that,” said another neighbor who asked not to be identified. “She never had any problems here.”

Stewart’s relatives visited the crime scene Saturday afternoon and angrily declined comment. Neighbors said they didn’t know if Stewart was turning tricks but they had noticed frequent male visitors to her home.

The suspect remained in police custody last night as the Bronx district attorney was determining which charges to file, officials said.

Must we list off the problems here? I hope not, but here goes, anyway.

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Today, reader Kate sent me a link to this anti-rape campaign, and I was extremely impressed with it. Unfortunately, a bit of further research showed that the campaign isn’t recent; other blog posts I found indicate that it’s from 2001 or earlier. So you may have seen it before. But I hadn’t, and I liked it enough that I thought it was worth posting about, anyway.The campaign is called, as each poster indicates, This is Not an Invitation to Rape Me. It was created by an organization called Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, which has since changed its name to Peace Over Violence. The campaign consists of black and white images of women in positions that our society believes either make women prone to rape or makes rape okay, with the words “this is not an invitation to rape me” placed over top in red.

I think that all of the posters covered an impressive and commendable breadth of sexual assault myths. I came up with a few more images that they could have used — a disabled women, a man holding a gun, an undocumented worker — but still think that they did an excellent job with covering a wide range of issues and the most commonly-heard rape apologist arguments. My only genuine criticism is that most of the women (and men) in the photographs appear to be white. The photo above is the only one that seems to clearly feature people of color. I find a couple of others to be indiscernible and the rest to be all very clearly white women. With black and white photos that don’t show faces, more obviously darker-skinned women of color would have been a good thing in terms of making the campaign relevant to POC communities.

My favorite posters are after the jump, but I strongly encourage you to take a minute to go look at them all. Because they’re good.

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Starting in 2008, Texas plans to instate a tax of $5 per strip club patron, with the money going towards help for rape victims. I have to say that I’ve been mulling this over for a few days, trying to figure out my feelings on it. Strip club owners, of course, have sued to block the tax.

Starting on New Year’s Day, Texas plans to tax strip clubs $5 for every customer who shows up to watch performers bump and grind.

Using figures for liquor sales, state officials estimate that the tax will raise about $40 million a year.

The state plans to use most of the proceeds to help rape victims, but club owners are suing to block the tax, saying it infringes on their First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

Despite the noble cause, the owners say, the tax will drive some clubs out of business and unfairly links their industry to sex crimes.

State Representative Ellen Cohen, Democrat of Houston, sponsored the bill, which was approved by the Legislature in May. Ms. Cohen is also the president of a women’s center that could receive financing from the new law.

“This is an industry that largely employs women, and this gives them an opportunity to raise funds for a crime that affects women,” Ms. Cohen said.

She added, “I’ve been told the fees to get into these places can be $10, $15. I don’t think another $5 is going to prevent someone from going.”

I don’t really buy the First Amendment contradiction argument. After all, governments have placed special taxes on products we find to be both unnecessary or unsavory for some time. Cigarettes, alcohol, soda and potato chips when other foods and beverages aren’t taxed, etc. One person in the article argues that if we choose to tax one unpopular industry (strip clubs), there’s nothing stopping extra taxes on other unpopular establishments, like abortion clinics. And though I see the point and certainly wouldn’t put it past anti-choicers to try such a thing, the two are fundamentally different: one is entertainment, the other is a medical service. With all of this being said, though, that doesn’t make it a good idea.

I’ll admit: on the surface, it’s hard to find anything wrong with the proposal. Money going to help rape victims is a great thing. And I can’t say that I’ll shed any tears over men who frequent strip clubs having to hand out a few more dollars to do so. But something bothered me about it from the beginning; it just took me a while to figure out what it was.

While I couldn’t care less about whether or not men will still be able to afford to get their naked dancing women fix, I do care about the women who work in the clubs. I personally think that the claims that this could shut down strip clubs are overblown; I imagine that your average strip club patron probably doesn’t go every day. An extra $5 each week won’t likely deter most of them. But it could very easily mean that they’ll hand out less in tips to the women working inside. And that’s not okay with me. High end clubs will be fine; most patrons will never miss that $5, and the women working there could probably find jobs at other clubs easily if they had to (and which they probably won’t). For women working at the lower-end clubs, it’s a different story. If each man pays an extra $5 to get in and then gives out a few less dollars in tips, the women are definitely going to miss that money. I’m sure that anyone who has worked a crap job for tips to make ends meet knows the terror of losing those tips. So if we’re going to do this, it seems to me that the far wiser and fairer thing would be to instate a tax that is a percentage of the cover charge rather than a flat tax. Bars and clubs need those cover charges, so I don’t see them lowering them significantly to try to beat the tax.

But again.  That still doesn’t make it a good idea.
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Labour party parliament officials in Britain are currently working to outlaw prostitution.

Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader and minister for women, gave public backing to a ban on prostitution yesterday.

Home Office minister Vernon Coaker and junior women’s minister Barbara Follett are to visit Sweden, where paying for sex is illegal, to see what the ban there has achieved.

The Home Office considered making paying for sex a specific crime in 2004, but decided against it. Harman’s comments have put the issue back on the table. “Do we think it’s right in the 21st century that women should be in a sex trade or do we think it’s exploitation and should be banned? Just because something has always gone on, it doesn’t mean you just wring your hands and say there’s nothing we can do about it,” Harman told Radio 4’s Today programme.

She said the government had to deal with the problem of sex workers trafficked into Britain. “I think we do need to have a debate and unless you tackle the demand side of human trafficking, which is fuelling this trade, we will not be able to protect women from it. That is what they’ve done in Sweden. My own personal view is that’s what we need to do as a next step.”

The Newspaper Society will produce new guidelines on small ads offering services at brothels next month. “I think that the new guidance will stop those ads. But the next question is, can we really stop this trade when we’ve still got a lawful sex trade going on?” Harman said.

I think that Harman’s last question is a valid one with no easy answers. I also think that her first question is innately flawed. To ask whether we think that the sex industry is exploitative and then declare that if we do, we must outlaw it, is to work off of the disproved basis that criminalizing the sex industry will somehow make it less exploitative.

From everything I’ve read about the plan, the new laws would simply criminalize the purchasing of sex and not the selling. Indeed, in some small ways it even officially lessens the restrictions upon sex workers themselves. The goal here is a noble one: to put the sex trafficking industry out of business, and therefore decrease the number of abused and exploited women, as well as to increase the safety of all sex workers.

The problem is, as sex worker advocacy groups and the Liberal Democrats (a smaller more politically progressive party in parliament) have pointed out, that the restrictions will probably make sex workers less safe, not more.

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